Caroline O'Donoghue: Seven things I've learned about father-daughter relationships

"You are very close when you are very small, when your Dad is willing to be a horse and let you ride on his back, but it gets complicated as you get older."

My Dad’s birthday is this week and — like pretty much every other adult in the world with living parents — I won’t be seeing him. He’s turning 70, writes Caroline O'Donoghue.

The plan had been to get the whole family together in Killarney for a boozy weekend in a fancy hotel. Now the plan is to get dressed up and drink champagne over Zoom.

It’s fine. It will have to be fine, because we have no other choices.

But with all the disappointing cancellations that are occurring because of corona, this one breaks my heart the most.

We have never, as a family, given my Dad a really good birthday. Sixty was a washout; the recession made us all too broke to do a thing. Fifty we were too young to do anything of note.

He was 40 the year I was born, the “whoops” baby that, he maintains, was “the nicest surprise of all”.

1. Father-daughter relationships tend to have a boomerang quality to them.

You are very close when you are very small, when your Dad is willing to be a horse and let you ride on his back, but it gets complicated as you get older.

I grew up in what many people would describe as a “traditional” household: Where Mum stays home, Dad comes home at 6.30, and you go to bed at around 9pm.

That doesn’t leave a lot of time for your knackered Dad to get to know whether you’re into Polly Pockets or not this week.

As you get older, you begin to be offended and exhausted by their shots in the dark about what you might enjoy.

They ask vaguely about “dolls”, but don’t understand that you’re a Barbie doll girl, not a baby doll girl.

They don’t understand that there are distinctions within Barbie: That you love scuba Barbie, with the wetsuit legs that disappear in water, and not just any old princess Barbie that does nothing.

Then, suddenly, you’re a teenager, wearing a three-inch wide strip of frayed denim as a top.

He tries to tell you, worriedly, about what young men are like, because he remembers being a young man, and the memory of his youth and the fact of yours is disturbing and terrible to you both.

2. But then, if you’re lucky, you boomerang. You come back to him.

Strangely, I started feeling closer with my father once I left Cork for London back in 2011; a journey he had made, also as the youngest child, when he was the same age.

I had no connections in London, except for an old colleague who was allowing me to sleep on his floor, but for some reason this was acceptable because it was placed within a grand family tradition of leaving in pursuit of a vague bohemian existence.

I had been hearing stories about how my dad slept in curtains as a 21-year-old; now I would sleep in curtains, too.

3. The day I left for London, my father tied a deflated red balloon onto my suitcase so I would know which one was mine at the other end.

When he hugged me, he told me about homesickness.

In all the emigration stories he had told me in the past, I had never once heard him talk about it.

“It will feel like a physical pain,” he said. “And it will pass.”

4. Six months later, I found myself working on the set of a low-budget film that had not yet cast the prestigious three-line role of “building site manager”.

“My dad’s an actor,” I said.

“He was on the West End, and he played a Nazi in The Sound of Music.”

London's West End

5. There are three things I have inherited from my father: My height, my bad feet, and my ability to bullshit people.

My dad was on the West End — as a prop-puller.

He was a Nazi in The Sound of Music — but in an Everyman Theatre production, not the film.

They gave him the part, flew him over to London and we both engaged in the con of making all of my coworkers think he was an established Irish thespian.

After a day of him giving vague, lofty answers about “the stage” we walked back into the only B&B the production budget could afford — a queen-sized bed over a dingy pub in Stratford.

As soon as we sat on the tiny bed, we started screaming with laughter. Nothing was ever as funny.

6. This started a pattern over the years of Dad sporadically coming to London for business.

These visits, free of the family unit and the roles they prescribe everyone, always had a giddy, silly vibe.

One visit, however, I was slightly more downbeat than the others.

“How did you know that you wanted to marry Mum?” I asked, over steak.

“I knew when I stopped asking questions like that,” he replied. I wanted to cry.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

My relationship of three years was hitting the skids, and I knew it. It was the first time I admitted it to anyone out loud.

7. The relationship with my dad is not the confessional, tell-all, three-phone-calls-a-week I have with my Mum.

It’s more cumulative; built out of small moments, long lunches, and low-level amusement with one another.

And that, I maintain, is the nicest surprise of all.