Fish Fry Daughter

Sara Ries Dziekonski

Fish Fry Daughter

Holiday Inn kitchen, the day I am born:

My father is frying fish for a party of seventeen

when the call comes from the hospital.

He stays until the batter is crispy,

cold salads scooped on platters, rye bread buttered.

Dad never told me this story.

He told my boyfriend, one short order cook to another.

Mom doesn’t know why Dad was late

for her screams and sweat on the hospital bed.

Once, when she was angry with him, she told me:

When your father finally got there,

the nurse had to tell him to get upstairs,

“Your wife is having that baby now.”

I hope that when Dad first held me,

it was with haddock-scented hands,

apron over his black pants still sprinkled with flour,

forehead oily from standing over the deep fryer,

telling the fish to hurry hurry.

I suspect a lot of people have a harrowing story related to the birth of a child. This story has a happy ending and part of that is due to the “fish fry daughter’s” forgiving take on her hard-working father’s late arrival for her birth. 

I got to my son’s birth just in time because I wisely skipped a stop at McDonald’s on my way to the hospital.

The focus in the poem needn’t be confined to the birth of a child. More broadly, it is how parents struggle to balance the demands of work and the special moments of parenting. Life is made a bit easier when there is the kind of understanding that is expressed between the lines of Fish Fry Daughter.

A word about the poet: Sara Ries Dziekonski (Sara Ries), a Buffalo native, holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University, where she received the Best Thesis in Poetry Award. Her first book, Come In, We're Open, which she wrote about growing up in her parents’ diner, won the Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition and was published in June 2010 by the NFSPS Press.