I posted this last year and can't better it - so I thought I would post it again.
Father's day - A second chance?
What do we expect from our fathers? What do we celebrate on Father's Day?
One of my most vivd memories of being at boarding school as a young teen was making a promise to myself that I would be more available to my children than my father had been for me. I was not going to be on endless business trips. I was not going to talk ceaselessly about business at home. I was not going to to be a mystery to my son or to my daughter. I was going to be a warm and nurturing father.
But for many of the early years of Hope's and James' life I was just like my own father. So by the time they were 8 and 10 I had failed to be the warm father that I had promised myself that I would become.
But I had a second chance.
When we moved to Canada when the children were quite young, it broke the inevitability that they would leave home at 8 to spend their adolescence in a school and not at home. I had the time and the space that my father did not have to live with my children - what a concept! I discovered that I could get along with teenagers in a way that I could not with younger children. Why? Because I think that coincidentally my own very messy midlife crisis aligned with many of their own teenage struggles to understand their world and themselves. Perhaps we found a bond in our mutual uncertainty.
A few years ago, we all seemed to come into the light together. This shared experience of emergence has given us a bond that is more enduring than had I only been a nurturer in their early years. On reflection, my promise aged 13 was I think premature. I felt at 13 that I needed a father to be maybe more like a mother. I wanted a nurturing father when I was a boy. I think that I can see now that a father's role must be different than what we expect from a mother.
On a simple level, and Mothers/women are never simple, Mothers are maybe easy to understand - they give us life, love and order. Mothers are surely our natural nurturers. In this role, our mothers inform us about ourselves and about relationships. They can and do give us more but I am satisfied that this might be their core role. They by their example in relationships give us, for better or worse, our view on ourselves and how we relate to others.
So what then are our fathers all about? What is the real job of fathers? What do we celebrate our fathers for? They surely inform us about the world outside. They show us, not by their words, but by how they live their lives how to interact with the world outside the hearth. We unconsciously make decisions based on their lives about how we too will act in the larger world. We see their example more clearly when we can have a wider perspective as I have found in middle age. I needed 50 plus years to "see" my father's life without the fierce judgment of my own youth. As a result, Fathers take longer to connect to than to our mothers.
Young men die asking for their mothers. Middle aged men grieve and long for their lost fathers.
So paradoxically, on this Father's day, we all come full circle. My father, long dead, stands shoulder with me - his life a map for my own. Many of his mistakes - mine. Many of his strengths - mine. His face - now in middle age- mine. The gap has been bridged for all of us. The promise, made one desperate and lonely night hour, has been kept at last by all of us.
