The Father-Daughter Routine That Transformed Our Family Life
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In the early years, weekend adventures with my daughter followed a script: a park, a pet store, a local bakery or maybe somewhere for lunch. We'd do it every Saturday, on and on. Now my daughter is nearly 9, and the tone and tenor of our routine has changed. The music we listen to matters more—she's gone from wanting 'Baby Shark' to having strong opinions about how Kurt Cobain kind of sounds like a loud, angry version of the Beatles. We still go to bakeries (this is a topic on which we fundamentally agree as father and child), but now we can also talk about what we enjoy at them (both the pastries and the fact that we're supporting small businesses in the city we love).
Conceptually, what my family has come to call 'Dad-urday' grew out of a common parenting-duo problem: Sometimes, even though my wife and I believe in sharing household duties equally, one person will end up doing more kid-related labor than the other. This, I will admit (with some discomfort and guilt), fairly accurately depicts my family situation. Although I do parent throughout the week, I travel a lot for work, which means my wife has had to take on many an early morning alone.
So we designated Saturday mornings as my time to wake up with our daughter: make breakfast, watch some cartoons, then get ready to go out for a bit. I bring my wife a cup of coffee in bed and let her snuggle with our needy, oddball house cats—and allow her a full morning to herself. Dad-urday was a logistical decision that turned into a ritual, one that's become an anchor to my life: I design my work calendar around it and always try to fly home by Friday night.
[Read: The default-parent problem]
When my daughter was tiny and refused to sleep on a regular schedule at home, our Saturdays involved a lot of naps (hers, not mine), and I acted as a sort of baby-sleep chauffeur. The back of my Volkswagen was the only place she would snooze soundly—after a habitual 30-minute period of screaming-infant Sturm und Drang—so I would drive her around for hours on end, looping through neighborhoods and cruising up and down the hills of our Oregon town.
But soon enough, as my daughter got a little older, Dad-urday became more dynamic: We'd talk over the day's agenda and debate which park to visit. Some weeks, she'd choose one with elaborate climbing equipment; others, she'd want one with trails and streams to traverse. Afterward we'd visit a store called Pets on Broadway because I love animals and so does she. It's like a zoo in there, with fish and lizards and guinea pigs and a cat-adoption station, and we'd always get a treat or toy to bring home for our kitties.
Every Dad-urday, we aim to be out of the house until at least the early afternoon. This creates an uninterrupted period in which my daughter is the only person I'm talking to, and vice versa—me the planner, seeking order through scheduling, plotting out the best spot to have lunch ahead of an afternoon movie; she the great adventurer, up for anything, ready to let 10 a.m. become 3 p.m. if the getting is good at the park with the epic zip line.
Now that my daughter is way bigger, our days reflect her changing interests and greater maturity. She's learning to play the guitar, so I've been subjecting her to my Millennial-with-Boomer-tastes CD wallet: Jerry Garcia, the Kinks, J Dilla, XTC. We roam around and visit music shops, plugging guitars into cool amps and fiddling with distortion and delay pedals, behavior that the guitar-shop bros seem willing to tolerate in small doses.
[Read: I still get called daddy-mommy]
Our conversations have also expanded to encompass the wider world and its fundamental truths. The other day, on our way to pick up some kimchi, my daughter demanded to know, in detail, the difference between a pickle (like the ones we had in a jar in the fridge) and kimchi, which I had previously—and not entirely accurately—described as 'a style of Korean pickle.' By the end of the chat, I was talking about the different preserving and fermenting traditions of various cuisines, and she was ready to conduct a taste test when we got back home. Another development: Whenever we order lunch, my daughter now has an ideal deli sandwich (turkey, cheddar, sourdough, light mayo). I find it charming, but it also feels like some kind of passage into adulthood, the fact that my child knows herself well enough to dictate her preferences to the deli guy. If her grandfather or great-grandfather, who both knew their way around a deli, were here, they would be positively verklempt.
