Growing Up With a Gay Dad Should Have Been More Fun

It should have been a lot more fun to be the daughter of a gay man. We should have gone shoe shopping a lot more. We went once. It was for Easter shoes when I was about 11. I remember the shoes vividly because they were sexy shoes not little girl shoes. My dad didn’t want to get them because he thought they were too grown up for me. He was probably worried I wouldn’t be able to navigate in them. I don’t recall it being a very fun shopping excursion. Dad was always in a hurry so the shoe expedition was a bit rushed if I recall correctly.

I don’t know where I got my shoe thing from. My mother didn’t wear fun shoes and I’m pretty sure my father wore the same pair of shoes the whole time I knew him. If it wasn’t the same pair he bought the same style year after year.

My father never took my clothes shopping but he should have. I grew up in the late 70′s early 80′s and that was a great time to buy clothes. Dad hated everything I wore during those years but it could have been fun if he had a better sense of style.

Which he did not have really. He wore suits to work and changed into jeans and a sweater when he got home. He wore striped button down shirts and Levi’s. For as long as I can remember. He never mixed it up except for the Speedo he wore at the lake on the weekends. And that was a complete fashion faux pas.

Dad loved to shop but he liked things that I couldn’t stand. He loved going to estate sales. To him there was nothing better than digging through the dead’s belongings that even family members didn’t want. I ended up with a lot of them. He loved antiques (old stuff that is really uncomfortable). I hated them because they were so hard to keep dusted. If he had liked the more traditional furniture, Shaker or Quaker it would have been fine but he liked Victorian stuff. Victorian furniture is the most ornate shit I have ever seen. In order to dust it properly you have to get in all the nooks and crannies with a Q-tip. It is a day long project to do one piece of furniture. No thank you.

I took my dad with me to buy a car once. He accepted because the dealership was just down the block from the bar where he spent his afternoons. He didn’t much care for my choice in vehicles. He thought the cars or trucks I picked out were not luxurious enough. They weren’t because I couldn’t afford the kind of cars that he liked. When I did buy my first truck he was concerned that I wouldn’t look feminine in the vehicle. This from the father who bought my first car which was a used Nash Rambler. He thought it was a wonderful car because the seats folded down so you could actually sleep on it like a bed. Not the best thing to buy your 17 year old daughter. It was yellow too. God ugly car. I had it for about three weeks before the engine froze up. That’s what you get for $200. It might have helped too if he had taught me about checking the oil.

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