Blue Father’s Day Reflection

June 19, 2022

A comment from my wife, Lenora, sent me to the back of the closet to dig out this ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ tie. Each June, my wife would take the kids to the headquarters store for Save the Children and I would get a new Father’s Day tie to wear proudly. The eye-catching designs are adapted from drawings done by children the charity serves. This collection, spanning more than a decade, is one of my dearest possessions and, despite retiring and eschewing ties, has survived multiple downsizing purges.

Lenora and I recently returned from a road trip to Yellowstone, fortunately ahead of the disastrous flooding that has closed all access roads to the park. On the way back, while in Salt Lake City, I visited the LDS Family History Library, a renowned genealogical research center, to resume my ‘on again / off again’ search for my long-lost cousin, the son of my father’s brother. Over the years, I have sporadically tried to connect with this relative I have never met, one of my only two first cousins.

In recounting my family history to the researcher helping me, I was reminded that the root of the disconnect is that I come from a line of less than exemplary fathers. My ne’er do well, alcoholic grandfather triggered a sequence of estrangements, financial struggles, and hidden emotional pain when he abandoned his wife and two young sons. One outcome was that several years ago, discovering that others had similar stories, I hit on the idea of a Blue Father’s Day service, modeled on Blue Christmas services, designed to address that emotional pain by acknowledging it and sharing the common threads in our very human stories.

To clarify, this is not the Blue Father’s Day service; this is merely a few random reflections brought to mind by the occasion. Importantly, when I am asked to share a particularly spiritual or meaningful word, that word is always ‘Family’. Please take today’s words in that context. Like pulling my tie out of the closet to appreciate my family once again, we learn by exploring the human experiences that connect us.

Many years ago, I attended a Father’s Day service at my previous UU congregation. During Joys and Sorrows, a dear friend with a large, loving family, enthused for some minutes on the many endearing attributes of her father. As she spoke, I felt a sharp pain in my heart. The primary emotion was simple jealousy – she had something I desperately wanted; however, the jealousy was tinged with a strong sense of being cheated. Something I was owed by the world had been stolen from me. While I had a father in my life, something was missing. Being abandoned by his father and the hardscrabble life that followed, had left my father incapable of expressing love. In fact, some of his last words to me before he died were to call me a clown for going to grad school instead of getting a job. The pain I felt that Father’s Day, as my friend spoke glowingly about her father, was the seed for the idea of a Blue Father’s Day service. I know I am not alone and I want to help others process that shared pain.

I do not begrudge my friend her joy. The purpose of a Blue service is not that there be less joy in the world; rather it is to reaffirm that we, as humans, experience both joy and sorrow. While we may not feel them simultaneously, they coexist within our community. Blue Christmas services came about because the holidays amp up joy and light sharpening the painful edges of the shadows cast on the hearts of those in pain. In Blue services, those in pain are validated while others are reminded that their compassion needs to be heightened, along with their joy. My intent is that a Blue Father’s Day service would teach us that validation and compassion are needed throughout the year.

In thinking about my relationship to Father’s Day, and to my father, I came to realize that parenting is about meeting the needs of the child, not bending the child to the needs of the parent. This is best done by modeling positive values and productive behaviors while being sensitive to the individual needs of the child. Life gave Lenora and I two polar opposite children to drive that point home. When people try to raise children in their own image, they are playing God in a destructive way as they suppress the needs of the child in an effort to justify themselves. 

For his part, my father was cheated by life, cheated out of his father. Although his mother was a good and deeply religious person, each of them went through life suppressing their unmet need for love by not expressing love. Having seen alcoholism modelled, my father turned to the bottle when disease added physical pain to his emotional scars. When his drinking didn’t cloud his judgement, a state increasingly rare as time went on, my father did have fundamentally good moral values and, indeed, had made some good life decisions. Despite that, I was cheated out of a parent who could say, “I love you!” Instead, I saw alcohol-addled sarcasm and verbal abuse modeled.

However, Father’s Day is not just an occasion for looking retrospectively at our fathers; it is also about looking forward to the next generation that we have parented. Our true legacy is not what we, as a generation, have accomplished; rather it will be what the next generation accomplishes. What will they forge with the tools we, as parents and community, have given them?

In that vein, I received what is my ‘best ever’ Father’s Day present while I was in Salt Lake City. Our daughter, a 30-something single woman working full time as a post-doc, has spent the last year getting qualified as a foster parent, a way to make the world a better place. This April, as soon as the paperwork was complete, our Elizabeth became the foster parent of a teenager, a 17-year-old Black woman named Ace with the pronouns she/they.

Ace’s particulars are confidential, and Lenora and I quickly learned to be comfortable not knowing the whole story. In May, heading west toward Salt Lake City, we wondered what role we would play as Ace adjusted to living with Elizabeth; we resigned ourselves, however, to not being in control. A couple days before we arrived, we were told that Ace wanted us in her life as grandparents which was a slingshot event for us. We had a wonderful visit as Ace immediately bonded with our Bella, went to the Tetons with us, and told Elizabeth how much she was like her mother.

The night before we left Utah, as we were saying goodbye, Ace ran to me with open arms. Shouting ‘Grampie!”, they gave me a big, enveloping hug. The warm feeling in my heart made me know I had come full cycle in my relationship with Father’s Day. It was no longer about what my father had or hadn’t done for me; what mattered was what I could do for Elizabeth and Ace and what they could do for the world.

The next day, as we drove home, an interview on NPR provided me with the epilog for my Blue Father’s Day service. While discussing renewed interest in Stoicism, blogger Ryan Holiday referenced the Roman emperor and Stoic, Marcus Aurelius. In Meditations, Aurelius gives this advice, quoted in the original gendered language but generalizable: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

I won’t waste any more time as the takeaways are simple. First, be joyful yet mindful as there is always pain deserving of your compassion in the hearts around you, if not in your own. Second, while it is important to look back with reverence and clear-eyed analysis at the generations that have come before, the Ancestors, it is more important to look forward recognizing that we influence what the next generation will do to make the world a better place.

In closing, if you are a father on this Father’s Day, you are blessed; if you had a father in your life, you are also blessed but remember, for many of us, that is a mixed blessing!