Happy Family Day Part 2 - The Parents.

Mom is my most important teacher. She taught me how to walk, how to talk, how to pee on the potty, how to read, how to write, how to play my first song on the piano, how to weed the garden, how to clean the house, how to line a cake pan with wax paper, and so on and so forth. As long as I have her I will never stop learning from her.

She spent countless hours waiting for me while I was at piano lessons. She never missed one of my competitions or recitals. I marvel at her patience as I am sure it couldn't have been that much fun for her to watch other kids play piano while she waited for me to claim my 5 minutes of fame onstage. She spent even more countless hours listening to me practice. I'm sure after a while it would get irritating for her to listen to me play the same two bars of music over and over and over again until I got it right.

Mom is my nurse. She was the one who held my hair when I had the flu and needed to throw up. That couldn't have been easy at all! She mended everything from skinned knees to a broken foot to a broken heart.

Mom gave me life and gave me spirit. Mom taught me the meaning of unconditional love. No matter how infuriating I was and no matter what I did wrong, she never turned her back on me. She believed in me and taught me to believe in myself.

My Dad was larger than life - at 6'4" tall and 225 pounds, he was a very big man. It took a lot to make him mad enough to yell at me, but when he did I did not hear it - I actually felt it reverberate in my chest. I think I lipped off to him once. That was enough for me to never do it again.

I inherited my Dad's quirky sense of humour and ability to look at things very differently than most people do. He and I would sit at the table and banter back and forth while Mom sat and shook her head. He also had this habit of stirring his coffee until the spoon was nice and hot, wipe it with a napkin, then touch my arm to see how high I would jump and how much I would complain.

Dad taught me that if you want anything in life you have to work for it. Each of us kids were given our own bicycles and I got mine around the age of 9 or 10. I had a habit of leaving it out in the rain, and not taking care of it as well as I should. It was an old school coaster bike with only one gear. I liked my bike, but when the kid next door showed up with a brand new 10 speed, I decided that I had to have one of those instead.

I asked Dad for a new bike, and he turned me down. I asked again and again and again, and received a "no" each time. After a while Dad got sick of me asking for the new bike so he said to me "I have to work for everything I want, so you have to learn that you must work for everything you want. If you want that bike, you have to do all your chores and do them well. Everything your mother asks you to do, you have to do it and without complaint. When I feel that you have done enough work, I will get the bike for you."

I did dishes, swept floors, weeded gardens, hung laundry, and all kinds of chores for what seemed like forever. Finally one Saturday morning my Dad said to me "I think you have worked hard enough and I am going to take you to Canadian Tire to get you your bike". I was in heaven. I got my reward, and was thinking of all the places my new bike would take me. As we were on the way home, Dad looked at me and said "Oh, by the way, I hope you don't think that this means you can start slacking. If I see you neglecting your chores I am going to take the front wheel off your bike and will keep it until you earn it back." He never did take the front wheel off, despite the fact that I would neglect my chores once in a while.

But the funniest part came years later when I talked to Dad about the fact that I had to earn the bike. His response was "I don't ever remember making you work for the bike." To which I replied "That's because you weren't the one stuck drying dishes every night after supper!"

As I grew older I found ways to be able to do the chores that I didn't mind doing and would try to slink my way around getting out of doing the stuff I didn't want to do. Dad knew this, and would have to find increasingly innovative ways of getting me to do things. One time the ceiling caved in at the bottom of the steps to the basement and the floor was full of a mixture of wood and fiberglass insulation. That Saturday Dad was working on fixing the ceiling and I noticed that he wasn't cleaning up the insulation. I thought to myself "Oh, he's saving that task for me. I'm going to have to find a way out of this one." So I hid in my room as long as I could. Unfortunately to get to the only bathroom in the house I had to go through the kitchen. I figured enough time had passed that the insulation would have been cleaned up and decided I should be safe to emerge from my room. Besides, my bladder was about to explode.

I came out of the bathroom and Dad was sitting drinking a coffee at the table. This is what happened next.
Dad: Hey, while you are walking by the cupboard, would you get a garbage bag out for me?
Me: Ok.
I got the garbage bag out of the cupboard.
Dad: Since you have the garbage bag in your hand, do you mind taking it downstairs for me?
Me: Ok.
At this point I was down the stairs and setting the garbage bag down. Dad opened the door.
Dad: Oh, since you are already down there, why don't you put that insulation in the garbage bag for me.

I would have been more upset about the whole situation, except it was so smooth the way he got me to clean up the insulation. I also draw upon the lessons learned in that situation and apply them at work so that I can convince people to do work for me without them hating me at the same time.

There are so many stories I could tell about my Dad. The memories of going to town with him on a Saturday morning, riding around for hours on the tractor with him, the stories he would tell, and the things he taught me. The way he would marvel at the fact that my three brothers would always gang up on me and yet somehow I would be able to hold my own time and time again. But eventually when things got too rough for me I could always go to Dad and he would protect me from the evil siblings.