Father Knows Best

Image by nongpimmy

Image by nongpimmy

Though he spent a lot of my childhood hard at work on the football fields of Santa Barbara City College–calling plays, not mowing the lawn–and a lot of my adulthood on the golf course, playing poker, or retired on the couch–in deep snoring thought–my father still manages to provide his children and grandchildren with a lot of hard-earned, sensible advice.

While most fathers offer cliched wisdom about how they walked miles to school in the snow, or earned just pennies an hour for backbreaking labor, my Dad is nothing if not an original.

One of his favorite expressions is, “pain is your friend.” Thanks to my Dad this sage advice (good for skinned knees and bloody noses, bad for PMS) gets lobbed around our household almost daily. Ask any of my son’s soccer, basketball, chess or baseball teammates and coaches, and they will tell you that this is Koss’s favorite phrase. As the fortunate–or unfortunate–recipient of two generations worth of pent up Dinaberg testosterone, Koss now gets the advantage of Coach Bob’s advice on a regular basis.

Growing up with a football coach father, my mom, sister and I would often reflect on what a good thing it was that we didn’t have any boys in our family. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my sister and I both married guys who prefer golf, swimming and channel surfing to any sport where they might actually get hit.

Luckily for Grandpa Bob, Koss, his only male grandchild, loves to wrestle, tackle and play rough. Thanks to Gramps, Koss has embraced the idea of “pain is your friend” wholeheartedly. This is a good thing because as an only child, he needs all the friends he can get.

“Developmental tasks” are another favorite Dad-ism. With pain as our friend, if we couldn’t manage to play through it, we could always learn from it. Anything we didn’t want to do–like paint the sundeck or tar the roof–was a “developmental task” in Dad’s mind. Same thing with anything we wanted to do but couldn’t–like going to a parent-free party because “everyone else was going”–they all became “developmental tasks” for my sister Pam and I to learn from.

When I went through my own labor and delivery, I repeated both of these adages to myself, Dad, and I’m sorry to report that pain was most certainly NOT my friend, and my “developmental task” was to learn that I should have demanded an epidural at least two weeks before delivery.

I don’t think I ever realized it at the time, but those themes of learning from things that are painful or out of your control have played a big part in my life.

Time has a sneaky way of rewriting history.

Legend has it that the first thing my Dad said to my mom when he saw me at birth was: “Don’t worry, honey. We’ll buy her pretty clothes and develop her personality.”

Granted, this was 1963, I had a forceps-dented forehead, and the only labor fathers participated in those days was pacing the hospital halls and handing out cigars, so seeing this very un-Gerber-baby-like creature might have been a bit of a shock.

Why he repeats the story every birthday is another matter–yet here I am, sharing my pain with my friends. Thanks, Dad. Happy Father’s Day.

Share your father’s wisdom with email. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com.
Originally appeared in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on June 13, 2008.

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