My father has always wanted me to swim—literally and figuratively—in a straight line. He’d tell me that while driving the boat beside me as I swam across the lake. No matter how busy he was or how badly he wanted to play golf, he would find time to drive beside me for as long as it took me to get from shore to shore. Every time I thought I had found an unusual but “better” way to do things, he would literally ask, “Why can’t you just do it the ‘normal’ way and make it easy on yourself?”
The problem is, being “normal” has never felt easy for me. From the moment in second grade, when I tried to start a “Save the Whales” campaign on the playground in my conservative, right-leaning small town, I have been trying to swim against the current. Some of my against-the-current swims have made life easier; others have made life unnecessarily hard. All of my swims have made me who I am today, and I am pretty grateful for that. While I don’t think I have ever been described as “normal,” I have often been described as exceptional. Having a father who always wanted me to be “normal” was, and still is, an important ingredient in my path to success. When my father second-guesses me or doesn’t quite “get” me, I am fueled by the motivation to prove him wrong. I have occasionally failed and learned that sometimes my father does know best, and I have occasionally succeeded and used that motivation to achieve seemingly impossible things.
Today, on Father’s Day, I want to remind my father that another thing people often tell me is that I ask GREAT questions. Asking questions is my superpower, and I inherited that from him. That superpower, combined with the love of a father who sometimes second-guesses me, is exactly why I had the courage and wit, as a 22-year-old nobody, to stand up in a room of 300 somebodies and ask a man I wanted to hire me a REALLY good question. That moment led to my first future-altering opportunity. The hundreds of similarly good questions I’ve asked have paved a path of opportunity beyond my wildest dreams.
After four decades on this planet, I have learned that my father does, in fact, occasionally know best—and occasionally knows me even better than I know myself. Both my dad and I also know that I have a habit of making life harder than it needs to be and that it can hold me back from being the exceptional woman I can be. The next time my dad asks me, “Why can’t you just do it the ‘normal’ way and make it easy on yourself?” I am going to ask myself whether I am making my life unnecessarily hard. I am also going to remind my father that I have never been “normal,” but I have often been exceptional — and then ask him which way he thinks I should swim.
My mom, who is also a woman who has never been described as “normal” but is often described as exceptional, has a school of ceramic fish swimming on a wall in her living room. One of these fish is swimming up and to the left, in a slightly different pattern from the rest. She calls that her “Elizabeth fish.” This beautiful articulation of how she “gets” me is perhaps the most meaningful of her many, many exceptional gifts.
When I was telling a friend about this gift, I described myself as someone who swims upstream. He astutely pointed out that the fish on my mother’s wall is not swimming upstream; it is swimming to the side, which I now realize is an important distinction. I now want that wall to remind me of this:
I don’t have to swim directly against the current to be exceptional. I have done that enough times for me to now be strong enough and smart enough to swim slightly to the side and seize opportunities that others can’t see. I can also take risks that others cannot because, even on my worst days, I am strong enough to swim to shore.
The next time my blood boils when my father doubts me or sighs because I am, yet again, being “abnormal,” I am going to remember that what he is really saying is that he loves me and wants my life to be easy. I am also going to remember that he is the reason I can swim directly against the current when I need to, and swim sideways or to shore when I don’t. Because my father has achieved tremendous success, I never really have to swim out of line, but I am grateful that I sometimes choose to do so. I am also grateful that my father has turned a failing small-town business into a success that provided our family with competitive advantages we could never have imagined. Because of the cushion he’s worked tirelessly to build for our family, I can experiment with swimming sideways, frontways, and all kinds of ways and know that, even in the unlikely event that I can’t swim to shore, my dad will be there, driving the boat beside me and ready to throw me a life preserver.
Dad, THANK YOU for thinking I’m “abnormal,” teaching me to swim to shore, and pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into building my life preserver.
Happy Father’s Day.
