My fondest memories of my childhood were days I spent with my Dad. I don't remember much about being with Mom, only brief glimpses of her sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette, her hair always in an immaculate coif. She took great pride in her looks, and her weight. I can also see her standing with her hand on her hip wagging her index finger at me telling me to go pick a switch from the peach tree. If I got the wrong size then she would go pick one a whole lot bigger, so I learned quickly to pick the right size. The switch of course was to punish me for something I had done 'wrong'. But that is for another day's telling.
Right now I want to look at the early years when Daddy would take me to work with him on Saturday mornings. He would give me a hammer and some nails, and would let me hammer the nails into any piece of wood I wanted too. I wonder how many houses that he built in Austin have those hidden little nails standing at attention behind wallboard. I liked to go to work with Daddy because I thought it was just the most wonderful thing to have a Daddy who could build a house from the bottom up. Daddy owned his own contractor's business, City Builders, and he had two partners. They did not believe in unions. They were experienced house builders who could pour foundations, frame it up, put the windows in, put the roof on, do the electrical and plumbing, put in the cabinets and flooring, do all the drywall work and they even did brick work on some houses. My Dad built the house that I grew up in at 700 Sandpiper (now changed to 704 Sandpiper), just on the outskirts of Austin on I35. It used to be a beautiful red brick house with green trim, but the company that bought the property when Mom died painted the brink a gray color. Poor beautiful red bricks.
Other than building houses and doing some remodeling work, Daddy loved spending time fishing and working with amateur radio. He would take me fishing about once a month, and now I realize that he had to be the most patient of men, for my line would get snagged repeatedly and he would reel his line in and come rescue mine. Needless to say we didn't catch a lot when I went with him.
I loved being with my Dad. To this day when Marty is working on some remodeling project around the house, and he smells of sawdust and sweat, I am instantly transported back in time when I would run out to meet Daddy when he drove in from work. He always smelled so good....sawdust!
Those early years came to a close very abruptly when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I never understood why, but my Mom would no longer let me go with Daddy. And once my Mom made up her mind about something, there was no changing it. I spent the next 23 years not being able to have a normal father/daughter relationship. I did not realize it until the weeks before she died when she was able to share with me but she had been molested when she was a little girl. She never did tell me by whom, but her fear of leaving me alone with my Dad seems to tell her story. She was molested by her own father at the early age of 4.
What my Mom didn't realize was that when she stopped us from spending time alone, it opened a hole in my little girl heart. I felt lost and alone. Through the years that came and went, Daddy and I learned to adjust to mother's needs. We spent time watching TV together, when she was present. We would work on his HAM radio in the garage, with the door open from the den to garage so she could always hear us and see us. When I got older, and was not living at home, we had to make sure that if we had phone conversations, Mom was on the other phone listening, or we had to tell her of what we spoke about if she wasn't home. It was a very dysfunctional home, but it was home.
One of the things that Daddy and I did that was just for the two of us was this: we would have a bowl of ice cream almost every night while watching TV. That is why I went from this:
to This:
And so, my battle with weight began.
And my self esteem spiraled down.
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