My Father Who Art in Heaven
Dad was an artist whose mind was on other things, not me
I love it when memes speak to me; in this case as a little aphorism, on my Facebook feed this morning.
It went like this: ‘The firstborn daughter is always the female version of her father.’
WTF? Who makes this stuff up?
It wasn’t attributed to anyone, annoyingly, and when I went looking, the closest I could get to the source was some TikTok thing.
Anyway, I’d been thinking about writing about my father and it seemed like a good place to start.
I’m nothing like my dad. After all he had straight, blond hair (his army buddies called him Snowy) and was a mathematical genius.
I’m innumerate and was blessed with a mass of dark curls.
Oddly, just recently I’ve gone blonde, but I assure you it’s got nothing to do with emulating my dad.
Memory is a funny thing and I wonder if it’s just because I heard the story so many times that I remember Dad coming home after being separated from us while he finished the job in Africa and we had already moved to Auckland, New Zealand, to set up home some months earlier.
