Dear Daddy,
The week of Father’s Day in our house has always been a particularly Daddy -centred time, with your birthday being the 15th of June. I know you enjoy this time but sometimes you must wish that both these events weren’t so close together so you could spread out the attention and celebration over the year. I can certainly sympathise, having been born on Christmas Eve. The stories of my birth vary drastically between you and Mam considering she said you had to be driven to the pub having prematurely begun to wet the baby’s head in the local, whereas you adamantly refute that and say you were working. Whatever the truth may be, you made it to your wife’s bedside to gaze upon your monstrous, 10lb 3oz, red ball of wailing glory daughter. Not exactly the dainty and delicate little girl you expected.
In the first few years of my life, you worked abroad driving trucks to Europe. My young mind created great images of what the exotic places you drove to looked like, after all it was the 1980s so France and Italy were still so foreign to us. The highlight of my week was your return late at night with a small holdall bag – I dread to think about how you only had enough clean clothes and underwear in that small bag for a week – a weary smile and a big hug for your little girl….and a new toy obviously. But even if there wasn’t a prospect of a new doll, teddy or creepy smiling nutcracker from Italy, I still anxiously awaited those returns with giddiness and elation every week.
As a child, even though you were working away a lot, I never felt any less loved than the other children my age. I fact I felt luckier than all of them because I had a father who had an exciting job abroad, brought me home toys that none of my friends had seen before and would tell me stories about what he had seen. I couldn’t wait to be a few years older so I could join you on one of your weekly long-haul drives on the continent. We still joke and look back fondly on the memories we have from the many times I acted as your navigator on trips to Italy, including the Southern Italian’s open-mouthed stares at the flame haired, translucent-skinned, freckled beanpole that emerged from the passenger side of the truck.
As I grew older, times changed; Italy and the rest of Europe were no longer exotic, my school friends came back from package holidays with toys I thought were exclusively owned by me, you retired from the exhausting long haul drives and I left home for college. You are now everybody's go-to man for any house, car or garden maintenance conundrums. I am now the one who returns home once a week to you smiling and excited to have your former navigator back. However the only unique gift I can offer you each week is a broken lawnmower or air-locked oil burner that needs to be fixed. Yet, you still accept these offerings with all the concealed delight of a father who realises that even though his daughter is an independent woman now, she still needs her Daddy just as she did all those years ago when she sat with a broad, gap-toothed smile and skinny legs dangling over the edge of the passenger seat of a truck travelling the motorways of Europe, singing, talking and laughing with her Daddy.
I love you Daddy,
Sarah