When we go to a park, I get to see other ways in which my daughter's personality has expanded. I listen to her rattling off the name and subspecies of every bird we glimpse. I watch her being kind to younger kids on the climbing wall. She is almost too big for a lot of the equipment—on certain sets of monkey bars, her toes nearly touch the ground—yet she calls over every couple of minutes, asking me to observe some feat of gymnastic glory. She still needs me to watch her on the playground, at least for now.
I can imagine that to some people, 'Dad-urday' might just sound like a cutesy rebrand for 'parenting.' But something about putting a name to the ritual has helped underscore for me exactly how precious my time with my daughter is—and how swiftly it moves. A consistent routine we share each week allows me to easily track her growth, as with height marks on a doorframe. And in my mind, under 'Dad-urday,' I now have a memory archive of hundreds of Saturdays with my kid, which allows me to reflect on the changes over the course of her childhood, and the changes within myself, more clearly.
Of course, nobody bats a thousand. Some weekends, if my daughter has a Saturday-morning birthday party or some other peg in her byzantine social schedule, we opt instead for a cheeky 'Sun-dad.' And every so often we'll miss a weekend. That makes the rest of the week feel out of balance, as if I'm missing some core part of myself. You see, I've come to love who I am on Dad-urday: gentler, more patient, more present and aware of the beauty of the world, because my daughter and I are seeing it together.
Before I wrote this essay, by the way, I sat down with my kid and talked with her about it. I'm careful about what I share online, and like many parents, I feel conflicted about creating content out of intimate moments. But my daughter told me, in her kind, self-assured way, that she thought writing about Dad-urday was a great idea—because she wanted other kids to get to have Dad-urdays, too.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
My dad was beloved bartender and sheriff. He was also an alcoholic with disease.
If you or a loved one struggle with addiction, help is available by calling 1-800-662-HELP. To see whether your pattern of alcohol use puts you at risk for alcohol use disorder, please visit Rethinking Drinking at: Listen to yourself. 'She's an alcoholic.' 'He's a drunk.' Equivalent to a loser. A bum. A failure. Those with alcohol use disorder are stigmatized by our tone of inferiority. We turn our noses at their actions. We believe they are less than us. In truth, they have partners and spouses who love them, children who rely on them and co-workers who brainstorm with them. Our historical disdain and distance are juxtapositioned with love. That makes it difficult to help them. When I was 13 years old, our green "princess" phone rang like a chorus of birds on high speed. I stretched the tangled, spiral cord around the corner into the living room ready to settle in next to the World Book Encyclopedias. 'Hello,' my voice squeaked. 'Your father is a drunk. He's going to lose.' Click. The man on the phone sounded like Alfred Hitchcock, deep and disturbing. The call came in during Dad's re-election campaign for county sheriff. On TV shows, drunks stumbled and fell into ditches. They drank out of bottles inside crumpled paper bags and spent the night in jail to sleep it off. Drunks couldn't hold jobs. They threw things across the room. Every Western had one town drunk who donned a scraggily beard, needed a bath and stumbled through the swinging doors of the saloon. That wasn't my dad. He wore an ironed, white short-sleeved shirt, tie and black pants to work. In no way could he be a drunk. But he was. Opinion: We asked readers about wake boats on Wisconsin lakes. Here's what you said. After being a bartender for 25 years and undersheriff for four, my dad was elected Manitowoc County sheriff, which borders Lake Michigan halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay. As a nine-year-old girl, I mixed three martinis for Dad each night after he came home from chasing criminals. After dinner, he mixed his own cocktails. Later in his life, I admitted him to the hospital six times to detox. In addition, he entered a 30-day in-patient treatment center twice. One counselor wrote Dad was admitted to treatment 'under pressure from his family because of what he called a little drinking problem.' Even Dad didn't believe he could be a drunk. Alcoholism is a serious disease. