Father’s Day Tales
Tales of Being a Father, and of Having a Most Amazing Father
I guess Father’s Day is as good excuse as any to take a break from my self-imposed hiatus from writing, to write about my thoughts this Father’s Day. I got a nice call from my son a little while ago to wish me a happy Father’s Day. Earlier in the day, we got the good news that his corona-virus test had come back negative. After feeling really crappy earlier in the week, he has begun to feel a lot better, as well. As a father, I am greatly relieved. While we don’t seem to worry as much as Moms do (we don’t have that hidden umbilical cord thing going on), we do worry about our children.
I’ve been a father for 30 ½ years now. I try my best to be a good father, and am told that I do a pretty good job. I do consider it the most important job I’ve ever had in my life, and I have always taken it very seriously. I’ve always wanted to give my son the best shot he can have in life, and helping to shape his world view seemed to be important. However, that said, my son has always had his own, richly creative and independent mind, that I could only hope to provide a good example for him to follow in how to deal with the things of life. I’ve often questioned whether I hit that nail on the head or not. I think it’s good that I question that.
When he was 5, and home with the chicken pox, I stayed home with my son Jonathon (aka, J.B.), since a couple of ladies in my office had compromised immune systems, and I could have been a carrier of the chicken pox bug, even though I’d had it when I was a kid.
There were lots of oatmeal baths, and I pretty much did everything in my fatherly power to help him feel a little better in his discomfort. In the middle of one oatmeal bath, around the 5th day of his agony, he looked up at me, with his sad eyes, so weary of being sick and stuck at home, and said, “Dad — you’re the best Dad I ever had!” After a good laugh, I thanked him and felt like my effort had at least been appreciated by my son.
When he was about 2 ½, my Dad wrote a letter to me in which he was making amends for some things he’d said, and ways he’d acted towards me, when I was growing up. In the letter, he went on to say that he thanked his God each day that the sins of the father hadn’t been handed down to the son. He said he truly admired how he saw me raising my boy.
That really meant the world to me. That letter is one of my most cherished possessions. It somehow managed to heal the child inside of me that was never really sure if his father had loved him. In the letter, he assured me that he had always loved me, had always thought the world of me, but just never really knew how to tell me those things. He sure did a great job making up for that, with that letter. Yes, I bawled my eyes out when I read it — tears of gratitude, and a warmth inside I’d never really felt before. I felt loved by my father, just for being me.
I took a lesson from that. I try to tell my son, at every opportunity I get, how much he means to me, and how very proud I am of who he is. I’ve told him many times, even though he doesn’t seem to believe me, that he is one of the most courageous people I know. It is true. I’ve watched him face fears that I would have cowered from, or been too dense to even have, and seen him do what he had to do to move through them, and to act despite his fears. For the first 25 years of my life, the way I dealt with fear was to avoid it, at all costs. My favorite chosen way to do that was to get high in order to allay my fears. That wasn’t courageous — just stupid.
But, thanks to the love of my father, who never bought my bullshit when I was so full of it and deep into an active addiction, but who became my greatest champion (along with Mom) from the very moment I made a decision to do something about my addiction, I did find a way to recover from it. After attempting to do it through sheer force of will (which only led to my being suicidal), I learned how to surrender and to find a spiritual solution to my problem.
Of course, in attempting to find that spiritual solution, I had to face a lot of confusion I had about the concept of God and religion, that hindered my own efforts to find a spirituality that worked in my life. Very wrapped up in my confused ideas about God and religion and spirituality, was my Dad. He had been a Christian Brother for six years prior to meeting and marrying Mom. He had been a very preachy, and somewhat judgmental, father growing up. At least, that is how I experienced him.
Because I had rejected him and his religious ideas, from my early teens on, he’d always loomed large in my efforts to find a working spirituality. But, as it turned out, he did some things that became great examples for me to follow, later in his life. He began to question the things that he’d believed in. He began to explore his own spirituality more. He’d broken with some of his long-held traditional beliefs, transforming into someone I considered truly spiritual.
Meanwhile, in my own growth, and progress through the 12 Steps, I discovered some things about myself that I hadn’t been expecting. I’d learned that I’d spent most of my young life trying to be something I wasn’t. I did this because I did not very much like who I was. The drinking and drugging had helped me in my attempts to become someone else, but I could never sustain that façade, and eventually, they stopped working for me.
When I began to truly face my fears, and to discover who I was, I stopped running from myself. I learned, to my great surprise, that I was so much more like my father than I’d ever suspected. The more I accepted myself, as I am, the more he and I began to get along.
After the aforementioned letter from him, we got very close. It began with a phone call, in which I called to wish him a happy birthday. On that call, he described this new congregation he and Mom had recently become a part of. He told me all about the first funeral service conducted there, for his best friend Paul, who had died suddenly of a heart attack, at age 49. By the time that call ended, I realized that Dad and I were actually on the same page, spiritually. We spoke the same language. He was into what I was into, and vice versa. It blew my mind!
From that point, to his life’s end, just about a year and a half later, we were closer than best friends, much more than father and son. Outside of my relationship with my wife, it became the closest relationship I’d ever had with anyone. He shared so much of the wisdom he had gathered in his life with me, and so much of the heart in which he believed in, his love of people, and his grounded belief in a loving and caring Higher Power.
If nothing else ever went right in my life — though many things have — just getting that relationship with my father right would have been more than I ever could have asked of life. But, so many other things have gone right. The longer I live, and the more I learn of others’ relationships with their fathers, the more I come to appreciate how very fortunate I was for the one I had with mine.
For someone who’d felt like he’d had such a shitty father growing up, I’ve gotten to live the past 25 years knowing I had one of the best Dads, ever. I didn’t even mention, but I will now that I think of it, that he was a powerful advocate for LGBTQ rights (even before there was a Q in that acronym), from around 1982 until his death in 1996. He was well ahead of his time! He took a call from a distraught young gay man on his deathbed, and spoke to that man for over an hour, offering hope where there was despair, and giving, practically to his final living breath. I think this is what I am proudest of my old man for. He was such a living example to me of what a real man looks like. Each day, I can only hope to live up to a fraction of that example.
