Father’s Day Blues

 

Father’s Day Blues

By Michael Field

Reworked from June 2022 Reflection – V2 – 1048 Words

 

Returning from a trip to Yellowstone recently, I visited the famed LDS genealogical research center in Salt Lake City to resume my ‘on again / off again’ search for a long-lost cousin, the son of my father’s brother. Sporadically over the years, I have tried to connect with this ‘close’ relative whom I’ve never met. My father grew up physically separated from his brother and, as a child, the only way I knew this missing branch of the family tree even existed was from oblique references and disjointed segments of overheard conversations.

While recounting these fragments of 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. When my father’s father, a ne’er-do-well alcoholic, abandoned his wife and two young sons, he triggered a sequence of estrangements, financial struggles, and hidden emotional pain that continue to echo today. That realization left me with one of those echoes, a lingering blue feeling.

Later, while driving home from Utah, an interview on NPR provided me with a bookend insight. Discussing renewed interest in Stoicism, a guest referenced the Roman emperor and Stoic, Marcus Aurelius. In Meditations, Aurelius gave us this advice: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

Once home, that comment sent me to the back of the closet to dig out my ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ tie. Each June, my wife would take the kids to the gift shop at the headquarters of 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 refugee children the charity serves. The collection, over a dozen ties spanning more than a decade of third Sundays in June, is one of my dearest possessions and, despite my retiring and eschewing ties, has survived multiple downsizing purges.

I also remember one Father’s Day church service many years ago. A dear friend from a large, loving family stepped forward to enthuse 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. The universe had stolen something from me, something I was owed. While I had a father in my life, something important was missing. I realized that being abandoned by his father, and the hardscrabble life that followed, had left my father incapable of expressing love.

For his part, my father was cheated by life, cheated out of his father. Although his mother was a good and deeply religious person, as single mother and only remaining child, 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. The alcohol clouded his judgement to the point he could not discern the pain his words would inflict. Not only was I cheated out of a parent who could say, “I love you!”, but, growing up, all I saw modeled was alcohol-addled sarcasm and verbal abuse. In fact, my father’s last words to me before he died were to call me a clown for going to grad school instead of getting a job. And I, for my part, did not cry at his funeral.

So, Father’s Day has long been a trigger that can make me blue. I emerged into adulthood not wanting to have children of my own. I have never probed the roots of that feeling, yet I am sure it is one of those echoes, the actions of my grandfather still reverberating off the walls of the canyon of life. Fortunately, the river running through the canyon eventually took me out into the verdant valley beyond. There I found love; there I discovered a reason to have children. There I realized that while blue is part of life, it is not the only color in the rainbow.

Most importantly, on the road to Yellowstone this year, I was given my ‘best ever’ Father’s Day present, a tool that allowed me to finally disarm the trigger.  Our 30-something daughter, who moved to Salt Lake City during the pandemic, is a resilient woman working fulltime as a post-doc. Despite being single, she has spent the last year qualifying as a foster parent. She is driven 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.

The particulars are confidential, and my wife and I quickly learned to be comfortable not knowing Ace’s whole story. In May, heading west toward Salt Lake City, we wondered what role we would play as Ace adjusted to living with Elizabeth. While hopeful, we resigned ourselves to not being in control.

Then, a couple days before we arrived, we were told that Ace wanted us in her life as grandparents! This was a slingshot event for us, instantly catapulting us from strangers to family. We had a wonderful visit as Ace immediately bonded with our dog, Bella, went to the Tetons with us, and, with great insight, 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 let me know I had come full cycle in my relationship with Father’s Day. The trigger was disarmed as life was no longer about what my father had or hadn’t done for me.

That warm feeling was in my heart the next day when Marcus Aurelius exhorted me to just be a ‘good man’, and to not be concerned as to whether my father was or not. That feeling was in my heart the third Sunday of June this year when I put on my “World’s Greatest Dad” tie. It was in my heart as I stepped up to the microphone to share this story.