Secrets: Do Sons Need Fathers? Do Fathers Need Fathers?

Here’s the inciting incident for these thoughts.

Two weeks ago, an acquaintance on Facebook whom I knew in college made a comment about a photo I was in.  Apparently, she knew the photographer.  The photographer and my friend had an online discussion about how small a world it is and how they know me and each other.  And then my friend wrote this:

“I know his dad.  He’s like an uncle to me.”

And Valerie read this and said, “That’s funny.  He’s not even like an uncle to you.”

I’d forgotten this is how I’d known this girl.  That this was our initial connection.  She was a spiderweb trailing back to a different part of the forest where my dad lived and I never ventured.

~*~

Val’s right.  He’s not even like an uncle to me.  We haven’t seen each other in more than a decade.  The last time we spoke was five/six years ago.  And that was by accident.  I’d meant to call my brother, Craig.  CR is right above DA for Dad in my phone.

When I’d accidentally dialed it I was walking home through my Brooklyn neighborhood.  I had something on my mind to talk to Craig about. And then Craig didn't answer. Instead,  it was that voice I knew and didn’t know. Probably the voice of long buried lullabies and ancient soothings.  And he called me Shamus, the name I used to be, my nickname until I was 9.  The confusion poured into the moorings of my adult self.  It took me a while to recover in the conversation.

His voice is deep like mine.  Whatever rocks he swallowed to achieve that sound passed to me.  But we don’t sound the same. His tone is calm, almost fighting a deep boredom, with a hint of amusement.  My voice is a little more sardonic maybe, a little quicker to jump octaves for a joke.  But it’s the same well.  You can hear it.

We talked. Of usual things.  I never pushed him to talk of the absences or explanations so he never did.  Even if I wanted to ask him something, I didn’t.  Maybe I was scared to sound needy.  But usually it was just:  “Why? What’s the point after all these years?”

So we engaged in light fare.  Movies, books.  He’s a smart dude. So I hear.  I can’t say I’ve spent enough time with him to truly know.  My father is more rumor than flesh to me.  Since I was 6, I would say I’ve spent an accumulated total of two months around him.

~*~

Sometimes when I say stuff like this about my father, people get sad.  It bums the room out.  But I’m not telling a sad story anymore.  I’m just telling my story.  This is how I grew up and I’m not sad about how I grew up.  The amalgamation of myself is the result of many things.  My Mom’s cancer, my obsessive writing, the echoes of Michigan, the friends I kept, my family's humor, the closeness of my grandparents, the absence of my father.

I wouldn’t change it because I don’t know who I’d be without it.

But I’ve been wondering this past week, like I’ve wondered many times over the years:  Should I make another effort to reconnect?  Should we acknowledge our biology, our short history, and make something work? Even limited communication?

As you can imagine, I have a few arguments/counter-arguments.

1) DO WE JUST START OVER?

Do I just call him/email him and be like, “Hey, Daddio. Long time no talk.”?  Do we just set aside the past? Start fresh?

Because he’s never met my wife.  Or my kid.  I don’t know if he knows how I am or where I live or what I do.  On the flipside, I don’t know how he is or where he lives or what he does.  Our lives are equally opaque to each other. Unless he reads my blog.  I don’t own the internet. He could.

Is a fresh start fair?  Does he deserve that?  Is there a statute of limitations on our mistakes?  Do we just shake hands with the past and let it move on?

2) DO WE HAVE THAT “TALK” FIRST?

Is it about reconciliation? Getting it all out and then moving on?  Will it be satisfying? Will it mean what I want?

Do I even want that?  Will I be halfway into this and think, “It’s too late. This has been too long. I’ve repaired these roads, I don’t need to reopen these cases.”  Will I really use mixed metaphors?

Is this what he’s dreading?  Or is this what he wants to get off his chest? Don’t we all want to explain ourselves a little?  I don’t know.  I can’t decide which I want.

