“Undemonstrative” by Anita Levine Dahlin

An avid watcher of the early family sitcoms, I wanted my father to be more like the TV dads. Like Robert Young in Father Knows Best, who left the office at five, came home and immediately inquired into the lives of his kids, calling them by their special nicknames like “Princess,” and showering them with unlimited patience and affection.  

I noticed my friends’ fathers, the nine to five commuters in soft gray fedoras who worked in offices downtown. I knew one who would come home, hug his daughter, immediately start to chat with her visitor, maybe tell us jokes. Sort of like a TV dad. In charge but relaxed and casual.

While he always claimed to know best, my father was not the genial Robert Young. Not much for small talk and certainly not with youngsters, my father was deemed “formidable” by my friends. I could understand that.

When I whined to my mother about wishing my dad was different, she thought I meant that I wanted him to be “more demonstrative”, as she phrased it. Looking back now I’m not even sure what it was I wanted from him. When I was a small child he was warm and loving with me.

I recall playing with my invisible friends on the front lawn of our apartment building when I saw my daddy turning the corner onto our street. I tore down the sidewalk and launched myself at him, expecting his arms to catch me before I hit the concrete – or broke his shins. Then he lifted me up with a big hug, called me a “little apple” and pretended to take a bite out of me while giving me kisses and whiskers. This was our special greeting. I imagined myself as a round red apple, all cheeks and smiles. Only my father ever called me an apple.

As I grew into the role of dissatisfied teenager, beginning to “put away childish things”, I forgot all about my star turn as an apple. Why didn’t my father call me “Princess” or “Kitten” like perfect TV Dad Robert Young?  My mother was always affectionate but found me annoyingly inquisitive. For her I became “Miss Know-it-all”  or “The Ear Flapper”. Both, I confess, are still accurate.

Demonstrating affection was not my father’s natural style. My mother never seemed bothered by that. My parents did not engage in romantic embraces in front of the children, but my mother sometimes flopped unexpectedly into my father’s lap and put her arms around him. He never pushed her away, but liked to make a show of being irritated, groaning in pretend pain, with “Tula, for God’s sake,” all of which she ignored.

Sam Levine

She might give him a slurpy-sounding kiss, if only to make my brother and I break up.  I knew this was all part of their shtick - we never doubted what they felt for one another. But I also knew, having entered puberty and felt this nagging need for something – more affection? – from my father, that it would not be appropriate to imitate my mother and fall into his lap uninvited.  

Gradually, I was exposed to more of my parents’ banter. My father often read the paper in the kitchen while Mom was cooking dinner. If something caught his eye he often read it out to her. Once he looked up from the Entertainment Section, always the section he read first. “Guess who’s back in town, Dear?” he said to my mother. “Who?” asked my mother, the permanent second banana. “Cupcakes Cassidy,” announced my father in a newsreader’s serious tone. “She’s playing at the Victory.”

“Do you want to go see her, dear?” asked my mother, sounding moderately enthusiastic, as if my father had mentioned the arrival of a theatre company or a dance troupe. “Who is Cupcakes Cassidy?”  I interrupted. Just the name was making me giggle. My father was suddenly deep in the newspaper. My mother, laughing, said, “Oh Anita, you always have to know everything. She’s a stripper.”

At the time I was flattered by my mother’s assumption that I knew what a stripper was. Now, as I review that bit of my parents’ persiflage, I feel real warmth at being included in a slightly risqué, vaudeville-style mini-performance initiated by my father. I  realize he was honouring me as grown up enough to share that comedic moment.

My parents were both very private about their deepest feelings. They operated that part of their life behind closed doors. In the open, bantering was their natural style, much of it staged for our benefit. Why did I wish for a TV dad when we had our own comedy show right here at home?

Besides, my wish to turn my father into a nine to five dad was an impossibility. My father did not go to the office. He was usually asleep when I brought my friends home after school. In symphony season, his workday consisted of driving downtown in the morning for rehearsals, coming home for lunch, napping in the afternoon, eating dinner with us, putting on white tie and tails, maneuvering his double bass into the car and driving back downtown for the concert, arriving home late at night.  

My father getting ready for work was a performance before the actual performance. The routine:  Waking from his nap, he wandered around the house and ate dinner in his billowy blue trunks and sleeveless undershirt. This behaviour worried me after I started going out with boys. It seemed to me, exercising my teenaged entitlement to exaggeration, that whenever I was expecting the arrival of a date, there stood my father in his undershorts, looking out the picture window. It made me crazy, even though most of him was hidden by the heavy living room curtains.

I went running to my mother. “Mom, Daddy’s in the window again!”  Next we heard, “Sam, you need to go and finish getting dressed.”  He grumbled his way back to their bedroom while I started to breathe freely again. Later on, I told my friends this story with genuine amusement, recounting it as yet another performance instigated by my father. 

On an evening when he was fully clothed and ready to leave for the concert and I was dressed up and ready to greet my date, I presented myself to my father. “How do I look, Daddy?”  “You look very nice, Daughter, but please take off some of that lipstick.” With a mighty sigh, I went to find a tissue and returned to the front hall mirror, blotting as gently as I could until he approved. I call this “our” shtick because it was played out multiple times. In this performance, my father gifted me with a new nickname. I was not Kitten. I was not Princess. Cutesy nicknames used by TV dads were not in my father’s lexicon. I was his Daughter, with a capital D.

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Anita Levine Dahlin has her own practice as a mediator and workplace investigator, following a lengthy career with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Journalism was her first love. She was a founding editor of York University’s student newspaper, later becoming an investigative reporter for a daily newspaper. 

Encouraged by courses with Brian, Anita is preparing a collection of (mostly true) stories about growing up in a family of on and off-stage performers. Her memoirist idol is Nancy Mitford, whose family was beyond eccentric. Anita is proud of never having spoken or written (except in this instance) the word “awesome”. She also believes that pluralizing with an apostrophe is unforgivable.  

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