©Perkerson Park Press
Roy Hill had three daughters, no sons. Everyone said that the girls were adorable, and Roy loved each of them, of course. It was just that raising girls was different than raising boys, and Roy wasn’t quite sure just how to go about it.
When you raise a boy, Roy figured, you know what your objectives are from the start. You want to raise a boy up to be a man who knows the value of work and how to hold onto a good job, knows how to do things that make a difference in the world like building things and repairing things that get broken.
A father wants to produce a man whom people will respect, a sober church-going man whose wife is modest and quiet, and who keeps the house and children clean and presentable. That’s what Roy figured, but none of that applied to girls.
Raising a girl should be a lot simpler, Roy estimated. For starters, girls don’t need to know so much, there’s no need for them to know how to build or repair things. Men attend to jobs like that. Women need to know simpler, basic things—things like how to keep an orderly house, tend to children and be a good steward of the household funds her husband provides.
Actually, Roy thought, attitude is just about the most important thing for girls to learn. A girl needs to learn her place in life and go about the business of being a wife and mother with a cheerful and optimistic attitude. Nothing can replace a good attitude.
Oh, and of course, there is religious training. Roy took comfort in the thought that proper religious training would provide each of his girls with a clear understanding of her role and responsibilities in life, both before and after marriage.
Who better to teach his daughters the skills required of a housewife than his own wife, Julia? Who better to provide his daughters with religious training than the church where he, himself, served as an elder? With all the bases covered, it seemed to Roy that there was very little for him to do.
Nobody thought Roy was a bad guy. Quite the contrary. Most everyone who knew Roy and his family regarded him as a solid family man, and the people at church looked up to him as a model husband and father. From the outside looking in, the Hill family was a happy All-American family through and through. Those on the inside saw things from a different perspective.
Carla Hill, the oldest of the three girls, was bright, inquisitive and talented. She was full of life, and potential wiggled around inside her like raccoons tussling in a burlap sack. She wanted to know things, learn things and do things. She wanted to be something special!
Clearly, Carla knew her curiosity was wrong. She’d certainly been told often enough. And, she knew that most of life’s learning and doing was reserved for boys. She was something special—a girl, she was repeatedly told. In Carla’s mind, though, “special” never seemed to add up to “as good as.”
After she was grown, Carla’s life was nothing like she had planned. Her life was nothing like Roy had envisioned for her. Carla’s life was at once random and wonderful, conservative and spontaneous, wearing the many faces occasioned by a complex life. It was triumphant and unexpectedly sad, and bound together with an unimagined and abiding love who led her far away from the everyday, the safe and the commonplace. In her mind and in her life, Carla lived.
The years went by faster than either father or daughter noticed, and before either was ready Roy was old. His mind and memories were fading, and finally Roy no longer recognized his oldest daughter. From time to time Carla would visit him at the nursing home where Alzheimer’s required him to live, but there was little left of her father there to see.
Carla wondered if her dad had been proud of her. She wondered if he’d noticed what she’d done in her life, not nearly as much as she’d wanted, but far more than most. She wanted him to see her for what she was, and she wanted him to care.
Last fall Carla attended Roy’s funeral in the small town where she grew up, at a sanctuary near the church where Roy helped guide a congregation. As she stood beside the casket and took one last earthly look at her father, she imagined him now in heaven with the angels, feminine angels with wonderful and unimaginable powers. She imagined herself like them one day, and all she would learn and all she would do then.
Roy loved his daughters, and Carla loved him.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It may be hard to believe but there are still a lot of parents who have these kinds of ideas. I have some evangelical friends who still think that a woman’s role in life should never be more than serving her husband and raising his children. Notice I said “his” children. In their view everything belongs to the man.
Don’t you think that things have gone too far in the opposite direction now? Too many young women think that being a wife and mother are jobs that are beneath them. I want my daughters to learn things and do things too, but not at the expense of all the joys of being a wife and mother. Nothing is more fulfilling than a wonderful marriage and raising children.