He was there at
the end of the diving board. He would tread water for hours watching while I
practiced my dives. For years it was our Sunday afternoon ritual . I was 4
years old when we began. Daddy was there
in the deep water, waiting for me. On those Sunday afternoons I believed that
if he was there at the end of the board I could do anything.
He would wait,
treading water, off to one side. He would look around and give me the sign that
it was OK to dive. And I would stroll to the end of the board, tugging my
stretchy lavender swimsuit, and bounce in the air before I dove in.
I would rise to
the surface sputtering, and look for his face. He would hesitate a moment to
let me right myself. I would cough and beam. He would grab the back of my suit
and give me a push toward the side. “Swim to the ladder,” he would say. And he
would stay out at the end of the board waiting.
I remember the
feeling as I paddled to the ladder. The world was perfect: I was diving in the
deep end of the pool; there was no pain, and no evil in the world. There was no
need or want in my life. I was a
perfect, grinning, sunburned, waterlogged four-year-old, in love with the
world, herself and her daddy.
He died when I
was 18. In the intervening years life happened to me and to Daddy. By the time I was 13, he was traveling a lot,
and when we did spend the occasional weekend together we did not speak of
personal things. There were no talks about plans or dreams. As a teen-ager I
felt awkward with my father so I would interview him about his job. I know a lot about industrial engineering. It
filled our time. By then my addictions had begun.
On a July
evening, when he was 56, my father had a stroke and died.
Has it affected
me? Of course. To have had that closeness and to loss it; to have had those
timeless moments of being safe and special and then to lose him when I still
needed to ask what happened.
It took years of
my life, of other relationships, addictions and even years in recovery for me
to wrestle with those two men--the daddy who waited in the deep water and the
man who left suddenly, without a word, when I was 18.
Somewhere
inside, that four-year-old still wears her lavender bathing suit. She is at the
end of a diving board and leaning forward to hear someone say, “You are so
special.” There is a deep hunger for those words. Can I ever get enough?
I’ve learned a
lot from listening to that little girl. I know that in romance we get some of
that need met, but romance has its own path and after a while no one wants to
admire us every day. Another way to meet
this need is with an affair. Having an
affair is a way a four-year-old can twirl in a 40 year-old body and hear again,
“You are the only one.”
In the first
five years of recovery I practiced healthier solutions. I practice in the mirror: “Diane, You are
very special.” But all the praise and promises in the present cannot fill a
hole that exists in the past.
Later I learned
to meet this need in a spiritual way. In the rooms I began to meet people who
had a connection with their God or higher power that helped them to live
believing that God smiles warmly on them.
So what is the
gift from a father who left when we were both too young? It’s this: For a long
time I resented the missing memories; no father-daughter chats, no drives to
college, no adult conversations. But I have this other thing--a picture in my
brain and in my heart of my father still there at the end of the board, smiling
and waiting.
Today I believe
in a God who looks around my life and says, “Hold on a minute. We don’t want
anyone to get hurt; then, “OK, go for it, I’m here.” I have a God at the end of
my daily diving board who says to me, “Okay now, catch your breath. I’m
here.”
