Katie said that, and its true. My dad and I do not have a typical relationship that most fathers and daughters have. We have that and then some. Early on, when I was first getting to know Aaron, he was disturbed by how much I told my dad about what went on at the cabins. I told him to try to think of us more as roommates then a father and daughter. I don’t think it really helped Aaron’s peace of mind, but then, he also knew that my dad was into guns and very protective of me.
The protectiveness comes from the fact that I am my daddy’s little girl. This is purely from the fact that he is my dad, and I am his daughter. I think it’s a prerogative of parents to be that protective. It comes from the days when their child was small and helpless, and they were solely responsible for their child’s safety and wellbeing.
I will admit, that at times, that protectiveness comes into odds with Dad’s ability to treat me as an adult, especially when it comes to things we don’t’ see eye to eye on. For the most part, I don’t buck the system, but sometimes I have to, and it’s those times that cause the some of the most strife. Yet, I credit our friendship to the fact that those times are worked through, rather then cause permanent distance. Yes, there are certain things a daughter should not tell her dad, but those rules never really held sway around here.
Maybe part of the reason I didn’t get in much trouble in High School was because it’s really impossible to not get caught by a dad who has been there and done that a thousand times over. Or it could have been that those things were never really a mystery to me. Dad did ten time worse then most of my friends, back in his day, and I heard all the stories. There is some saying about the wise learning from other’s mistakes, and while I will not claim to be wise, I’d like to think I’m at least smart enough not to get into that kind of trouble.
Maybe a part of it was also that there was no point. It has all been done before. To me, it really wasn’t worth doing, if dad had already done it. Unless I could one up him doing something I wanted to do, there was no reason.
The reason I know all these things about my dad, is because he told me. Not in the “back in my day…” stories that bore the crap out of everyone because they are incredible pompous and not even remotely close to the truth, but through conversation. I shit you not, the reason I know that one should shower immediately after using whip cream for certain activities is because of my dad. It came up, don’t ask how, cause I can’t tell you (don’t remember), but it did.
Dad doesn’t always have a filter, plus he’s honest and he just likes to talk a lot, which has resulted in some pretty odd conversations over the years. Add that to the fact that I don’t really have a filter, am incredibly blunt and overly curious and you have the makings of a really bizarre conversation.
The other reason for our closeness is the fact that there have been horrible times when all we had were each other. It started when my mother went off the deep end. At the time, he had no one else to talk to, so he talked to me. Much of these things I shouldn’t have been told and shouldn’t have known about. When mom caught wind, she raised hell. Luckily, she only caught wind of the fact that dad told me about financial matters. If she had known the true depth of information I was privy too, both then and forever after, she would blow a fuse. In those times, I was there for him, and he was there for me. We had a common enemy and we trusted only each other with the true extent of pain she dealt.
Once she moved out, and it was just us, we had ample opportunity to bond in ways beyond what had been. We had a chance to just hang out and talk whenever we wanted too. These were the good times, sitting on the front steps and bitching about the latest movies, going somewhere in the car blasting the radio and talking about the latest rock gods on the scene or comparing one artist with another. We had ongoing battles about one fictional character vs. another. We would pour over the latest gun rag and rail that we couldn’t buy something because of all those damn gun laws. Politics, guns, philosophy, music, movies, books, and dogs were, and still are, only a small fraction of our never-ending conversations.
We get it. We get each other well enough to understand how our minds travel. We both are fine with sidetracks and conversational back roads. We can sense when one topic has been finished and move to the next seamlessly. Plus, we never run out of crap to talk about, since we’ll talk about pretty much anything. There are times, especially now a day, when certain conversations are tricky. There are topics that are taboo unless we are in the mood to tread carefully. Yet, even the taboo topics get discussed and usually without verbal bloodshed.
An oddity that sometimes appears is my protectiveness of him. I don’t think most daughters are as protective of their dads, as their dads are of them. This is my own quirk. In some ways, it is because I don’t think I would know what to do without him. I almost lost him once, and due to the nature of the disease could still lose him. Cancer is a word that in our culture is never viewed lightly, and in this family, is always there. When dad was diagnosed with an inner ocular melanoma, my world fell apart for weeks. I had always been protective of him, but this was the cause of the new emphasis.
He, in many ways, saved my life. I owe him, and it is not a burden. Too almost lose him before I even get a chance to give him the life I want him to have is something I cannot chance again. I want him to see his daughter do well in her life, to give him things like a nice home to grow old in, lots of guns, all the books, movies and music in the world, present him with grandchildren to spoil and love and come up with crazy new ways to entertain. I want him to be able to look back at his life and be proud of what he did for me.
We are an odd family. I have never known anything else, but I often see how odd it is when I talk to others, even more so when an outsider misunderstands the dynamic. I tell my dad most everything, for many reasons, because I value his insight, because I need to talk, because I figure he’ll think its funny or, sometimes, because I know it will get him started on a very funny rant. He does the same to me. We respect each other when it counts and unapologetically swipe each other’s food at the same time (his nighttime scavenging got a large portion of my double stuff Oreos the other day). We have our inside jokes and odd habits in dealing with each other. So, yes, we are best friends, as well as family.
How could I not be best friends with the man who taught me what a friend is?
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