As some of you may or may not know, I cover a 5 hour shift once a week at a children’s toy store in Vancouver’s urban hippy neighborhood known as “The Drive.” This experience is both incredibly fun and incredibly eye opening. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been shocked by the leniency of parents while purchasing birthday gifts for other children, how many parents turn a blind eye to their child’s misbehavior and how seldom it is that you see a parent not just teaching their child to be nice, and polite, but considerate. Yes, we know that sharing is nice and we do it because we get positive reinforcement from our parents, but its increasingly apparent to me that children are not being taught to consider other peoples feelings. To clean up the mess they made because the poor girl in the shop will have to do it if they don’t, and she looks like she had a long night last night and might still have a hangover.
Two weeks ago, on a particularly sober morning, I was caught off guard while preemptively separating the medieval and cowboy Playmobile sets, lest I have an “Indian in the cupboard” situation on my hands. I felt a tug on the frays of my skinny scenester cut-off shorts to find a tiny girl chewing on a Play-Doh ravioli cutter, she couldn’t have been more than three years-old, and was dressed in pink overalls, and a pink shirt, with pink Mary Janes, and a pink ribbon in her baby soft blonde hair. She pulled at the frays of my shorts to tell me, in so many words, that I had dropped a Playmobile set without noticing. Her tiny hands, obstructed by her Play-Doh toy, could barely grasp the box, a particularly gruesome medieval war, as she tried to lift it up to give to me. Moments after I thanked her, and she fell over in delight, her father joined her.
He was dressed in Vans, cut off black Dickies shorts, sleeve tattoos, a “Pro Skates” t-shirt, a winning smile and empty ring finger. He picked up his daughter, and proceeded to ask me if we had any fairy costumes, unfortunately all of our costumes are for little girls who want to be fairies and not girls who are the same size as real ones. He looked at the tiny creature on his hip, and said “Not a problem, I’ll just make you one sweetheart.”
Cue: Heart melt. It may just be my aching ovaries, or my raging hormones and desperate loneliness, but this tattooed, skateboard daddy, with a daughter who just wanted to be a fairy (although I’m convinced she already was) made me believe in parenthood again. Not only was he willing to make his tiny daughter a fairy costume, (which looked like the last thing a guy like him would want to be caught doing on a Saturday night) he wasn’t trying, like many parents who come into my store, to turn his kid into a clone of him. Skate-Daddies come in all the time, with their kids in mohawks, and Baby-Vans, and ironic shirts that say things like “Recently Evicted” and “iPood” or baby “Ramones” and “Guns N Roses” t-shirts. All of these poor children are mini clones of their not so cool parents, and may very well grow up to resent the fact that daddy had a skateboard.
While I dug through the dress-up clothes to try and find a pair of tiny pink wings, the little creature he was holding squirmed away and found the play table at the back of the store. We chatted about Pro Skates, a Halifax based skate shop, how he used to work there and how he had moved to Vancouver while he constantly kept an eye on his charge.
After a short while she decided she had had enough and, clutching a firefighter toy, she decided to let daddy know she was tired and hungry and possibly poopy, in the loudest way possible. Skate Daddy wasn’t going to have any of it. In ten seconds he did what I have seen other parents take twenty minutes, much pleading and the purchasing of unnecessary toys to do. He quieted his daughter, made his purchase, and began to exit the store. Realizing his daughter still had a toy in her hand he asked her to go return it, knowing he was almost out the door and the battle was almost won, I offered to do it for her.
“No, thank you, she needs to learn.” he said. He was teaching her what I wanted every parent who comes into the shop to teach their kids.
This interaction with Skate Daddy was eye opening for me, this beautiful creature was so lucky to have such a great person on her side, fighting for her, protecting her, teaching her, making fairy costumes for her. I thought of my own Dad. He wasn’t a Skate Daddy, he wasn’t a fairy costume making daddy, he wasn’t sleeve tattoo daddy. While I silently wished that he was heart melting daddy I quickly realized that my daddy was all of those things.
He was Rock Star Daddy, skinned knee daddy, and always there daddy. When shit hit the fan, it was easy to blame my parents, and for my parents it was easy to blame each other. No matter how I felt in my teenage crazed hormone years, the years I tortured my father and he didn’t understand, the year I left home at 15 and left him alone, he was still always there, and still always the daddy who picked me up when I fell, the one who made things clear for me when they got all foggy. Skate Daddy and my daddy were one and the same, and I hope that the miniature person who tugged on my frays will someday realize how fortunate she is to be blessed with someone like him, and hopefully he’ll be able to survive the years that she doesn’t act so angelic and doesn’t know why. Because, trust me, those years are not pretty, and it’s just as hard being the daughter as it is being the daddy.