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, people with alcoholism have a brain disorder. It can be mild, moderate or severe like heart disease or diabetes. Without help, people are sentenced to an earlier death from cancer or damage to the liver and heart. Long-term sobriety of individuals who misuse alcohol involves behavioral therapy, support groups, and/or medications. Seventy percent relapse. Dad relapsed again and again. Each time he detoxed he wore a straitjacket tied to the hospital bed due to life-threatening delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal. Doses of Librium to mitigate seizures calmed his nervous system, but he screamed and yelled at imaginary spiders on his legs. After being sober for a month, Dad's brain told him to keep drinking. If alcohol abuse really is a brain disorder, why do we joke about it? U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's allegations of alcohol abuse made him the butt of jokes on late night TV. We seem to be more empathetic to an individual's health condition if the disease doesn't cause slurring, stumbling, anger or crossing the centerline. If someone goes into a 30-day treatment center and relapses a few months later, do we hold the same empathy for this person as we do for someone whose cancer reoccurs? The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism cites three factors that increase the risk for alcohol use disorder: Drinking at an early age. Those who begin drinking before age 15 are the most at risk. Dad started drinking at age 14. Genetics and family history. Hereditability accounts for 60%. Eight people in my extended family died from alcohol-related problems. Mental health and a history of trauma. Risk increases for people with depression, ADHD and PTSD. Access, genetics and trauma. We stigmatize people who get dealt a bad hand. Do we hold the same disregard for a person who grows up without access to fresh vegetables, has a genetic predisposition to breast cancer and suffers childhood trauma from losing a parent? Access, genetics and trauma. Try saying, 'She's a cancer patient' in the same tone of, 'She's a drunk.' It doesn't work. Everyone knows someone who misuses alcohol, especially in Wisconsin, the drunkest state. With 28 million alcoholics in the U.S., people function invisibly in every career. According to the Addiction Center, jobs with the highest rates of addiction to alcohol include 20% of lawyers, 16.5% of oil and construction workers, 15% of doctors, 12% of restaurant workers and 10% of priests. With drinking on the rise among women, there's likely a high percentage for the career called "carpool driver." Because many people with the disease are functioning adults, they live unbothered and invisible until the effects on their body of prolonged and/or excessive drinking show up and also damage those they love. When Dad lost re-election, my parents reopened their small-town tavern. Customers loved my dad. They remind me how when he laughed, he flicked his head and eyes to the upper right as if joy ran through his body so rapidly, he needed to release it to the atmosphere. They share stories of him throwing their dollar bill in the air and having it stick to the ceiling or how he extravagantly decorated the backbar for holidays. Mom also drank excessively. She became severely depressed, went through alcohol withdrawal, developed Korsakoff Syndrome and lost her brilliant mind. Dad sought medical care from doctors, hospitals and in-patient facilities to get better. Medication for alcoholism hadn't been invented. Thirty years ago, it took a colossal amount of willpower to recover. I never gave Dad credit for his effort to get better because he never did. Instead, I abandoned him like his illness commanded him to abandon our family. His alcohol use disorder made it difficult for us to love him. For a time, I hated him. I secretly hurt reading social media posts about wonderful fathers every Father's Day. It took me 35 years to understand Dad and Mom suffered from a disease, not a moral weakness. Learning to express empathy rather than disgust for those who suffer from the disorder came from intensive self-reflection through therapy and the conclusion that in the game of life, everyone tries. Once I stopped inserting repulsion into the narrative whenever I said, 'My parents were alcoholics,' people's faces softened, and so did my heart. Alcohol can make a person do bad things, such as drunk driving or domestic abuse. An alcoholic may disappoint, hurt and abandon those they love but their actions and disease do not inherently destroy what initially made many people love them. An understanding and acceptance of alcohol use disorder as a widespread disease is the first step we need to help those we love. Jane Hillstrom is a former public relations executive. She writes literary nonfiction and is completing a memoir about her childhood growing up in a tavern. She writes on Substack under The Osman Club, her parent's tavern. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Society doesn't treat alcoholism as disease. We judge drunks | Opinion
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
When I was a kid, I had no idea my dad was a CIA spy
