Being Useful
My father taught us all (eleven kids) to work hard. This was intentional and he was proud of it. You might look at the result and call us all “Type A” personalities, like he was, or even say that we are “workaholics.” It’s true that most of us feel more comfortable in work spaces than we do in personal or relationship spaces. My father had no idea how to do any of those things, except as they were related to work.
Assign my dad a job, and he would do it. He would figure out how to do it if he’d never done it before. He believed he could figure out how to do anything. There were some problems with this philosophy, which you’d be able to see if you looked at the cement stairs he put into the “mother-in-law” apartment into his home after the kids moved out. Or his idea of doing “car maintenance” that made most car shops unwilling to take the leftovers on. But on the other hand, he did make me feel nearly fearless about throwing myself at anything and believing I could probably figure it out.
What I’m spending more and more time thinking about as a struggling empty nester mom of five is what you do to feel useful after you’ve left your religion and your kids don’t need you anymore. My dad had children a good decade older than I did, and by the time his youngest was four years old, the grandchildren started. My mom spent a lot of time babysitting the older grandchildren, but after my father retired, he had an itch to be “useful.” He wanted to “leave a legacy” of some kind. He bought some family properties, and then he threw himself at the idea of creating a new Mormon university in the middle of nowhere. When that petered out, he still had the need to be useful for another decade or so.
He proved himself useful in a variety of ways. He would help neighbors move (until he was past 80 and really shouldn’t be lifting that kind of weight). He would take on church callings with great energy. He would also give money to others in ways that he deemed acceptable—like paying them to do a job he only sort of needed to be done and they got paid even if they did a bad job, as long as he thought they were making an effort. He liked to lecture the grandkids about religion. But I think that in his older years, he felt a profound loss from his inability to be useful in any of the ways that he considered valuable to society.
There is a Mormon hymn “Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel” that I think very much exemplified my father’s idea of usefulness. It says “we all have work; let no one shirk.” My father didn’t want to be accused of shirking. I think a lot about my childhood, spent doing made-up chores, and some actual chores, where I learned to enjoy work, to take great satisfaction in finishing a job—even if it took until midnight. My sister eulogized my father in 2020 on this point, reminding us all that he made us this way, for good or ill. We complained bitterly about him at the time and for years afterward, but by God, we know how to be useful.
And now that my children are grown, I see my father’s need to feel useful in a different way. It is also connection. It is a promise that you matter in the world. When my youngest son came home for the summer (his last summer before graduating from college), I was delighted to rush out and help carry in even the heaviest boxes into the house. I had a list of things I wanted to help him with, and it made me feel excited in a way I hadn’t known I needed. My depression has already lifted a bit with this sense that I am needed, after all, that I matter to at least this one person.
My father never appreciated my fiction. The best compliment he could ever offer was, “well, it had a good lesson in it, at least.” But I think my father would appreciate my essays. He might even print them out and hand them around to his friends. I was useful, I can hear him saying. See, I was useful to my daughter. She remembers me. I mattered to her. And I can only find it strange that I am writing love letters to a father I had told myself I would never say “I love you” to again.