‘Don’t tell your mother:’ A life of love and adventures with my Dad

By TAYLOR BROWN
Senior Staff Writer
tbrown@yourmvi.com

If my mother were still alive, she would probably ask why I thought publishing this column was a good idea.

Then she would likely not speak to me for a week because I never wrote one about her.

My dad and I spent years convinced we were getting away with things.

The following evidence suggests otherwise.

To be fair, my dad and I were never criminal masterminds. Most of our schemes were doomed from the start. We simply had one advantage: we thought we were much smarter than we actually were.

My dad was the alleged mastermind, I was the willing accomplice and my mom was the investigator who somehow always solved the case.

The thing about my dad is that he has always been charming enough to think he could get away with almost anything. That confidence has been proven to produce mixed results.

At one point, my dad was a hairdresser, which probably explains why I trusted him as a middle schooler with entirely too much hair, to give me a perm.

He called me “Big Wig.” Because my hair for the first part of my life was bigger than the rest of me.

One day after school, with complete confidence, he rolled perm rods into my hair and assured me everything would be fine. He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right either. I remember wanting curlier hair, and as I write this my argument remains that he should have said no to me, for once. Long story short, he didn’t and when my mom came home from work that day she took one look at what was happening and had a meltdown. When the rods came out, I cried. When she saw them sitting perfectly rolled on my head, she cried. And my dad smiled and walked out of the room until it was time to take them out as if he had been innocent the entire time.

Like many adventures for the two of us, the plan always seemed perfectly reasonable right up until the moment it wasn’t.

And somehow, that’s probably the best way to describe my childhood.

When I was young, my dad got hurt working at the mill in Butler and after several back surgeries, became a stay-at-home dad. While most dads headed off to work every morning, mine was packing lunches, pulling my hair into ponytails and picking me up from preschool before nap time because, according to him, I didn’t need one if I did not want one. This might be the one thing we still agree about. My mom would tell you we were both wrong.

Thinking back to my perfectly clean Barbie bedroom, I know how lucky I was.

Long before people talked about stay-at-home dads, mine was one and I don’t think he ever thought he would be. But I remember laying on a mat while everyone around me fell asleep and the lights shut off, and I knew within a few minutes there would be a knock at the door and that was my cue to run to the station wagon. I hated nap time and always loved him for that.

My dad didn’t just make my lunches or drive the getaway car.

He made homes. For me, and for my mom.

No matter where we lived, he somehow convinced us we belonged there. We moved around a lot when I was growing up. Some of the houses were old. Some were strange. A few of them were haunted, but no matter where I got off of the bus, when I walked through the door pictures hung on the walls and furniture found its place. Holidays were special, no matter the address.

With every picture, junk in every drawer, my room always just the way I wanted it, my dad — despite struggles I now understand my parents were facing — made sure that wherever we ended up, as long as we were together, that was all that mattered.

Some of my favorite memories begin with a sentence that should have served as a warning.

“Don’t tell your mother.” That phrase became the unofficial motto of my childhood. My mom, of course, usually found out anyway. By my senior year of high school, I had grown tired of cheerleading. I actually hated it. And one day, I came home crying and told my dad I didn’t want to go back. Maybe he should have told me to stick it out, but instead he told me I never had to pick up a pair of pom poms again if I didn’t want to with a familiar instruction: “Just don’t tell your mother.”

For months, everything worked perfectly. Or at least we thought it did.

Until my mom took the weekend off to bring me flowers during senior night and was told, politely, “We haven’t seen Taylor in months.”

Dad and I were caught and neither of us had a convincing explanation. In our defense, we never claimed to be good at this.

Then there was the driving lesson.

My best friend Jillian lived in Melcroft at the time and one snowy day after convincing my dad we had to have a sleepover in the middle of winter, decided I should spend some time behind the wheel. At some point on County Line Road, I took a turn way too fast. The car spun. I panicked. I cried. My dad was a bit pale, but after making sure we were both okay, he delivered what had become one of his signature lines.

“Never, ever tell your mother.”

Now, all of these years later, I realize those stories weren’t about getting away with things. They were about trust. They were about a man who believed I could do things I wasn’t always sure I could do myself. Sometimes he was right and sometimes he was very, very wrong. But he always believed in me.

My dad grew up in Florida, and I inherited his love of the water. I learned to swim before I could walk, and spent weeks every summer in Lauderdale- bythe- Sea. At the Sea Foam my mom would bake in the sun while my dad brought us fruit, and I spent hours in a pool next to the ocean without much concern as I threw in toys and dove down to pick them up from the bottom of the pool. I called any deep end, the “deep-deep up.”

Once, I can’t remember how old I was, we drifted past the pier and scared my mom half to death.

My dad never let me see he was scared. As an example, most of my life I thought my dad loved roller coasters. Despite probably not being allowed to ride them because of his back, we rode every coaster at every park we ever went to.

