Taking Off The Rose-Colored Glasses: How I Lost The Child-Like Reverence of My Father

The following is adapted from Trials and Tribulations by Atiyah Nichols.

“There’s nothing in the world in a woman’s heart like her daddy’s love. And if you don’t have your daddy’s love, not only will you continue to look for it in all the wrong places, you will sacrifice yourself to get it.”

— Iyanla Vanzant

When you come on the scene as the youngest of twelve, your family has lived a lot of life before you get there. The way our family worked, though, I never felt like I had missed out. I heard all the stories, saw all the emotions on the faces of my siblings and my mom, to the point where it felt like I had gone through those earlier times right along with them.

The tale of my sister dying, for instance, was decades old by the time I was born, but it was real and present for me. I prayed to my sister Princess daily; I felt like I knew her. And I understood all of the details of what Momma had gone through when she lost her. Nineteen-year-old Hattie was the mother of three when her tiny, precious daughter one day simply stopped breathing. She went into a deep depression, stopped eating almost entirely, and shrunk down to an emaciated ninety pounds before prayer, and the needs of her two living children, brought her back.

And then there were the men of the house that came before I was born. Momma’s household had known four fathers before my own dad entered the picture. And their histories with my mom were part of the legacy I was born into. Only one father was in residence by July of 1985, though. And, with all due respect to my siblings’ dads, he was the very best of the bunch.

Marion Smith was mostly Smitty or Dee to us kids, and I thought he was Superman. You couldn’t tell me nothing about my dad when I was a little girl; I adored him without conditions.

If you’ve ever watched the show Amen from the late eighties then I can give you a vivid picture of Smitty. On Amen, Sherman Hemsley, who had been George on The Jeffersons, played a lawyer who was a deacon in his church. His character was always dapper and had this memorable walk. It was exaggerated and suave, and was 100 percent my dad’s. Seriously, when my sisters and brothers and I first saw that show we were like: “That’s my Dee! That’s his same cool strut!”

The way Dee spoke was cool, too. He had this habit of dragging out his words, making each one last. His personal style came out in his clothes, too. Dee always looked nice, stepping out in crisp khakis and button-ups when other fathers in our neighborhood were usually so casual.

As a six-year-old, seeing my dad drive up to our house was one of my favorite things.

He’d be coming to collect my brothers and me for a visit, and we would be so excited as we waited for him to get there. If I close my eyes, I can still picture everything about those moments, right down to the smell of whatever he was driving that week. Dee was a car salesman at a dealership, so he was always switching out his ride. Everyone was shinier and cleaner than the last. Everyone was fresh enough that it still had that new car smell, and the paper mats would be lying on the floor, crinkling under our feet as we climbed in.

You know what’s crazy, though? Those are my earliest clear memories of my dad.

Now you tell me: how did Dee live in our house for the first half-decade of my life, yet it’s not until age six that my real recollections of him start? I guess maybe something about the household split woke me up to making solid memories of him. Because after he and Momma broke up, I made plenty, and they aren’t fuzzy at all.

Mostly, those memories are of Dee being really sweet to me. Whenever I would see him, it was all “baby girl,” and him laughing at things that I did wrong. Clearly I was special to him, because when the boys did something wrong while we were visiting it was a different scene. Dee would get on them about whatever mistake they had made. With me, though, it was, “Oh, baby girl, you can’t do that.” He would have a smile on his face while he said it, and I always got the inkling that whatever he was trying to scold me about was actually okay with him.

Who is My Dee?

My dad got the nickname Smitty, because of his last name, Smith. He got the name Dee when my older brother couldn’t say, “daddy” as a baby. Those two nicknames followed him as Momma bore him children number two, three, and four. By the time my parents broke up, his four babies were six, eight, ten, and twelve, all still calling him Dee. My older siblings, the ones who weren’t biologically Smitty’s, used the nickname, too. But it turned out they weren’t saying it with as much fondness as I was.

See, I would later learn that there was some stuff I missed even after I was born. I might technically have been around during many of the years that Dee lived at home, but I was still too young to grasp the darker side of our household. Unlike the other family legends that my siblings, and my mom, filled me in on, they didn’t get me up-to-speed on how Dee treated the older kids. I mean, I was there, after all. How were they supposed to know that I wasn’t really forming memories of it all. I had no picture of how hard it was for them to be teenagers under his rule. Then, after the split, it was just the four of us who took visits to Dee’s house. So I rarely saw them interact. And by the time I was a teen myself, Dee had long since started to disappear from our lives.

Once I was grown, though, my brothers and sisters shared their stories of Dee during those early years. They talked about how quick Dee had been with his belt. And they told me about resenting him so much that they remember times when they silently plotted how they might come back as adults for revenge.

“Your daddy used to whip us like crazy,” my older brothers and sisters told me. “If we came home from school with a test where we got one problem wrong, he would tear us up. We promised each other that when we got older we were going to kill him.”

By the time they were painting these pictures for me, though, they better understood his intentions, even if they still disapproved of his methods.

“Tiyah, he was just trying to keep us off the streets,” my brother said. “He knew what the streets had for us. He knew the kind of people we were going to make friends with, because we didn’t have a choice. Those were the only friends on the block, half the time. So he knew he had to be scarier than the streets and those friends. He looked at it as training.”

My six-year-old impression of Dee, though, held none of that. My dad hadn’t yet started to disappoint me, so I still got to see him through a daughter’s rose-colored glasses. There was a lot I was blind to. Some of it was serious, but some of it’s pretty funny. Case in point: what I thought about the place Dee moved into after the breakup.

To read more about Atiyah’s story, Trials and Tribulations can be found on Amazon.

Atiyah Nichols is a businesswoman and devout Christian, passionate about caregiving. After becoming a CNA and medical assistant, Atiyah learned hospital administration; she started her own assisted living home, Caché James Better Living, LLC, now a million-dollar-company that has quadrupled in size. Atiyah broke generational boundaries and built her family their first home in 2019, after which she built a new community-based residential facility, Ameira Orchids Assisted Living for Seniors. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her husband and their children.