My Father

(This is a post I tried to write a year ago, but I never got it done. And even this year, I had hoped to post it before Fathers Day but missed the mark. It’s been a hard one to write, and I’ve changed it numerous times. But it will never be perfect, so I am finally just posting what I have.)

About a month ago they observed Fathers Day in the United States. It’s not as big a deal as Mothers Day (in May), and rightly so. But it still has significance, because fathers are important too. This day makes me think about a number of things: my own father and how I look back on him, my own performance as a father and how much I know I could have done better, friends and acquaintances who are fathers (good and otherwise), and my admiration and hope for the next generation of fathers in my family.

One thing that often gets me thinking about fathers is Facebook. Around Fathers Day, birthdays and anniversaries, my cousins back in the U.S. routinely post photos and memorials to their fathers, and I have always admired the adoration they have for their departed dads. (Technically, one of them is not my cousin, but a cousin to my cousins. But his dad was my godfather, our families were close, and I always thought of his dad as an uncle and him as a cousin.)

I share their feelings about their dads because they were men who I really looked up to as well. One of them had been my father’s close friend in their early years and, for that reason, became my godfather; his younger brother ended up marrying my mother’s baby sister, so he became my uncle. 

But sadly, I don’t feel similarly moved to remember my own father the way that my cousins are inspired to honor their dads.  I don’t have that same kind of adoration for the man. I feel bad about this because if he were alive and knew, he would be terribly hurt. And I would not want that.

Many Good Points

My father was not a bad man – far from it.  And in his way, he was a good father.  He worked hard to provide for his family, and he never failed. We didn’t want for anything important. We always had a safe, comfortable home, decent clothes, food on the table, etc. My sister and I didn’t have as much as some kids, but we had more than many others. We were comfortably in the middle class, and he was the reason why.

And my father was not a drinker or carouser. He would have a few beers occasionally in the summer, but that was about it. I don’t remember ever seeing him drunk or even close to it. He was steady and reliable. And he was mostly a selfless man who did without a lot of “toys” he might have liked to have had so that he could give his family what they needed.

He was generous to his children, perhaps to a fault. He always was ready and willing to help us financially when we hit tough times. When we needed him, he was always there.

Something Was Missing

I respect and admire all of those things about him. So why do I not feel so moved to memorialize him as my cousins feel about their dads?

I guess it’s because, despite all these good qualities, there was something missing.  My father was a closed-up soul and not someone who could offer deep thoughts and perspectives on life. His advice was limited to practical matters: how to work a table saw, how to wire a trailer, how to properly use a variety of tools, how to change a tire, spark plugs or the car’s oil.

Those were good things for a boy to learn from his father, to be sure.  But I needed more. I needed someone who could talk about life with me, who could give me advice about dealing with all kinds of people – especially women – someone with an inquisitive mind who could talk about science or music or art. 

I needed someone who could enthrall me with stories and help my imagination to soar, someone whose wisdom would form the bedrock for my own spiritual and intellectual growth. And I needed someone who could teach me how to hit a baseball, throw a good spiral, deke out a goalie, or win a fight when there was no other way. 

But that was not my father. I had to learn all those things on my own.

An Odd Egg

He was not a stupid man by any means, and I think he could have been much more than he was. But he was very limited in his outlook, and perhaps most of all in his self-confidence. It seems to me that he was a man who was never comfortable in his own skin. He covered it with a façade, a false bravado, but, deep down, I don’t think he ever really liked himself very much.

My father could swear up a storm when he was angry. One of my most enduring memories is of the occasional days when he would be running late for work, hurrying to get cleaned up and on his way, and yelling curse words at the highest decibel level possible. His swearing never included the F-word or anything like that; it was limited (there’s that word again) to a short rotation of several religion-related terms (taking the Lord’s name in vain, as it were) together with the phrase “son of a bitch.”  Those were mornings when I just wanted to hide under my bed covers until he was out the door.

My father's sense of fashion was like him: black and white. He always went to work in a white shirt with a narrow black tie, black pants and black engineer's boots. His idea of casual wear was a drab green or gray shirt with his black pants and black engineer boots – always the engineer's boots. In summer, he even wore his engineer's boots with swim trunks (not in the water, of course). I recall when my mother tried to get him to put some color into his wardrobe and wear more up-to-date ties. I thought it was going to kill him. 

He pretended to be an authoritarian, not only with my sister and me, but also with our cousins when they were in the care of my parents. It was something he could get away with when dealing with children who were not wise enough yet to question his orders. Looking back, I suspect he had a harder time doing that with adults, like on his job… but I really don’t know that side of his life at all.

And that segues into another issue: I knew almost nothing about his job, what he did there, or what it was like. I knew that he was a supervisor and then a middle manager at an electronics manufacturing firm – a branch of the Texas Instruments company. But that was all. I never saw where he worked, met only a few of his coworkers over all those years, and had no idea what his work life was like. He never talked about it; when he came home, he left the job behind.

