Tuesday Tumble - My Dad, Embracing Responsibility

Thursday Thirteen will be also be about my dad since Friday would have been another birthday for him. Today is about perceptions, being influenced by others, seeing things differently later.

Growing up, Mom told me Dad left his job in NC as an accountant because they wanted to promote him to a manager and he didn't want the responsibility. I didn't question this, but formed an opinion that Dad was afraid of responsibility. I spent my teenage years thinking he had more or less run away to Florida.

Looking back at his life recently, other observations and memories surfaced:

• Dad hated accounting. I told him my senior year I wanted to be an accountant (thinking, but not saying, it would be a safe job away from people because I was so scared of going out into the world). He was adamant that I didn't want to be one.
  
• Dad and Mom had both loved Florida and by refusing the promotion gave them reason to finally move down there, near the aunt that she had lived with a while after her mother died.
  
• Dad was always working. When he was laid off a job that didn't involve accounting that he loved, he found another job, even though some accounting was involved. He didn't search for months for the perfect job, he made sure his family was fed. Irony was, for him, the job became the perfect job. When that establishment closed and he was already in his quite old, and still poor, he went to work at J M Fields as a janitor, riding the bus.

So, on retrospect, he may not have wanted the responsibility of that job - or it may have just been Mom's interpretation. But it was only that one responsibility in a job he may have shunned. Scrubbing toilets when most people are too old to bother working at all is not shunning responsibility, it is embracing it.

I am thankful I learned as an adult to look at more facts than just the words of one person. I may have missed something wonderful.