On being a Dad

It’s Father’s Day today, that means two things.

The first is that I get to spend the day with my kids, doing the things I want to do. Today that’s going to the movies (Toy Story 5) and the World Cup.

The second is that it’s complicated. I lost my dad 20 years and 2 weeks ago. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s been that long. He was 65. I was 22, a week from graduating university. This morning I’m drinking my coffee from his old Navigator mug, from his boat.

He wasn’t a great dad, to be fair. My parents split up when I was four. We moved from London to Glasgow, and he moved to Spain to live on his boat. After that I saw him maybe twice a year, sometimes for a month at a time, but I never had a real relationship with him. And I never got to know him as an adult.

I miss him anyway. I remember the hugs he’d give me before bed. The silly stories. And I remember sitting on his boat watching him know just what to do and where to go. He knew what was broken when things broke, which on a sailboat is always, and he knew how to fix it.

When he died, my sister and I kept the boat. I went and lived aboard for a few months with a group of friends, sailing around Spain. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but figured, how hard can it be?

One day we set off on a short hop up the coast of Ibiza on a clear morning, with a forecast that promised an easy day. About an hour in, the wind shifted, dropped ten degrees in an instant and went cold. Within minutes the wind was at fifty knots. That’s a Force 9, the kind of thing experienced sailors spend their careers trying to avoid, and we were four miles off a rocky coast with too much sail up, and without any experienced sailors around. I looked and couldn’t see land. The sea had gone flat, the rain was sheeting sideways instead of falling, there was lightning a quarter mile off the stern, close enough that I saw the water light up, and it was as though I’d stepped into a different world from the one I’d left five minutes before.

I remember standing there in the middle of all of it, soaked and scared, wishing he was there to tell me what to do. He always knew what to do.

He wasn’t there. So I figured it out. We rode it south and into a quiet anchorage, shaken but in one piece. And somewhere in those few hours, out on his boat in the water he loved, I’d turned into the guy who knew what to do. Or close enough to fake it. The part of him I admired most.

Now I’m a dad myself, to two amazing little girls, and I can’t imagine seeing them only twice a year, the way he saw me. I just wish he could see me now. Meet the girls, and know that I turned out okay.

I’m the dad who’s there. The one they get excited to see when I walk in the door after work. The one who shuffles around the floor on his knees pretending to be a horse. And every night, the one who climbs into bed with them and tells a made-up story about a gang of animals who go on adventures. The gang started small. It’s about 95 creatures now, all of them friends, and it grows by one or two every night, because I’m there every night to add them.

And they’re growing up in a house where their parents love each other. I never had that. I think it might be the most important thing I give them.

The coffee’s almost gone. Time to go be a dad.