Sometimes he was hard on me.
Sometimes it felt hard to connect.
I was fiery and adventurous, after all.
I wanted colored hair and multiple piercings.
I think maybe he didn’t quite know what to do with all of that.
He was raised with the tumbleweeds.
I was dancing, rap music, and Hawaiian Tropic tans,
while he was ranch life, old westerns, and the smell of leather and welding.
To say we were different was an understatement, and when my dad is at a loss he goes quiet,
and distant.
He disappeared often with his horses into the wheat grass of the old barn that sat across the street.
There was a whole lot of each other we didn’t see.
He was unbending when I was a fresh reed.
His voice was firm when mine wavered, scared to reveal myself and disappoint,
and we’ve spent a lifetime trying to make our eyes meet,
but I think as we’ve both gotten older we’re starting to feel the time slip,
and so we’re squinting at each other in the distance now, at least trying to see.
At Christmas time my dad dropped an orphaned calf in my lap.
“He’ll die without someone to care for him” is how he roped me in.
Fifteen minutes after he sent me a photo of the calf literally crying tears, he came pulling a trailer into our driveway.
As he unloaded the calf I could still hardly believe was a thing, he said that if we could just keep him for at least the night (Yes. Laugh with me) maybe he would have time to find him a permanent home,
but four months, hundreds of dollars I never planned on spending, several professionally built shelters and sheds, and one very attached 10 year old later, and I now see that permanent home was ME.
I really should not be surprised as “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission” has always been my father’s life motto.
My main stipulation for housing this cow was that he would have to come help me.
I didn’t know the first thing about cows, after all.
Let’s just say there has been a shift in my late night google searching.
In the last four months my dad has come by a lot. He comes to fix fences or tinker with things.
Every time he’s here finishing up something now, he mysteriously ends up finding some new thing he says he will come back to work on next week.
Over the months, my youngest daughter, Paige, who has struggled so much with Covid loneliness, has forged a relationship with him unlike she ever had.
She, unlike me, is very much like my him.
She likes the dirty chores, the fingers dug in.
She spends hours out there using his tools, and carries around his nail gun in a backpack, grinning.
I recently found dining room chairs on Marketplace, and their current project is that together, they are refinishing those.
He’s taught her to whittle, he’s taught her to use wood stain, and make dowels.
She can change out an electric sander pad on her own.
I watch them through the sliding glass door and feel transported back in time, thinking,
“He finally got a girl that’s easy for him to know.”
Last week they declared a lunch break halfway through the day, and came in to rest for a while.
Paige pulled out the checkerboard, a new passion of hers, and challenged him to play.
He accepted with a smile.
For an hour he absolutely creamed her.
She quietly said a suggestive, “Sometimes my dad shows mercy to me.”
He just giggled gleefully and jumped over 2 of her guys and said,
“Your mother will tell you – There are no hand outs with me.”
She asked him questions about his life, and he told her stories I had never heard.
I saw her willingness to get her hands dirty again by her questions.
I saw, in that, some things to work on in me.
After the game she commented to me about all the cuts she had noticed on his hands.
She asked where she could find the Neosporin, because she was adamant about bandaging them.
I pointed her to them, and watched the scene in silence as she treated his hands gingerly.
Her smooth fingers against his rough, stained hands.
He smiled and asked if band-aids can even stick over grease.
Just a little girl who still sleeps with stuffed animals, and a man bearing the proof of his pain.
She asked him if all of his cuts and bruises hurt.
He told her that that was the beauty of letting your hands get calloused –
You can’t feel so many things.
In that moment, watching her caring for him – gently soothing all the places he’d bled,
I felt painfully aware of the fact that I’d been so focused for years on all the ways I hadn’t been seen, when maybe he had been in that barn alone all those years feeling the exact same thing.
This quiet rancher just didn’t know how…
He prides himself on knowing how to do so many things.
But a daughter with fire in her eyes, and with so many foreign ways?
Maybe he just hadn’t known what to do with me.
But here he is back to trying.
He’s offering what he can in the same way I’m trying with my own teens.
Him bringing that calf didn’t have as much to do with the calf, itself, as him trying to find a way to get back through that wheat grass to me.
There were years where I rarely saw him at all.
There are stories we each have to tell that neither of us know,
but now he is here at least once a week.
He’s looking for things to fasten, build, fix, and restore.
He’s just HERE.
The thing I’ve spent my whole life wanting.
Tomorrow he will be here to finish restoring some old battered chairs that I got for free off of Marketplace, and the lesson of this moment in time is not lost on me.
Together we’ve given something new life that could have easily been tossed away.
Just like relationships – Sometimes things don’t come easy, and they could use a little sanding down of rough edges, and a few coats of stain;
But his callouses are being softened,
and my voice wavers no more.
There is a cow in the back yard of my duplex,
and now we are what is being restored.
We show back up again,
and we look in each other’s eyes while we find things to fix,
and now the stories my daughter tells won’t be about the pain.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
Beautiful