Words & Timing

Words & Timing

When this challenge popped up, I was so excited as I thought that this would be a fun and easy piece to write, I must have been hallucinating!

It is indescribably difficult to cram all of the lessons that my father has taught me over my lifetime and is still teaching me in less 5000 words.

So let me start with a bit of background:

My Dad and I have been close for most of my life and while I was growing up, Dad raised me alone from the time I was 7 years old after Mom left.

It was not an exceedingly popular thing to do at the time, nor was homeschooling me, but Dad did it anyway. That in a nutshell is my dad, unrelenting willpower and indomitable perseverance…….well and a lot of pride and shamelessness in turns.

As you might imagine while I was growing up, I held enormous resentment towards my mother for leaving.

Whenever I would give voice to it , my dad would always say it was a good thing that she left as she needed to be free to live her life and he wouldn’t have let me go anyway.

Simply put, Dad needed me in his life, whereas Mom did not.

When it got tough on me, He would tell me that sometimes people come together in life for a single purpose and then their paths diverge out of necessity.

He loved to say that his and Mom’s purpose was me and that was IT.

What lessons did Dad teach me, hmm , well let’s see?

Dad’s lessons (taught by example or by direct teaching) include but are not limited to,

love, creativity, ambition, drive, teamwork, kindness, perseverance, grace, strength, practicality, Intuition and logic, charity and opportunism, what addiction can look like and what it can do to a person, and the list goes on.

He also inadvertently taught me that childhood trauma triggered by grief coupled with the predictable addictive coping mechanisms that those things tend to bring-as well as physical illness, can turn someone that you love and think that you know like the back if your hand into a complete & utter stranger.

Dad never wanted me to know that he worked hard not to pass the poisoned chalice of trauma onto me and was more successful than he could have hoped to be.

He made me see him as a human being, a normal & very flawed human being…..and thats a hard lesson to learn about your parent.

I think that deep in every childs heart they feel that Mom & Dad are superhuman (at least a small part of them feels that way, anyways.), and while it is a wonderful thing, its simply not true. Dad & Mom are still human with all of the bad parts to go along with the amazing stuff. Parents get old, they get sick, they make bad choices…….sometimes really really bad choices…and they arent awesome all of the time. However, I feel that the great ones just keep getting up and trying to do the right thing no matter how many times they fall.

Dad always told me that I taught him just as much or more than he could ever teach me.

I always thought Dad was a bit of a screwball, now that I have a child of my own….I understand his sentiment a little more. Of course, there has been quite a lot of the “Dad you were right.” moments once I got past my early 20’s.

To his credit he has taken them all with good grace, just saying “I know honey, I knew it would take you some time to figure it out, but you found your way there. That’s why I said those things….so that you would have a point of reference. You’re so smart and I love you. Always remember you’re my baby.”

Dad has a lot of grace and compassion, don’t tell him that though as it would go straight to his ego!

Since I have to pick one lesson in particular for this piece…I feel it should be about Words and Timing:

This is the ever-present lesson that sticks out to me, it weaves itself through my dad’s life like the string that holds a web together, it is overarching and always there in the background.

*I guess it’s ironic that my father wanted to be a poet and author most of his life. He gained some success after forty and is still working on his dream as the crow flies. *

For as long as I can remember he drummed into my head the value of using the right words at the right time, to weigh and consider my decisions, but always most importantly my words........how I say things and the way in which they are delivered.

The tone, the feel, the body language that I use.

He would also stress the timing of everything, not necessarily waiting for the correct timing but being mindful of when and how I did things. The right words to fit the situation.

The right word in the right ear at the right time.

I would watch as he would utter a sentence, a word, or a phrase and completely change the energy of a situation. He would always stress to me to “KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE”, by that he meant being aware of the need to speak to different people in different ways and tones.

It is partially an intuitive process, but also a matter of experience and being observant.

Funny enough, Dad was originally a group Therapist who then went into business for himself. He is also a clairvoyant psychic medium (Which he was good enough at when I was young to keep me firmly out of trouble, even through my teenage years).

Words, knowledge, intuition, heck even gossip, Dad knew how powerful these kinds of things really were, and he would use them to his and his loved ones' benefit.

Anybody that really knew Dad always joked that if you dropped him off in nothing but a pair of bikini underwear in the north pole, he would come back with a ride, some cash, nice clothes, a new girlfriend or two and one hell of a story to tell. I always knew it was true. Dad knows how to use words to his advantage and how to make an opportunity out of thin air.

Perhaps, one day I will sit down and write about some of the other lessons that Dad has bestowed on me over the years, but this one deserved to be first.

Cheers to you Dad!