There is a sentence I grew up underneath, and I did not know, the way you never know in the moment, that it was holding up the whole house.
When I was small, I was loud. I danced through my chores with the volume up. I was fiery and shy at the same time, too much and not enough in all the ways a girl learns to apologize for early. And when someone in the room would ask me to be smaller, to turn it down, to take up less space, my father would answer from the other room. Every time. Let her. Let her dance and sing if she wants to.
He was not what people mean when they say a father is protective. Protective can mean keeping a girl small to keep her safe. My father was something rarer. He was my defender. He stood behind the person I actually was and refused to let anyone talk me out of her. Where I grew up, in a time when a girl’s path was mostly drawn for her before she could hold the pen, here was this man telling his too-much daughter to go be exactly herself, out loud, for the whole world. Just do what makes you happy, he would say. Go after your dreams, and do not let anybody turn that down or turn it off. He said it the way you hand someone a key.
He was my number one fan before I had done a single thing worth being a fan of.
I think of the bicycle when I think of him. I came home one evening and I did not ask, I told him, I need you to teach me to ride, tonight, so I can ride with my friends tomorrow. I picked it out myself, a white BMX with a yellow seat. Our street had the smallest hill in it, just enough to matter to a beginner, and we went up and down it in the falling light, my father behind me with no training wheels to do his job for him. He ran. He held the seat and let go and caught it and held it again, popping up behind me every time I wobbled, back and forth on that little hill until his daughter stopped falling. It took maybe forty-five minutes. And then I could ride. He never made me feel ashamed that I was behind. He just helped me catch up so fast it stopped mattering.
That is the whole of me in one story, if you are paying attention. The all-in urgency, the refusal to be the one who could not, and a father who would drop everything and run behind me until I could go on my own.
He was a nurse. I did not plan to follow him into it, and yet here I am, a nurse practitioner, spending my days being for other people the thing he was for me. Because that is the other secret of him: my father taught me how to be soft. I learned it by watching him, the gentleness, the way he could make a frightened stranger feel safe in a single minute. Everything strong in me, he defended into being. Everything soft in me, I learned from him.
He could be fierce, too, but only ever in front of someone he loved. There was a day I was sick and small and frightened, and he crossed a room and put his own body between me and harm and raised himself up like a wall. He never once in his life raised a hand. But he raised himself, that day and so many others, and I have never forgotten what it feels like to have someone stand between you and the storm.
I am a grown woman now, and I hear him come out of my own mouth. When the people I love start to shrink, I find myself saying the inverse of everything I was ever told to be: take up all the room you want. You never have to make yourself smaller. I will be standing behind you the entire time, the way my father stood behind me.
So this is for him. For the man in the doorway who told the whole world to let his daughter dance. I could not thank him enough if I spent the rest of my life trying.
And it is for every good man who does this quietly, who defends instead of diminishes, who runs behind a girl on a small hill until she can go on her own. The world does not always notice you. I do. We do.
I love you, Dad. Happy Father’s Day.
Je t’aime, Baba. Joyeuse fête des pères, Papa.
With warmth,
Wahiba