My father and I always had a very intense relationship. As a small kid, I adored him, I much preferred him to my mother. He was good with us little girls. He would make lots of time for us, play with us, take us out to different places, to our friends, or shopping. At home, he would make us lemon custard, tell us stories and tales, show us many old gadgets he kept in his “surprise box”.
I might have been seven or eight years old, when he taught me the first really important thing:
1️⃣ unless they come from someone who’s very important to you, other people’s opinions about you don’t matter.
That was a big thing for the sensitive kid that I was! It helped me a lot throughout my early years in school.
The problems started a little bit later. As we got to teenage, he suddenly didn’t know how to deal with us anymore. He never really respected women – although he certainly loved them, in a rather macho way – and he would have been a hundred times happier raising boys. So he simply ignored our femininity, and tried to suppress it and shape us into boys. My relationship with him became tempestuous, with much fighting and slamming of doors.
Since he was indeed very important to me, the things he thought and said about me as I was growing up, had the power to destroy me completely.
For 14 year-old me, the old baby love I had for him started turning into painful disappointment and intense frustration. And I had to gradually take myself to the point where I decided that he was no longer important enough, to give his opinions power over me. That was a tough thing to understand and to accept.
At some stage in my later teens, he taught me the second really important thing:
2️⃣ never discuss with idiots because it’s a total waste of time.
That came in divine timing. Thanks Papà! It took me a few more years to bring this skill to absolute mastery, but I eventually learned to replace any discussion with him – sorry Papà – with a Yes and a smile, which made both our lives a lot more enjoyable.
And the third great thing from him came when I was learning to drive. He would sometimes take me out for practice drives – in my mother’s car haha! – and teach me with much screaming and swearing on his side, and much sweating and crying on mine.
3️⃣ slow down into a curve and then accelerate out of it
I’m sure I owe it to him also, if I became a good driver. But this piece of advice holds true beyond the tarmac. I apply it to learning curves as well, to relationships, to projects, and it has served me very well. I’m by nature very enthusiastic and I tend to “start in fourth gear” as we say in Italian, which means all in without thinking, and too fast. But I got in the habit of slowing down into things, of easing my way in until I feel a safe grip under my tyres, and only then, accelerate out of that phase and spin into the next.
Apart from these big things, my father also taught me how to make his famous lemon custard, how to play the treble recorder, how to power a lightbulb from a battery using 2 cables, how to season olives, I must be forgetting a few more things…
Thanks again, Papà! ❤️ Our souls always loved each other, it was just our gremlin minds, that weren’t really compatible.