My father was not an unkind man. As I mentioned earlier, he could be quite generous, especially with his family. But he was mostly aloof and insular. The only “stories” he told were of his army days in Panama, but I suspect that not all of these stories were real. He often mentioned about how he had his own Harley-Davidson motorcycle there and rode with some friends. That he rode a motorcycle, at least, there is proof in photographs. The rest of it… I don’t know. 

He had a scar on his shoulder that he said came from the .50-caliber gun of a fighter plane he was servicing. But a .50-caliber is a large and powerful gun, and its bullets are designed to destroy airplanes and other machines. It seems to me that such a slug would have damaged his shoulder more than was apparent. But I am not an expert, so perhaps it was true.

Most of all, my father was not an openly loving person.  Through all of my years growing up in that house, I never – not once – saw a display of affection between my parents. I never saw a warm embrace, never a kiss. My father simply found it difficult to make such displays; he was enormously reserved when it came to physical touch. I wrote once in an ironically humorous family history that, as they had two children, I was reasonably certain my parents had had sex at least twice.

I suspect that this kind of reserved nature and embargo on outward displays of affection ran contrary to my mother’s way, and she simply changed over time and adapted to the reality of her life. She was better at showing affection to her children, but even she became more reserved as we grew older.

What Shaped Him

I have often wondered why he was the way he was. What forces shaped and molded him? What made him so insular, so incapable of letting his feelings out?  I think it was because of his own father. I never knew my grandfather; he died shortly after I was born. His wife, my paternal grandmother, passed away before I was born, and there seemed to have been some bad feelings and controversy surrounding their relationship and her death. But my father rarely spoke about his parents, and he had no brothers or sisters, so it was all pretty much a mystery.

What little I learned about my father’s growing up and his relationship with his own parents came mostly from one of my aunts (my mother’s older sister).  My grandfather was a tough – and apparently mean – Irish cop in the small Massachusetts city where I was born. He had a fractured relationship with his own family, told a Catholic priest to “go to hell” and left the church, and made life difficult for both his wife and son. My impression is that my father grew up without having real relationships with grandparents, uncles, cousins, etc.

My father, it seems, wanted to please his demanding father, as any son would, but he couldn’t seem to measure up. So I guess he grew up feeling like something of a disappointment to his father. And it seems that it was from his own father that he acquired his emotional aloofness.

In a rare moment of openness, my father once told me that he was very proud of me, of my accomplishments and the man that I had become. I appreciated that, of course, and it meant a lot. Looking back, I suspect that it was something he wanted badly to hear from his own father but perhaps never did.

But all of this is mostly conjecture based on just a few facts. I could be way off base, but I don’t think so. His life growing up in that family seems to have been filled with a lot of hard feelings. My father was prepared to be the hardworking breadwinner for a family, but not to be a source of inspiration.

Not a Condemnation

After writing only a few positive paragraphs and so many that seem negative, it can certainly appear that this post is a condemnation of my father. But that’s not the case. I am simply trying to call it as I see it, and I’ve analyzed him a lot to try and understand where I picked up some of my own, similar tendencies, as well as to put into context how different from him I am.  I could have done much, much worse for a father. He was a good man.

It’s just a simple fact that I needed more. The person I am – the child I was and the adult I became – is very different from my father. I have some definite physical similarities to my father, in appearance and some facets of speech, but I think there is a lot more of my mother in me, in my nature, in who I really am on the inside.

But boys learn how to be men from their fathers. They adopt most of their fathers’ behaviors and ways of dealing with the world. When these behaviors and tendencies don’t work for them, they are left confused and wondering why.

Looking back on my life, I can see that in my early adult years, I carried a lot of my father’s tendencies with me. Most of them ran counter to who I really am, and it was a mystery to me why these ways of reacting to the world caused more difficulties than they solved. It took me a long time to figure it out.

Me as a Father

One result of all that confusion, I think, is that I wound up not being the kind of father to my own daughters that I wish I had been. I was not a complete failure, of course, just as my own father was far from being a failure. My daughters have both grown to be enormously intelligent, talented, kind and considerate young women, and my relationships with each of them is positive, open and with a lot of love.

But it seems to me that their achievements are more despite my influence than because of it. I know that for most of their growth years, I was not “there for them” nearly as much as I should have been. Divorce can make that happen.

Where my father was steady and content to work for years at a routine job and a routine life, I was not. Where he was willing to, as he put it, “be miserable in life and his marriage” for the sake of “responsibility,” I was not. Where my father was a stranger to any form of spirituality (and even seemed to fear it), I am not.

I don’t assert that this makes me better… not at all. Just different. My path in life has been far different than his: more spiritual, more inquisitive, more questioning, more open, more social, more emotional, more sexual. I am glad to be who I am. I could never have lived his life, and I’m quite sure he would not have been able to live mine.

But I do wish that living my life could have included being a better father in some of the ways that he was. That would have been nice. But it’s not how this life unfolded for me. Just as his life happened the way it needed to for him, so mine has followed the path that I need for the lessons I need to take from this earthly trip.