Sugar and Spice?

... and everything nice? Everything? As in always nice? Not the girls I know. Not that it ultimately matters.

Thing 1 battles with attitude and begrudging (even though she thinks of it as martyr-like stoic) acceptance while Thing 2 draws from her arsenal both fury and sulking withdrawal when it is Go Time. But it will probably work out in the long run.

After all, a Holyoke (Mass.) student has come to grips with having her father also act as her basketball coach. As her disciplinarian coach. As her, he-makes-me-so-mad and it-is-to-unfair coach. But is it as a loving daughter or player trying to suck up to the coach for more playing time when she writes, "[our strong bond] makes me know he did everything for all the right reasons."?

Fortunately, that epiphany came in time. Australian Minister for Sport and Youth Kate Ellis acting the hellion as a child, didn't feel her father's connection until she was losing at age 15 and saw him spend his last months focused on what would be best for the family he was leaving behind. Now her country's youngest federal minister, her life as a hellion (drugs, sneaking out, various rebellions) was turned to its present course by her father's example. "I think it's about how you honour somebody's memory," she says. "...I like to take the values that I learnt from him and put them into play in my everyday life. That's what I think he would probably ask of me."

The wisdom that did not come in time belongs to (among others) Canadian writer Maggie Marwah who fought and fought and fought her father, even up to his last breaths. And then came the learning:

But daughters like me – nursing wounds for too long – must learn the grace of forgiveness. Not because our fathers asked it of us. But because our childhood is long since over, and it’s time to grow up. ... one day we realize we like who we’ve become, and our fathers were a large part of getting us here. And occasionally, we can even glimpse the best of our fathers in ourselves.

So I stand today, before his oak coffin, to offer a humble nod of thanks. And, quietly, ask his forgiveness that I couldn’t do better.

** And every father will offer that forgiveness and ask for some of his own. **