One lesson your dad taught you???

[frugalfoster]

How to cut up a whole chicken... one of the best frugal tips ever.... gosh i loved that guy! He's been gone 18 years now, but the memory of that day lives on!

[Missourimom]

My "father" taught me to marry a man who was exactly the opposite of him.

[Dutchie]

I too have too many lessons he taught me - good and bad - to pick just one.

However this is I think the most important one and I have been learning it just recently.

My father has always been a bit of a hard nut and it seemed that his motto was 'don't show your emotions - it doesn't help anybody'.

His reaction when I went back to Scotland for the funeral of my best friend 12 years ago was that I was wasting my money since she wouldn't know I was there so what's the point. I was doing this for myself and not for her.
This is just the kind of thing he comes out with.

Anytime we talked about extended family or even his sisters and their kids, he talked about them as if they were a waste of his time even though we all lived in the same small town.

This is the kind of father I grew up with
BUT
I have been learning about another side of him I couldn't even have imagined was there.

My father has a soft spot but just doesn't want to advertise it. He won't talk about it with me or anyone else.

When talking with a cousin of mine who I hadn't spoken to for almost 30 years, we got to talking about our mutual parents.

As kids or around 18 we all moved away and only came back to the small town we grew up in occasionally. The parents all stayed in the small town.
My cousin's father had passed away about 30 years ago.
I mentioned that I had really loved his father but that I thought that my own father was a bit hard.

Then I got the surprise of my life. My cousin told me that he wouldn't never hear a wrong word about my father because after he and I had moved away (about the same time), his father had become sick and my father called my cousin's father every day and visited him twice a week up till the day he died. My father was working 12 hour days/7 days per week at that time.

My father is now doing the same thing with his only living relative of his generation even though my father is 85 and not in the best of health (his relative is 86 and in worse health).

I confronted my dad with this info and he said it's not a big deal, it's family, it's what you do.

It has somewhat changed my perception of my dad.