187: Father's Day '01
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From W.B. E.C., Chicago, and Public Radio International, it's this American life. I'm out of class. Father's Day is here. I was about nine or ten, and my parents were splitting up. And we lived in a very small rural town in North Dakota. And my dad, he left, and he left the house, and he got an apartment in the city. And he's a farmer. To go and see him somewhere where there was an lawn, or pets, or field, or trees, it was just that and itself was strange, plus the fact that he was there alone. The first time Leah and her sister and brother saw their dad's apartment after the parents separated, they were uncomfortable. The whole separation made them uncomfortable. They hadn't seen him in weeks. And then there was the apartment itself. We went up the stairs, and it was like a three flat, behind the grocery store, across from the library. We'd had that apartment smell of cabbage in the hallway, and then we went in, and it was like a living room, and then a kitchen, and then a bathroom. And I remember I was like, "Wait, where's the bedroom?" And he's like, "That's the great part! This is the cool part. See those doors? Open the doors." And I went over to open the doors, and there's just like metal frame. And that's the bed. And it's called a Murphy bed. I'd never seen one before. He said, "Did you pull it down, and pull it down, and pull it down, and made this really awful noise?" Kind of creaked. Like it was needed to be oiled. And I hated seeing it. It was like a lumpy mattress, and like there was a thin blanket on it, and it just didn't look like it was very good quality or comfortable. And we would sit on it sometimes to watch TV, and I remember just thinking, "This is so weird to sit on a bed and watch TV." It seemed really pathetic and lonely, and it's lonely and depressing anyway, because you know your parents are splitting up, but then to see where your dad is living, and it's not nice. And it was so incongruous with who I knew him to be. I mean, he's someone who belongs outside. Working outside animals, pets, agriculture, all that, and here he is in this apartment. And he even hated the word apartment for a while. I remember like seeing it in books, or I don't know, reading it somewhere in the newspaper, and you're like, "Oh, apartment. My dad lives in an apartment. I was really bothered by that." The first time you saw him so long ago. Yeah, I mean, he'd always been my horse used to get out, escape, and run down the road for miles, and I wouldn't know what to do. And my dad would just calmly get in the car, go drive, and find him in the bean field, and lead him back to the... I mean, he was my... Who else could do that? You know? But here he is in this apartment, and he seemed kind of cowed by it. They were... The walls closed it on him, but I know. So I saw him as just being kind of helpless. As the years went on, did he resume his full size, or did he stay more like the picture that you had in that apartment? No. That image was kind of shattered. He never regained the stature. He never regained the stature that he had before that moment, and before that year that he lived there. Leo is nine. She says if her parents hadn't split up, she probably would have had two or three more years, or she would have kept her dad on that pedestal, before adolescence would have hit, and he would have come down to size anyway. You know, your father gets knocked off the pedestal, and that would have happened if they'd gotten divorced or not, but it did kind of... It was more jarring the way that it happened. Do you regret that you lost those years of idealizing them, or do you think in the end it doesn't really matter? I think it matters. I think that it really... It was so painful, and we were so young, and just like, you don't need that. Yeah, it did make a difference. You need a few more years. You need to have it come to you on your own terms. I don't think that it's good when it happens in a way that you don't control. And the way that it came about for me wasn't really natural. It was very shocking. It was like one day he was there, and two weeks later, he definitely was not there. Here's the story of everyone and their dad. Once dad was on a pedestal, then we got older
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