Somebody Else’s Father’s Day

Today is Father’s Day in Guatemala. I watched a father interact with his seven-year-old daughter today, and I was uncomfortable with how much care he put into making her happy.

I was visiting a friend I have made here in the neighborhood. I was helping her print some documents because her printer setup is cantankerous. Time passed, and eventually, her son came home with his daughter in tow. Not unusual. I have been over her house before. But this evening we needed his help. The printer was beyond help, and I knew that it needed him to access the setup program, for which he had the password. He stopped what he was doing to help her out.

However, at this point, his daughter came back into the kitchen where we were gathered around her table, and she told her father that she was ready to go night-night. But more specifically, it was their time. In some way, I found myself envious of a seven-year-old girl.

I didn’t have that at seven years old. At that age, we were emigrating from Guatemala, following my father to the United States. But even at that age, my father was virtually a stranger to me. I don’t have any memories of spending time with my father doing anything, just him and me. None. When we got to the States, we didn’t even live in the same state as him; he was in NY, and we moved to Connecticut.

I can tell that she is going to be the center of his world. She was already the center of his world now. They had their ritual. I had seen it before, but for some reason, today, his patience with her as she questioned how much longer he was going to be helping her grandmother, it got to me. But it also left me confused.

I can’t stand my father on a base level. As a woman, as a mother, as an independent adult, I know he doesn’t respect me. Or at least he didn’t 23 years ago when I cut off contact. All of my memories of him are tinged with the knowledge that every thoughtful act, underneath the surface, was an afterthought.

Why do I prefer cheesecake over any other kind of cake on my birthday? Because one birthday weekend, my father forgot it was my birthday, and we ended up at Junior’s, a restaurant in Brooklyn.

I had never had cheesecake before. The specifics of how he found out it was my birthday after all escape me now, but I got a mini cheesecake with a candle on it to blow out for my birthday, in the end. That was my first time having cheesecake, and as it turns out, not the last, as it is now my favorite kind of cake. Could have been disastrous if I had hated it. But it reminds me that the outing was not for me. He had completely forgotten.

I lost count of how many of my birthday nights were spent sitting in his double-parked car on the street outside the main post office in Manhattan, waiting for him to file his taxes at the last minute. Midnight would roll around, turning the date to not my birthday, and he would emerge from the darkness with so many excuses as to why this could not be avoided, but my birthday certainly could.

I don’t have memories of him focused solely on me, doing something with me that was solely of my interest. Granted, life as a sibling will mean divided attentions. But I do have recollections of him choosing to spend time just with my brother, doing something specifically for just them.

Tonight, watching my friend’s son being a caring father figure on the Dia de los Padres, of all days, for his daughter, shouldn’t have bothered me. But it did.