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Father's Day and the dad who never let you pay him back
My dad has a move. You’ve probably seen some version of it. The server’s walking toward the table with the check, and before it even touches the tablecloth, his hand is already out. He doesn’t look at the total or at anyone else at the table. He just slides his card into the little folder and hands it back in one motion, like a magician palming a coin.
I’m a grown adult with a mortgage and a bad knee, and I have never once beaten him to a check.
For a long time this drove me a little crazy. When I was in my twenties and broke, it was a relief. He’d slip me a few hundred for a security deposit and refuse to talk about it again. Once he spent a whole Saturday fixing my car and wouldn’t even let me pay for the parts. I’d say “Dad, I’ll pay you back,” and he’d wave his hand like he was shooing a fly. Then I got older and more stable, and I wanted to pay him back, actually pay him back, and he still wouldn’t let me.
I tried sneaking a check into his coat pocket one Thanksgiving. He found it in the car on the way home and called me from the highway just to say, “Nice try.” Two days later I found it in my mailbox, torn neatly in half.
There’s something strange about being on the receiving end of that much generosity. You’re grateful, obviously. But there’s also a low hum of imbalance underneath it, like you’re a kid at the grown-ups’ table forever. I think a lot of us with dads like this carry around a sort of invisible ledger, a running total of everything they’ve done that we’ll never be allowed to repay.
What I figured out, eventually
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize my dad wasn’t refusing to be paid back. He was refusing to be paid back in money. Those are different things.
For his generation, or at least for him, covering the check was how he said things he wasn’t going to say out loud. “I’m proud of you,” mostly. Or maybe “I still get to take care of you a little.” If I grab the bill, I’m not just evening out the money. I’m taking that away from him.
Once I understood that, I stopped fighting over the check and started looking for other ways to give back. Not as payment, exactly. More like holding up my end of the conversation.
So now I show up. I drive him to his doctor’s appointments, partly because he hates parking at the hospital and partly because I like the forty minutes in the car with him. Last spring I spent a weekend helping him rebuild the fence in the backyard, and at the end he cracked two beers and said, “You know, I could’ve paid somebody for this.” I said, “I know. That’s sort of the point.”
He didn’t say anything back. He just clinked his bottle against mine.
Accepting help is a skill too
I’ve also had to work on just letting him. Saying thank you and meaning it, without immediately launching into “you didn’t have to” or “let me get the next one.” A friend of mine, Wes, pointed out once that when I argue with my dad over the check, it kind of ruins the moment for both of us. He was right, annoyingly. Dad’s having a nice time, and I’m making it about my own discomfort.
Accepting generosity gracefully is its own kind of repayment, I think. It tells the person their gift landed where they meant it to.
That doesn’t mean I’ve given up completely. I still try now and then, mostly for sport. Last month I called the restaurant ahead of time and set it up so the bill would already be paid when we sat down. When the server came over and said “it’s all taken care of,” my dad turned and looked at me with genuine betrayal.
Then he leaned back with his arms folded and said, “Fine. But I’m getting dessert.”
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.