Daddy, Dad, Father, Pops

I know, I know, it's a bore when a parent goes on and on about his or her special wonderful offspring, but I cannot help it.  I so rarely get to spend--what do they call it? ah, yes,--quality time with my children, some of them almost never.  Especially my oldest boy--boy?,--well a gentleman about to turn sixty in another year.  We had a hard time when he was a teenager, being the eldest and thus having to take the strong opposition as he and his siblings fought to establish their push back against demanding parents.  Now all these years later, he is a grandfather twice over, and the same gentle person who at the age of fifteen, sixteen and up until he left home at nineteen, was resolute in his opposition to me and my values, or so I read it then, and not altogether incorrectly, but the opposition was not hostile, but thoughtful and deliberate and now I see him as a principled person who inwardly decried the ambition that fueled his parents workaholic behaviors, what is more I almost burst into tears as he gently reminisced and spoke of all the wonderful things he had learned over the years from me, yes, by god from me!  I am closer to my second son who is a professional chef, having learned cooking first of all from me, and we are in weekly telephone contact over the slight shifts in intensity and accent in whatever dish I am planning to cook up.  But I see him rarely, and miss him at lot, if for no other reason than his love for me is so transparent, and like everyone else I need that.  My daughters I see more frequently, geography being what it is, and also they have no children, so they are more free, a choice I always feel they made contemplating the extraordinary prison their mother unwittingly created with her chance but relentless motherhood--four children in five years.  We all of us marveled over the government of Nova Scotia awarding my granddaughter a year of maternal leave to tend to her new baby boy, coupled with four months of full pay and I forget what follows that.  The two daughters came specifically to help the new mother, the one of them out in the kitchen helping her brother chop, cut, and stir, the other taking over the baby care when my step great-grandson had done his share and more.  These darling daughters surprised me by their intense attention to my failing powers, helping me in and out of cars, up stairs, through complicated thresholds.  How funny it is, indeed, as one reads in novels and short stories, to find how gradually and innocently familial roles reverse and the commander figure becomes the one in constant need.  Not quite yet the baby in his nappies, but, yes, moving in that direction.