~*~ 

Sometimes I put myself in his shoes or my mom’s.  I think: by this time in my life, my Mom was divorced twice with four kids.   I think: Edie’s going to be two tomorrow.  If I were my dad, in the next year, Valerie would leave me, go back to her parents.  I wonder how these things would feel. The life he envisioned gone.  I wonder how he navigated through those waters.  If he still is.

~*~

Does a son need a father?  Does a father need a father?  Even now?  After so much time?  After all this pause, could we even be that? Or should we?  What is there besides titles and dna to keep us tethered?

It’s all questions.  And they could all be answered with one email.  I just can’t figure out if that one email would be a step forward or step backward.

How I'm Trying Not to Screw Up Fatherhood

We were in Utah recently hanging out with some old friends from my college improv troupe.  It was Father’s Day and many of us, in the intervening 6 to 8 years since we’d seen each other, had gotten married and become fathers and mothers. It was cool to look around and see so many friends had moved on with their lives in good ways. Life can go lots of ways.  The reunion could have taken place at a methodone clinic.

But I made a joke (it’s a comedy troupe, there’s lots of those) about how many of us will actually be able to call our fathers on Father’s Day.  I made the joke because I knew the particular parental makeup of the group meeting there.  Out of the six male members at this dinner, four had fathers who were dead, one estranged, and only one had a father that was living and involved in his life.  What a freak, right?

I kind of hate Father’s Day.  I always have.  It’s been a complicated road for me and my siblings in the father department and I’m not really going to launch into that here.  We had a great mother and our Heavenly Father picked up a lot of slack where earthly fathers should have been.  My grandfather was a saint and played Dad when he mostly just wanted to be a grandfather. And my Mom’s brother, Uncle John, pitched in, too.  This is not a “Oh, woe is me” post.  It’s an intro to my new job as Dad.

It’s a lie to say I’m treading untrod territory.  I know what a good dad is.  I’ve seen Cliff Huxtable in action.  But it feels strange/disconnected sometimes to do “dad things” for Edie.  I have very little memory of “dad things” to emulate.  Sometimes it feels like I imitate things I think dads do.  It’s like I’m checking off a list.

CHECKLIST OF DAD THINGS THAT DADS MUST DO

Dads swing kids in swings.  Check.

Dads throw kids in the air.  Check.

Dads give shoulder rides.  Check.

Dads play sports with kids.  Gag me.

Dads let kids play in puddles.  Double check.

Dads say “It’s okay” to kids when they fall.  Check.

And I like doing these things.  I like playing cliché Dad and finding real Dad moments through it.  I can’t over analyze everything.  There’s too much life going on.  But sometimes I wonder what my gauge is.  Like my improv friends who had fathers that died, it’s a strange thing to realize you only have your shadow to measure against.  Or I guess the idea of a shadow is all you have.

I remember looking in the mirror the first time I was going to shave and realizing I was terrified.  I could cut my face into hamburger.  Why was there no one to teach me? Who let me have this tiny knife? Why was I being trusted with this responsibility? Maybe my teenage rat mustache could be burned off?  Ultimately, I came through mostly unnicked.

As much I say I don’t care, I do wonder if I’m just suppressing a desire to look over my shoulder and have someone say, “That’s right, son. You’re doing it right.”  Parenthood is a strange solitary journey even when you have someone next to you co-piloting.  Then I guess life is a strangely solitary thing as well.  Your dreams are your own.  The echo of your thoughts inside your brain is yours alone.  It’s good kids have such crappy memories or they’d remember you messing up a lot.

The thing is, I want Edie to be in that room 30 years from now hanging out with her friends and when hands are raised for who still has their dad around, I want hers to be the one raised.  I know life is tricky and full of lots of sudden and tragic things.  But I like being her dad.  I’m crazy about it actually.  I’m going to try to stick around.

I was carrying her down the road last night in the 94 degree Boston humidity with her little body like a heater against me and my shirt clinging to me because of it and we both looked up at the hawk flying over us and she pointed at it and I said, “Hawk” and she paused and said “Haw-awk!” and she clapped for herself and I didn’t need anyone to tell me I was doing it right. I knew I was.

Though one nod from Dr. Huxtable would be alright.