In a few weeks, Veterans Day will mark the second anniversary of my father’s death.  I become admittedly more emotional as more days like this-birthdays and holidays and anniversaries- come and go.   However, as I now reflect on his life and the influence my parents have had on the person who I am today, I find that I’m able to laugh and smile a little bit more each and every day since he left this Earth.

Now that I’m the parent of a preschooler, I realize that my husband and I are constructing our parenting style largely based on that of our own parents,  and based on our life experiences.  When I think of what an amazing job my mother and father did with raising us as responsible, caring, and hardworking individuals, I am humbled at the task ahead.  What has stood the test of time as the seminal event that characterized how my father and mother parented was a Christmas in the early 1980s.

My parents were hardworking people – my mom was a first grade teacher, and my dad was a human resources manager for the county government.  They were born and raised in a time of great distress for blacks in this country, when a poem that began ‘Southern trees bear strange fruit’ was relevant.  Jim Crow was a huge part of their every day life, even up until my older sister was born.  They could give firsthand accounts of developments in the Civil Rights movement, with my dad marching with Rev. King when he came to Memphis on behalf of unjust treatment of sanitation workers; they felt the impact of his assassination in their very own city.  With this background and experience with social injustice, it is no surprise that they recognized the importance of education, voting, volunteerism, and general civic involvement.  However, they also possessed the desire to understand different cultures and to foster that understanding in us.

So it was in this spirit that my father volunteered our family for an exchange program of sorts between the county government and some powers-that-be connected to South Africa.  And it came to be that during a holiday season circa 1984, we had a woman from Durban, South Africa, Gugu, come and stay with us.  We were so very mesmerized by everything she said or did.  She was equally as fascinated with us and our practices. For several days, she broke bread, went shopping, and regaled us with stories of life in South Africa.  In one case, she noted that my father always liked to sit in the recliner in our den; one day, my mother sat down in that same chair, and Gugu nearly fainted from upset!  She screamed at my mother, “Margaret, Margaret you cannot sit in that chair!!!!  That is your husband’s chair; you must get out.”  Needless to say, Gugu learned that, although my dad was the head of the household, that didn’t equate to the recliner only being reserved for his back-end!  My sister, mother, and I all learned that the liberties that we possess in this country as women were very different from those of our African sisters; Gugu’s distress at what she took to mean disrespect towards my father in occupying ‘his’ seat gave us a peek into the world that she would return to when this little experiment ended.   Stories like those abounded as we learned about the big differences in our cultures.  Christmas was so much richer that year because we shared it with our new friend from halfway across the world.  And I was 9 years old that year, so I had a full Christmas list of everything that I wanted, including the dolls that I had most begged for throughout the year.  This year was no exception, and I was thrilled because I had longed for a doll who could be fed with a bottle of water and she could use the potty; I mean…she came with her own pink, heart-shaped potty!  How cool was that?

When the holidays were coming to an end, Gugu packed up and got ready to leave.  I will never quite forget her departure, because my scarcely-crying mother shed actual tears, and the two of them seemed devastated that their new sisterhood was going to be broken.  This was long before low-cost international phone rates, the internet, and social media, so goodbye was truly going to be goodbye for these new sister-friends who had bonded in just a few short days, despite the major differences in cultural backgrounds.  As she prepared to leave, Gugu gifted my mother with handmade jewelry from South Africa; my mother put it in a sacred place in her dresser, and it was to be handled by nobody but her.  My parents gave her some items to take back and share with others about her experience with her American family.

And then…it happened.  While putting me to bed the night before Gugu’s departure, my parents talked to me and explained that Gugu was going home to her husband and little daughter, who was around my age.  They explained to me that Gugu’s family lived far away in Africa, where her little girl lived very differently than I did.  They tried to explain the basic concept of apartheid and oppression to me, and I think I got a rudimentary understanding and thought it all sounded very sad.  So then they said that they thought it would be a great and compassionate idea for me to gift one of my dolls to Gugu to take back for her little girl; after all, her daughter had never ever had a doll who was black and looked like she did.  I can’t remember exactly what I felt at that moment, but I do remember that suddenly, the story about Gugu’s little girl and how they lived in Africa didn’t sound that sad.  However, I knew that my parents wouldn’t suggest something like this if they weren’t going to make me do it, so I acquiesced, saying that they could give her the doll that I loved so much two years ago, who had grown out of favor since I had my new heart-shaped potty doll.  But. No.  That simply wouldn’t do, they said.  I needed to give away my lovely new doll, because they were not sending Gugu all the way back to South Africa with some old, raggedy doll I didn’t want anymore.  They talked to me about compassion, sacrifice, selflessness and how sometimes you have to let something that you really want go and give to others to be the best person you can be.  So they told me to sleep on it, but pretty much made it clear that I would be giving away my new, shiny drink and potty doll in the morning.  And that is exactly what happened the next morning; as my mother hugged and hugged and cried and cried with Gugu, I was devastated because I was losing the one doll I had coveted all year-long!

That Christmas remains one of the richest experiences of my life.  Years later, after apartheid had ended in South Africa, my mother received a phone call from Gugu.  My mother was getting ready for work, so they didn’t get to talk for long, but my mom learned that Gugu was divorced and getting to do many things to fulfill her dreams, and she sounded so very happy!  I have tried to find Gugu through internet searches and social media, but to no avail.  How I wish I could find out how her little girl is doing (and what she thought of that doll!) Little did she know that she played a critical role in the lessons of virtue that my parents instilled in me at a young age.

Of course now that I am an adult and a parent, I’m embarrassed that I whined so over a simple doll.  What I love to remember most is how skilled my mother and father were at parenting a young girl.  I really was raised by remarkable people, and I value them more since I can now use their nurturing and teaching skills as a yardstick to measure my own with my son.  So this year as the holiday season approaches, I will undoubtedly have moments of overwhelming sadness over missing my father; but I will also be grateful for the blessing of memories of that Christmas when they gave me the gift of thinking beyond myself.