I am My Father's Daughter

and there's no one I'd rather be

Dad won first place in a beard growing contest. I can’t remember the deployment, but I’m pretty sure this is the victory photo.

I always wanted to be like my dad.

At six feet, one half inch tall, with dark black hair and twenty years of military experience he had the kind of presence you felt - larger than life, but so concretely human. He walked into the room and you knew he was there, but he was also funny and sarcastic and tender. When we were little he would read to my brother and I - Berenstein Bears or Dr. Seuss, more often than not. We would run to grab Fox in Socks from the bookshelf and curl up on our striped and floral couch in Orlando, Florida, while he read dramatically - expertly navigating the tongue twisters littered across the pages, often allotting one big breath to be drawn per paragraph and exhaling loudly before turning the pages. It was a private pleasure between him and us, one that would later expand to the younger six once they came along.

Dad converted to Christianity when I was six, in a Pentecostal church - he would tell us about how they wanted him to speak in tongues to confirm his new found faith and he simply told them that he knew he was different. He didn’t need to speak words he didn’t know to prove it. And that’s just who he was and how he lived. He knew, and he acted.

I remember when I was first learning how to drive and he and I went out on a Saturday to run an errand and then stopped at Taco Bell to celebrate. I was cringing, inside and outside, as I awkwardly parked and began apologizing profusely but my dad just gave me his signature smile - half amused, brown eyes bright with good humor - and said, “Honey, your Dad’s a steely-eyed killer of the deep, it’s going to take more than my sixteen year old’s driving to kill me.” It worked, it broke that internal tension of embarrassment and rearranged the world back to where it was supposed to be - I was just a kid learning, he was my dad and capable of walking alongside me while I did. We grew up with stories from his naval career and little mementos that he brought home to us from deployments - sea stars and sand dollars, stories of trying to inflate puffer fish in the torpedo tubes and the joys of eating camel and literal green eggs and ham. He would write letters in colored pencil, a different color every couple of sentences for us to read when we were missing him. There was a bomb threat on base when I was eight. I remember watching dad in his uniform as he would prepare to leave home to be on watch and being far more afraid for his safety than I ever was when he was out to sea. It wasn’t until later that I would hear some sea stories that very quickly rearranged my perception of his safety during deployments, including but not limited to the one vessel in particular that seemed to catch fire every week.

Dad was tone deaf, but he didn’t stop him from singing - crooning out songs that I can’t remember the words to, but I can remember how he would put on a full performance, dancing and snapping while his voice slid all around whatever note he was supposed to hit. He would join in singing hymns at church with full confidence, joking later that he ‘made a joyful noise’. He was just so unapologetically himself. I suppose I’ll never know the experiences that brought him from boyhood into this kind of confidence in who he was.

He expected a crap ton out of all of us, but he always expected even more from himself, and it was that kind of leadership that drove me to do anything just to see the pride in his eyes when I had done well.

I just. . . wanted to be him. To inspire that kind of trust, to carry myself with that kind of strength, to be that real.

The truth is, I am a very different person than my father. I see the world through vastly different eyes, I hold different values, I have different priorities. But I see him in my love of knowledge, I hear him in my sense of humor, and as I square my shoulders and lift my head when I feel like curling in on myself and apologizing for my existence, I feel his confidence. I remember his love.

an award I made for my dad and had the family sign.