Not all Dad Jokes are Created Equal
My Dad used to like to make me laugh, but it wasn’t your standard Dad joke, it was an act of resilience. It was our own brand of dark humour forged from adversity and forming a bond of unshakable love.
It’s fair to say Dad and I were joined at the knees. Oh you thought I meant ‘joined at the hip’ right? Nah.
When I was ten days old I was placed between my fathers knees in the intensive cardiac care unit. I was cared for by the nursing team as he recovered for the next few weeks after a massive heart attack. He had been muttering he wanted to see his daughter and the nursing team assumed, as he was 47, that I was an adult. When I arrived with my mother, it was apparent she had post-partum depression and the nursing team took over for a while. That’s was how we rolled in the 1970’s.
So began a father and his daughters journey of dark humour. Until he passed when I was 32, he and I would laugh at things that people would say “you shouldn’t laugh at that”.
But, you know what? It worked for us, and it was his way of teaching resilience and hope.
It still works for me, 18 years after his death; I often joke with people about my own chronic illness. It was the way we bonded and it held us together through his chronic illness and my mother’s mental health issues (plus add to that my autism which went undiagnosed through my early life).
I’ve never forgotten when he had open heart surgery in 1993. He awoke, after seven days in ICU because he developed pneumonia on top of this massive surgery. Looking up at us, my mother wringing her hands tearfully beside the bed and as for me…well…
I was waiting…I was waiting for what would come with that wry smile forming on his face…
“I’m sure that was the same saw as my circular saw they cut me open with. Made the same noise”.
Mum nearly fainted. Dad and I laughed.
Dad’s illness came from surviving his service in WWII. When he returned from service I don’t think he ever envisaged being a father at 47, but there he was, declared unable to work and “totally and permanently incapacitated” when I was a toddler. He had an amazing post-war career doing things like repairing lighthouses all around Australia and seismic line surveys through remote Australia. After the events of 1970, he decided to live the best retired life he could, regardless of what the doctors told him he could expect. He then did exactly that, a good thirty years past the medical professions expectations.
A few years later he would fight a massive aortic aneurism that doctors said he should not have survived.
Surgeon: “It was the size of a football”
Dad: “Was that an AFL football or an American Football, cause American one’s smaller and that would have been an easy one for you to throw away eh?”
*note, I can’t remember if the doctor was American, but it was likely he was. Sigh.
These are the two most extreme examples I have. But daily he would make me laugh with inappropriate commentary about our situation as a family.
People often say “oh I am so sorry” to me when they hear our story. Please don’t — it’s ableist and not a true reflection of our family or what Dad meant to me.
His chronic illness and then later disability was not something to be grieved and our shared sense of dark humour should be a demonstration of that. A demonstration of resilience and love.
He didn’t see what had happened to him as a burden, he saw it as challenge to keep living and loving as a long as he could — just like life can be for anyone. He gave me a world of his wisdom through extended conversations and time he could spend with me that other young people couldn’t get with working fathers.
As a teenager it was great source of embarrassment when my friends would find out he had named his small fishing boats; Jackie I, Jackie II and Jackie III.
Looking back, I realised, the reason he had named the boats after me came from that bond we had from the time I spent between his knees in hospital as a newborn.
Before he died, he told me why he had named them as such: “because you kept me afloat”.
It’s been 18 years this December coming since he passed and it will be my 50th birthday 2 days before that anniversary. I’m going to celebrate that birthday as he celebrated life — with a suitably inappropriate joke about not being dead yet despite the worlds best efforts to take me out (there’s been a few close calls).
I hope I didn’t make you cry with this story. If you did, I hope you also laughed at his take on life threatening things. Because he and I sure did.
Finally, disabled parents are parents. Don’t judge and don’t assume their value or what they can or can’t do for their children.