I was probably 25 when I learned he had lied and was always as terrified as I was.

The first year Top Thrill Dragster opened at Cedar Point, I tried to get out of line three different times.

As we walked off, my mom was still crying but we were laughing and my dad gave me a high five because we’d just ridden the tallest roller coaster in the world. I bragged about that to my friends for years.

It’s been decades since, and I know now that he was scared, too, but he just did the thing anyway.

That may be one of the most important lessons my dad has ever taught me.

My dad has reinvented himself more times than most people. Mill worker. Hairdresser.

Stay-at-home dad. Woodworker. Artist.

After he broke his back, he carved himself a wooden cane because he couldn’t be that guy walking around with a regular cane. Most people would have stopped there, but he isn’t most people. He’s my dad.

Before long, people were asking where he bought it, then they wanted one. Soon he was selling them at the Comet Drive-In flea market.

What started as a cane became carvings, art shows and a chance to combine two things my dad loved: woodworking and history.

I inherited that from him, too.

I like to think I inherited his charm, but along with that came stubbornness and the ability to professionally tell white lies.

Like my dad, I can talk to absolutely anyone, even in inappropriate situations, and unfortunately, I have a tendency to say exactly the wrong thing when I am hurt.

Being the only child of an only child creates a unique relationship.

There are no siblings to absorb the disagreements.

For most of my life, my dad used to brag that we had only ever had one real argument. I wish that were still true, but I think we tend to disagree on what qualifies as an argument.

More recently, sometimes those disagreements lasted longer than they should have.

My dad has a whistle he makes when he’s mad. Not with his lips. Neither of us can actually whistle.

He sucks his teeth and somehow creates a sound that I immediately recognize. I remember hearing it when he fought with my mother. Most recently, I heard it when I took away his car keys. Some sounds never stop making you feel like a child.

Then there was Mom’s cancer.

When she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2021, I think both of us — me and Dad — lived somewhere between hope and denial. For four months, we existed in a world where tomorrow still felt possible until one day it wasn’t.

The day my mother died, my father called me early in the morning and I knew what he was going to say before I answered. I showed up to the house and was afraid to walk into the living room. As Stevie Nicks played on the radio, I walked into the living room and laid over my mother and cried. I’m not sure where he was, or what he was doing in that moment.

For a little while, we weren’t father and daughter, just two people who loved the same person.

When the funeral home pulled into the driveway, we were sitting outside under a tree and it was raining. I don’t think either of us said much.

As they carried my mom from the house, my dad told me to turn around. He didn’t want that to be my last memory of her and nearly five years later, it isn’t. That was one of the greatest acts of kindness he has ever given me, and I’m not sure he realizes it.

In that moment, the man who packed my lunches and made sure my socks weren’t wrinkled, became a widower and I became a daughter without a mother.

Somehow we kept moving forward, one day at a time.

These days, my dad is facing health challenges of his own. There have been hospital stays, falls, breathing problems, conversations neither of us wanted to have. At one point, hospice entered the discussion. We even tried it. Then he ended up on a ventilator and I sat in the parking lot at Jefferson Hospital so afraid I would never talk to him again. He woke up and wrote notes on a piece of paper, and for months, it felt like every conversation centered around uncertainty, with a dark cloud hanging overhead and a word nobody ever wants to say out loud: Cancer.

That diagnosis came in January, and it hasn’t been easy since. That’s a different column for a different day, but recently doctors gave us something we hadn’t heard in a very long time: a plan and direction to move forward and how to do that together.

No matter what is happening, after all of this time, almost every phone call begins the same way.

“Hey Kiddo!” It doesn’t matter whether he’s sitting at home or in a hospital room. I’m still Kiddo. And, whenever I hear that, for a second, I’m 5 years old again and for a few seconds, he’s still just Dad.

He still doesn’t do Facebook. Or, as he calls it, “Faceplant.” Yet somehow he discovered emojis. Most of his texts contain at least one and almost all of them end the same way.

“Yo.” Every card he ever signed addressed me the same way, too.

“Tay2U.” I never questioned it and I still don’t get it. It is just one of those things that came with being Bill Brown’s daughter.

The older I get, the more I realize the stories we tell matter because the people in them do. My dad and I aren’t perfect. We’ve argued, gone weeks without talking but somehow, we’ve always found our way back to each other. I have learned the hard way, that’s what family is.

The decision to keep showing up.

The decision to keep coming back.

And, maybe, that’s why I’ve struggled to write this.

I thought I was writing a Father’s Day piece. Something funny. Something nostalgic. A collection of stories about a man who packed my lunches, let me skip nap time, taught me to ride roller coasters and spent years convincing my mother we weren’t up to anything.

Somewhere along the way, it became something else.

That’s what happens when you realize there are things you want someone to know while they’re still here to read them.

I hope you know. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Tay2U.

Senior reporter Taylor Brown has been with the Mon Valley Independent since its opening in 2016.