By Suzy Meyer
Journal Editor

Two of my favorite memories are of dancing: as a little girl, with my feet on top of my father’s as he carefully waltzed me around the living room, and 30 years later, when my husband and I slid our feet gingerly across another living room, the two children sitting on our shoulders dancing cheek to cheek as he and I did our best to re-main up-right.

I don’t dance very much any more. My feet are too big to inflict upon my father. My husband and I, stretched between ca-reers and parenting, prefer to spend our snippets of leisure time with our feet propped up. Still, when I think of fatherhood, that’s the picture I imagine: a man and a child, learning together how to negotiate this business of being a family.

Sometimes the dance is less than graceful. In fact, now that our children are teenagers, it sometimes looks suspiciously like they’re trying to stomp on his toes. The tiny son that used to sleep on his father’s chest is now taller than I am, with some ideas of his own about how the world works. His sister has learned how her own ways of getting her father to comply with her wishes.

And sometimes they look like dervishes, whirling between school, sports, work, church, music, home and fast-food restaurants. Life was much simpler when all that was required to keep them in one place was to prop them in a sitting position on the floor. After all these years, though, I’m still amazed at the way fathers and children interact, because it’s foreign to me.

This year, for the first time, all the important men in my life live in the same place, and the interplay is fascinating to watch. My 15-year-old son, who generally has to be bludgeoned into performing household chores, is glad to mow the lawn for my folks. My father, in turn, is willing to help teach him to drive because he has forgotten that 28 years ago, when I was a student driver, he swore he’d never do that again. He now has the time and the patience to provide my children with an entire range of benefits that their parents might or might not appreciate.

My husband, the middleman in this unholy trio, manages to wedge himself in where he’s needed, generally without being too intrusive. Sometimes it seems as though he must reinvent his role every day, because he comes home from work to find the adolescents in a different hormonal phase than they’d exhibited when he left that morning. Too often he discovers that they and their friends have eaten us out of house and home and left the dirty dishes lying about, five girls need a ride to Saturday’s soccer game, there are no clean towels, the hospital has called already, Mom will be late getting home, and "Oh, by the way, Grandma needs you to take apart a light fixture for her."

So I suppose it’s understandable that he occasionally storms through the family room snatching up soda cans and demanding to know why the children can’t do "a few simple things around here." The answer, of course, is that they could if they were so inclined, and probably would get around to it eventually — in about five years.

It’s probably also understandable that he doesn’t quite see why our household always seems to contain at least six teenagers. The old joke — "We had six before we figured out what was causing that!" — really doesn’t apply. We figured that out after two, and as a pharmacist, he knew what to do about it. We suspect the simple fact that we have food in the refrigerator has caused the rest of the population boom. Grandma and Grandpa, just across the street, with even more food and nearly endless tolerance, may have something to do with it as well. Having a safe, stable family is something every child should be able to take for granted.