Earlier this week, as I was contemplating how to celebrate my freedom from debt and whistling while I worked on my off-contract summer service, I was hit with an emergency: I had to shop for a Father’s Day card.
Ordinarily, I would have sent one from my copious greeting card stash, of which I am perhaps inordinately proud. It contains cards acquired at Pound Stretcher and Everything’s Less than a Pound! shops—as well as the typical museums, the British Library Bookshop, and Oxfam—in the UK, and of course shops big and little all over the US and Canada. Since I travel mostly to places with universities, the typical eclectic indie establishments staffed by hipsters wearing ironic nerd glasses whom (and which) I despise have sold me reams of “edgy” cards. The dazzling bounty of my card stash has recently dispatched cards from India, Israel, Italy, and Ireland, as well as countries that don’t begin with “I.” Despite their plenitude, I never bought indiscriminately: every card in the stash looks special. The stash occupies the largest drawer in my ostentatiously Gallic bombé lingerie chest, which goes with none of my other furniture and contains no lingerie. Have you just gotten divorced? Had your kitty put down? Lost your job? I am so sincerely sorry, but have I got a card for you!
No wonder, then, that I was numb from disbelief—no, horror—as I pawed through my stash, only to come up empty on Father’s Day cards. I already had my quirky yet secretly impersonal gift. The lack of a card to accompany it constituted a crisis.
Preprinted cards for Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, and parental birthdays are extremely problematic for me. Shopping for these is always a depressing ordeal. Like everyone else’s parents, my parents are not normal. Yet the cards that you can nip into the supermarket for describe parental characteristics completely alien to my upbringing.
The most common motif on Father’s Day cards is a tie. My dad is retired, but he never wore a tie to work, where he was reportedly (via an intern at the company whom I met coincidentally years later) an underachiever who somehow lucked into a salary sufficient to support an enormous brood in an expensive part of the country. I’ve never danced with him, and he has never held me aloft on his shoulders, as so many of those cards marked “From Daughter” suggest are common occurrences. My dad has never said a word of encouragement to my face, and he has the unfortunate gift of saying the most devastatingly wrong thing at the worst possible time. Still, he does share with other people’s fathers a penchant telling awful jokes. He neither plays nor watches sports—not even golf—though he has all sorts of mysterious trophies from before he met my mother. Ever since all we kids moved out, my parents have used a service for yard work. My dad isn’t handy. He doesn’t barbecue. He doesn’t read. He has no hobbies.
Shopping for a Mother’s Day card is even more trying. Throughout my formative years, my mother was perpetually pregnant. From what I can gather, she was always seeking the approval of my grandparents, on both sides, through abundant parturition. Though each of her children has undergone therapy, she doesn’t believe in it, but I am convinced that she suffered from decades of postpartum depression. Therefore, so did the rest of us. She went on sadistic rages whose fury could be sated only by humiliating others: to this day I shudder at wedge espadrilles because they were the fashion when my mother was fond of stuffing hers in my mouth for asking too many questions. (None of these questions was “Why are wedge espadrilles so ugly?”) She also regaled us with stories about her former beaux and my dad’s latest failings. Every other week, it seemed, she wanted a divorce; she kept the family together for the sake of the children, she said. For our sake, too, she turned away Child Protective Services, which apparently sent out a case worker based on odd things I was doing in kindergarten. (I have never done anything odd; this case worker must have been sent out in error.) She will be sixty this year, so she came of age at the height of the women’s movement, yet she has never worked outside the house. She is intelligent and has great aspirations. I think she would have been a lot less unhappy had she earned a living of her own.
I love my parents, but I have never liked them. We talk every weekend. Rather, they complain about each other while I listen. The complaints are variations of the ones I heard throughout my childhood. Now, as then, I never take sides. I grade papers or, if I’m feeling ambitious, request interlibrary loans online while “talking” to them. I don’t anticipate my Father’s Day call will be much different.
Over three decades, my parents have changed remarkably little. That troubles me. We are supposed to overcome our anger at people who have outgrown the behaviors that angered us: they are no longer the people who angered us. As far as I can tell, neither of my parents has outgrown their behaviors, but I’ve outgrown my anger, for the most part.
After all, they will not be around forever, and given the stress they have put each other through, they are not in the best health. Imagine if Homer Simpson had wed Amanda Wingfield, the faded, delusional Southern belle from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and you’d have a decent approximation of my parents. As a child, I fantasized about having been switched at birth and being reunited with my kind, clever real biological parents. I long ago abandoned that fantasy. I am every bit the child of the parents who brought me up. As I age, I discover myself embodying their worst qualities: the complacency of my father and the dissatisfaction of my mother make an unfortunate cocktail. Whatever. I’ll get over it.
All this occurred to me as I replenished my card stash. I had to veto the cards on offer at four hipster indie gift shops: they were either too allusive or too risqué. The Father’s Day cards I bought have, as they must, minimal text. They are not blank inside, because then I would have to supply the sentiment. A card meant to be “given” by an infant or a pet will do. The front must not be representational. Something abstract, or maybe a droll yet accessible cartoon: these are my safest bets, as they give me something to work with in a way that seems thoughtful, in an affectionate way.
Such was the case with the card I sent Wednesday—along with my quirky yet secretly impersonal gift—with love.