Later, his story changed. I overheard him on the telephone saying he worked for the State Department. Nothing had altered in our lives. That's when I knew he was hiding something. Another time, when I was 13, slumped in the backseat of the family car as we drove through the leafy suburbs of Northern Virginia, my mother said out of the blue, 'Tell the girls what you do for a living.' The energy in the car shifted. I couldn't believe Mom was talking about the thing we never talked about — Dad's job. He tiptoed around an answer. His job was to 'research events,' he told us. Mom asked him to say more, but he resisted. 'I manage people,' he finally said. Mom whipped around and asked my sister and me if we had any questions about his work 'managing people.' Advertisement We jumped in. What kinds of things did he research? 'World events.' What kind of world events? 'Events of the day.' When Mom saw we were about to give up, she pressed her lips together firmly and said, 'You work for the CIA, don't you?' Dad said nothing for the rest of the drive. My mind raced through the James Bond movies we watched at home. I tried to put Sean Connery and my horn-rimmed glasses-wearing Dad in the same frame, but Dad was no 007. Still, it felt liberating to be out in the open. I wanted us to share more — the fact that I liked girls — but our family reverted back to silence. Three years later, my brave mother died of breast cancer. The truth-teller was gone. When I was home for the summer my sophomore year in college, I discovered the definitive truth. Dad had picked me up from the airport to take me to his new home. We drove through winding back roads and eventually arrived at a small cinder-block building. A uniformed official came out and motioned for us to get out of the car. I heard bright popping sounds in the background but tried to ignore them. Were those gunshots? Where were we? Clipboard in hand, the man announced, 'This is a CIA base.' His words sped through the layers of my life. I had to agree not to disclose this to anyone. He offered me the clipboard and a pen. Numbly, I signed. Thirty years later, in a call with my sister, those memories came rushing back. After growing up close, sister-allies in a family of loss and secrets, our adult lives had taken different turns. But the day I called, I was sorting through the past: My father's habit of skirting the topic of work, his rejection of my being gay, the unhappiness my mother experienced as the spouse of a clandestine officer. Advertisement Then, when Dad was in his 70s, I started writing a book which sparked conversations that led to our reconciliation. He agreed to meet my wife and they hugged. The facts have fallen into place. Dad had worked at the CIA for nearly 32 years and was twice awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit. But I'm still unraveling. Still pondering. Recalibrating. is a writer in Oakland and the author of Send comments to magazine@ TELL YOUR STORY. Email your 650-word unpublished essay on a relationship to connections@ Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won't pursue.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
The Father-Daughter Routine That Transformed Our Family Life
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In the early years, weekend adventures with my daughter followed a script: a park, a pet store, a local bakery or maybe somewhere for lunch. We'd do it every Saturday, on and on. Now my daughter is nearly 9, and the tone and tenor of our routine has changed. The music we listen to matters more—she's gone from wanting 'Baby Shark' to having strong opinions about how Kurt Cobain kind of sounds like a loud, angry version of the Beatles. We still go to bakeries (this is a topic on which we fundamentally agree as father and child), but now we can also talk about what we enjoy at them (both the pastries and the fact that we're supporting small businesses in the city we love). Conceptually, what my family has come to call 'Dad-urday' grew out of a common parenting-duo problem: Sometimes, even though my wife and I believe in sharing household duties equally, one person will end up doing more kid-related labor than the other. This, I will admit (with some discomfort and guilt), fairly accurately depicts my family situation. Although I do parent throughout the week, I travel a lot for work, which means my wife has had to take on many an early morning alone. So we designated Saturday mornings as my time to wake up with our daughter: make breakfast, watch some cartoons, then get ready to go out for a bit. I bring my wife a cup of coffee in bed and let her snuggle with our needy, oddball house cats—and allow her a full morning to herself. Dad-urday was a logistical decision that turned into a ritual, one that's become an anchor to my life: I design my work calendar around it and always try to fly home by Friday night. [Read: The default-parent problem] When my