I never saw myself as being a dad. Chalk that up to my relationship with my own parents, their divorce, or my own self-loathing that said I’d never be any better at being a dad than any other deadbeat who got a girl pregnant.
My own mom and dad did their best. In retrospect, I often think that maybe they weren’t fair to themselves. They got married soon after learning my mom was pregnant. She had me when she was nineteen and my dad was twenty-two. Both were, in many respects, children trying to raise a child. Five years later, my sister, Keshia, came along, and our youngest sister, Avery, was born fifteen months after that.
Never really getting a chance to grow up themselves, I’m sure my mom must have felt trapped in parenthood and in a marriage with many doubts. Who wouldn’t ask themselves if their husband only married them because of the kid she popped out? After all, it’s only natural.
My mom did the best she knew how. Years of practically raising her own sister and brothers gave her good practice. In her life, I know my mom made a plethora of mistakes, but in looking back, I have to say this: As a mother, she didn’t fail.
She and my dad were divorced not long after I graduated High School. I’ll never forget the day she told me she was leaving him, nor will I forget the day my dad returned home to find she had gone.
In some aspects, it was humorous. He had been out of town at a kids camp for future hunters, trappers, fishermen or some other “woodsmen” type of thing, taking one of the boys from the church who was anxious to learn about all sorts of ways to kill random wildlife. Something I had grown out of years before.
My mother met him in the church parking lot. My sisters were with her, she had informed him and that she had left him.
And that I had stayed.
At some point, she must have also told him that she took just about everything they owned with her, because I remember hearing my dad arrive in our gravel driveway and after walking out of the house to meet him, I heard him yell from our shed, “She took my f*ing tiller!”
You may laugh, but my dad loved that garden tiller. It was bad enough she’d taken his daughters away from him, but that woman he had loved so much, had stolen his favorite piece of gardening equipment.
Now, before I go on there are a couple of things you should know about my dad.
One is that if he likes you, then you have friend for life. He’s loyal to a fault. A trait my wife has often pointed out I inherited. Another is, as I have already made clear, he didn’t have a lot of life experiences going into his marriage and it was his first time ever being a husband, quickly followed by his first experience ever being a dad. Many things he did in those two arenas – husbandry and fatherhood – he had to learn on the fly. Things he didn’t know, he had to improvise and deal with the consequences later.
On Father’s Day, 2000, “later” had arrived.
That was the day she had left him. The day he found out he was no longer in possession of his two daughters, nor his favorite piece of machinery he had used so often in his garden.
And he was without his wife.
Someone rejected his loyalty, and for the first time in his life, I believe my dad felt he had nowhere and nothing. His best friend had metaphorically stabbed him in the back in the most brutal way someone could to a person like him. They abandoned him.
Dad had always equated provision with love. He’d worked countless overtime hours at the factory to make sure we were provided for. Because of this, my mother, sisters, and I never felt the pain of hunger or the humiliation of having no clothes. Sure, we’d be picky about what food was on the table or how ugly the clothing we were bought looked, but we at least had the choice to do without. Some are not so fortunate.
However, in the immaturity of childhood, we often saw his working non-stop as more avoidance than love. Often times, I look back and think about those days and wonder if I’d been happy to miss a few meals so he could play me some Horse on the basketball goal out in our back yard. Or if my sisters would be okay not having some new school clothes if it meant dad was able to stay home for dinner a few nights a week rather than working all hours of the day. Would my mom had been okay with him being home or taking her out on a date now and then, rather than spending a Friday night re-wiring a house for someone he barely knew and Saturday mornings at the factory. I honestly don’t know, and it is probably a thought that will haunt me for years to come.
To be clear, I don’t blame my dad for my parents’ divorce. Nor do I blame my mom. A marriage is, at its core, two people who have become one. The marriage failed. That doesn’t have to mean either of them did.
As this father’s day approaches, I hold my own daughter in my arms and words my dad once said to me, back when I was in my early teens echo on. “Do you know why I’m your dad and not just your father?”
“Not really,” I hear myself reply. We’re in his blue Dodge Ram and heading down Rosewood Lane for the fifty billionth time.
“Because I love you. I’m here for you. I do the best I can to be a dad. I know I make mistakes, but I try. Anybody can be a father, but just the fact that I’m trying, that’s what makes me a dad.”
I remember rolling my eyes, and sarcastically repeating the commercialized slogan, “Anybody can be a father, it takes a real man to be a dad.”
My dad, having not watched as much T.V., simply said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
I never put much thought into that. What dad is perfect? Show me one who has never made a single mistake as a dad, and unless you’re introducing God, Himself, the man you’re hoisting upon that pedestal has either deceived you or you’re lying to yourself.
My dad has his faults. His failures are many, but he’s still my dad. And he’d rather die trying to be a dad, than live for one day as just a father.
I think of the saying, “Like father, like son.” I see my daughter, a little over two months old, and I think of my dad’s mistakes and resign myself to not repeat them. I think of his successes, and make it my goal to exceed them.
Because anybody can father a child, but it takes a lot more to be a dad.
