DADDY IN THE MIRROR                       (1,078 words)

I was mooching around the house the other day, doing this and that. Housework’s never been my forte; I tend to clean in a haphazard, catch-as-catch-can way. I’ll notice the bathtub has a ring around it, say, and start on that, but before I’ve managed to get all the way around the ring I’ll see the floor is even worse off than the bathtub. So I’ll hop out of the bathtub and go great guns on the floor for a while, but then I might vacuum up someone’s sock and while I’m trying to get that out of the vacuum cleaner, I’ll notice that the rotating brush on the vacuum cleaner is full of hair and pieces of string and broken rubber bands, so I’ll start cleaning that out. You get the picture: I hardly ever manage to finish cleaning. My sister once visited us and said, My God, is that how you clean the house? A little here, a little there, never finishing anything? No wonder it looks like this.

I prefer to think of my house-cleaning style as creative. A way to keep the boredom factor at a minimum.  But the truth is, she’s right: I never finish anything. Halfway through a degree in art, I lost steam and dropped out. Got a job working for an art publisher, then quit that. Then I got another job working in a hologram museum and I got bored with that after a while and moved on.

I leave sandwiches half eaten, sentences half uttered. I’ll read a book and get to the last chapter and never manage to finish it. I don’t know what it is with me – I’m easily distracted, I guess. Short on attention. Or maybe I just hate finishing things. Hate seeing the end of them.

So like I said, I was mooching around the house. I was vacuuming up the crud that builds up in corners, picking up kids’ socks along the way and stuffing them into my pockets, when I caught sight of myself in the full-length mirror that my daughter has insisted on putting in the hall. Jesus, I didn’t half give myself a turn: there was my father, gaping back at me, this sad, gangly, loopy-looking person half bent over with a vacant look on his face, a look of surprise. The same bad posture, the same gaunt figure, same long stringy arms with bulging veins – only feminine. And then it hit: this was me.

And I actually had to turn the vacuum cleaner off. Leaned against the wall and took a couple of deep breaths. Then I straightened up and worked up the nerve to take another look. And by God, there he was.

I turned the vacuum cleaner back on.  I hate being inactive. Even when I’m shocked or upset, I have to keep working. My mind was racing – how could this be? How could I have become this without even noticing? I managed another couple of minutes of vacuuming – sucked up a long fluffy strip of dust that ran the length of the corridor between the kids’ bedrooms – and then damned if I didn’t have to look again, just to make sure. This time I cheated. Sucked my stomach in, stood up straight. Did that yoga thing where you stick out your tongue and open your eyes wide and go GAAAH. Then I turned to the mirror and took stock.

What I saw was this:  a woman past her prime, a woman you’d only look at twice out of a kind of horrified fascination. A what-should-I-do-not-to-look-like-her? kind of woman. I smiled at myself and there he was again:  my father. Worry grooves between the eyebrows, a certain dodgy caught-in-the-act expression on his – my –face. And sad, too – that was what struck me the most. Infinitely sad.

The thing is, he and I were never close. He died when I was ten and remains in my mind a hazy figure, a botcher of odd-jobs, a teller of corny jokes, a singer of hokey country-western songs. He was, depending on who was telling the story, either half Navajo or one quarter; his father was a Jew from Krakow and there was some German blood in there too, just to keep things nice and mixed up.  He was 38 when I was born and only 48 when he died, but already one of those crackly-looking guys who look like they belong on a farm-fence chewing on a piece of grass and spewing out down-to-earth homilies on life in general. When in fact he was really just another furtive husband-and-father looking for an easier way through life, a part-time grease monkey and double-mortgager of houses.

My dad was the kind of person who’d get caught up with an idea. His own hobby shop, say, or building a tree house. Mail-order seahorses or grow-your-own mushrooms. Whatever it was, though, one thing was for sure: he might start something, but he’d never finish it. Our garage was full of junk from his half-baked ideas. A composter full of dried-up worms. Vending machines from out-of-business companies. Ceiling-high piles of old do-it-yourself upholstery magazines.

Up until now, whenever I’ve had occasion to tell anyone about my father, I always say that we had almost nothing in common. Other than the odd affectation – like him, I’m an insomniac, sing off key, like to lick peanut butter off a spoon. Up until today I’ve always thought that my starting things and never finishing them was just a temporary thing. Something that I could change about myself whenever I wanted to.

I finished vacuuming the house. I mean really finished. It went against the grain; I kept getting distracted along the way and wanting to quit, but I managed to resist the urge. I took the vacuum cleaner from the corridor through to the kitchen, from the kitchen through the lounge, and back to the corridor. I even vacuumed the toilet and the places I could reach in the kids’ rooms. And all the while I was thinking How did this happen? What’s next? Will I start looking like my mother? Or – God forbid! – will I start acting like her?  I started sweating, and let me tell you, it wasn’t from the vacuuming.

How does this happen? How do we start out with all the good intentions in the world, with high hopes and commendable dreams – and end up like our parents anyway?