daughter was tiny and refused to sleep on a regular schedule at home, our Saturdays involved a lot of naps (hers, not mine), and I acted as a sort of baby-sleep chauffeur. The back of my Volkswagen was the only place she would snooze soundly—after a habitual 30-minute period of screaming-infant Sturm und Drang—so I would drive her around for hours on end, looping through neighborhoods and cruising up and down the hills of our Oregon town. But soon enough, as my daughter got a little older, Dad-urday became more dynamic: We'd talk over the day's agenda and debate which park to visit. Some weeks, she'd choose one with elaborate climbing equipment; others, she'd want one with trails and streams to traverse. Afterward we'd visit a store called Pets on Broadway because I love animals and so does she. It's like a zoo in there, with fish and lizards and guinea pigs and a cat-adoption station, and we'd always get a treat or toy to bring home for our kitties. Every Dad-urday, we aim to be out of the house until at least the early afternoon. This creates an uninterrupted period in which my daughter is the only person I'm talking to, and vice versa—me the planner, seeking order through scheduling, plotting out the best spot to have lunch ahead of an afternoon movie; she the great adventurer, up for anything, ready to let 10 a.m. become 3 p.m. if the getting is good at the park with the epic zip line. Now that my daughter is way bigger, our days reflect her changing interests and greater maturity. She's learning to play the guitar, so I've been subjecting her to my Millennial-with-Boomer-tastes CD wallet: Jerry Garcia, the Kinks, J Dilla, XTC. We roam around and visit music shops, plugging guitars into cool amps and fiddling with distortion and delay pedals, behavior that the guitar-shop bros seem willing to tolerate in small doses. [Read: I still get called daddy-mommy] Our conversations have also expanded to encompass the wider world and its fundamental truths. The other day, on our way to pick up some kimchi, my daughter demanded to know, in detail, the difference between a pickle (like the ones we had in a jar in the fridge) and kimchi, which I had previously—and not entirely accurately—described as 'a style of Korean pickle.' By the end of the chat, I was talking about the different preserving and fermenting traditions of various cuisines, and she was ready to conduct a taste test when we got back home. Another development: Whenever we order lunch, my daughter now has an ideal deli sandwich (turkey, cheddar, sourdough, light mayo). I find it charming, but it also feels like some kind of passage into adulthood, the fact that my child knows herself well enough to dictate her preferences to the deli guy. If her grandfather or great-grandfather, who both knew their way around a deli, were here, they would be positively verklempt. When we go to a park, I get to see other ways in which my daughter's personality has expanded. I listen to her rattling off the name and subspecies of every bird we glimpse. I watch her being kind to younger kids on the climbing wall. She is almost too big for a lot of the equipment—on certain sets of monkey bars, her toes nearly touch the ground—yet she calls over every couple of minutes, asking me to observe some feat of gymnastic glory. She still needs me to watch her on the playground, at least for now. I can imagine that to some people, 'Dad-urday' might just sound like a cutesy rebrand for 'parenting.' But something about putting a name to the ritual has helped underscore for me exactly how precious my time with my daughter is—and how swiftly it moves. A consistent routine we share each week allows me to easily track her growth, as with height marks on a doorframe. And in my mind, under 'Dad-urday,' I now have a memory archive of hundreds of Saturdays with my kid, which allows me to reflect on the changes over the course of her childhood, and the changes within myself, more clearly. Of course, nobody bats a thousand. Some weekends, if my daughter has a Saturday-morning birthday party or some other peg in her byzantine social schedule, we opt instead for a cheeky 'Sun-dad.' And every so often we'll miss a weekend. That makes the rest of the week feel out of balance, as if I'm missing some core part of myself. You see, I've come to love who I am on Dad-urday: gentler, more patient, more present and aware of the beauty of the world, because my daughter and I are seeing it together. Before I wrote this essay, by the way, I sat down with my kid and talked with her about it. I'm careful about what I share online, and like many parents, I feel conflicted about creating content out of intimate moments. But my daughter told me, in her kind, self-assured way, that she thought writing about Dad-urday was a great idea—because she wanted other kids to get to have Dad-urdays, too. Article originally published at The Atlantic
