A Father’s Day Reflection
Being the sentimental packrat that I am, I keep all sorts of memorabilia from when my kids were little. That means, among other things, I have home-made Father’s Day cards sitting in a drawer from the late 1980s. And while these days, my children present my husband with gift certificates, DVDs, or his favorite dessert on Father’s Day – all of which please him very much – these thoughtful gifts, in my book, still take a back seat to those childhood mementos when it comes to pure nostalgia.
I found one of those very special Father’s Day tokens just the other day when I was digging through a drawer looking for a spring tablecloth. It was a handmade place mat that my five-year-old son had presented to his dad back in 1991. Titled “All About My Dad,” it features my son’s descriptions of his father. Thankfully, his preschool teacher had the foresight to laminate the construction paper placemat so that we might keep my son’s impressions for posterity.
The first thing that catches the eye is the authentic portrait of my husband sketched lovingly by our son. Without a doubt, it is very true-to-life: a big smile stretches across his face and his eyes are big vacant circles. As I recall, both my husband and I frequently had vacant eyes back in the days when we were raising four children under the age of eight – at the time, sleep was a precious commodity we never seemed to get enough of. Although, to be fair to my son, he didn’t draw in bags under my husband’s eyes, so I guess we looked pretty good to the kids back then. Vacant, maybe, but not tired.
Thanks to the placemat, we also have a written record of my husband’s vital statistics. According to my son, my husband is 500 inches tall, weighs 100 pounds, has green eyes and black hair. I remember when my husband, who has auburn hair and brown eyes, first read his Father’s Day placemat, that he wanted to know who the guy was that my son had described.
I have to admit, I was curious too. Obviously, his father’s personal appearance didn’t rank high in my son’s attention priorities. Either that, or my son was colorblind and we didn’t know it.
My son was paying attention to his father’s activities, however. He correctly noted on the placemat that my husband likes to plant vegetables. A farmer at heart, my husband has gardened since we had our first home and a little land to cultivate. Our young son also had an impressive insight into his father’s career as a high-tech electrical engineer – he said that his dad works at putting hard puzzles together. Finally, our son had commented on his father’s hobby: taking care of the fish.
Actually, the fish belonged to my son. Being only five, though, he had to rely on his dad to clean the aquarium.
Which, my husband found out, became a task he dreaded on a regular basis. A task that took up a lot of time. Like a hobby, you might say. And so since my son saw his dad doing this on a regular basis, I imagine that when his teacher asked him “What does your dad do when he’s not at his job?”, my son thought about the hours his dad spent cleaning the aquarium.
Voila! Dad’s hobby is taking care of the fish.
Thank goodness my son didn’t tell his teacher that his dad’s hobby was taking care of the damn fish. I’m glad that vocabulary was another thing that was low on my son’s attention priorities.
I guess the bottom line is that our children really are gifted with a unique kind of vision – one that sees past the surface of our appearances and language to who we really are inside. If that’s true, then it’s a comforting thought, because it means that despite all the little (and big) mistakes we make as parents, our children still know that love is the ground of our relationship.
Hey, I said I was a sentimental packrat.
And now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I’m going shopping for a gift for my husband for Father’s Day. I heard somewhere that he likes taking care of fish, so maybe an aquarium…
