Of Fathers and Sons
My daughter, Carolyn, has her mother/daughter posse that she always wanted. I’m very happy to see her so happy as a mother, but especially as a mother of two lovely daughters. Based on her blonde/blue-eyed genetics combined with her husband, John’s Norwegian heritage, this has caused her to have two blonde/blue-eyed beauties that share a bedroom and are the best and closest of sisters. Carolyn is an energetic mother (she is a marathoner who has continued to run marathons many years before, during and after her pregnancies) and that helps her have the gumption to always be on the go with the girls. Whether its during the school year or during vacations and weekends, there seems always to be something interesting on the agenda for those two girls. I do not mean to minimize the role of their father, but John is a responsible working man who has to spend a lot of his time closing business for Wells Fargo Bank, and since he is largely commission-based, his time and effort bears directly on his income. So, when he is busy with work, Carolyn is off and running with the girls in tow, doing something interesting and/or fun to engage the girls in whatever strikes Carolyn’s or the girls’ fancy. That’s what makes them a posse, always in the hunt for something and rarely sitting at home getting bored.
Neither of my sons have children yet, so I’ve yet to see how they each react (or not) as parents to their children. I can remember not having any particular point of view about the gender of my children before they were born. Girls or boys didn’t really matter to me either way. Being a man who was raised by a quite masculine mother (meaning she was a career-oriented, sports-oriented woman of the world), and was largely ignored by my father (as were my sisters and all of his other children to one degree or another), I grew up without a particularly acute sense of father/son relationship. We are not talking about a relationship with a father who worked too much and wasn’t around enough or perhaps was dismissive when he wanted to read his newspaper. He left to remarry when I was four and we moved a half a world away from him (literally). It was probably just as well since I expect that the disappointment might have been greater if I had thought he could have been in contact rather than being so far away that it was simply not an option. That was over several years in Costa Rica, but when we returned to the States to Wisconsin, things were not so different and there was no real contact until my mother decided I should spend a little time with him and apparently he had settled in enough to be willing to agree. You see he had had two daughters in his second marriage and as best I could understand at the time, I was his only son. He agreed to take me for a few months if my mother got me out there to California and it just so happened that my Uncle John, who lived in San Diego (a retired Chief Petty Officer in the Navy) was heading west, so I hitched a ride at age eight.
Those few months living with my father was literally the only exposure I had to a father/son relationship and given where he was in his life and his new family, I was just someone to tell to shower daily and eat less. I literally do not remember us doing anything together either as a family or as a father/son duo. After I returned home to the Midwest and beyond, there was not so much as a birthday card or a Christmas telephone call. I was not singled out by any means, that was just where children stacked up in his hierarchy of priorities, and since I had never had that relationship, I didn’t particularly miss it. I guess I got what I needed from my mother. I don’t really even remember feeling fatherless compared to my friends, so I never developed any resentment towards him either. I know that sounds hard to believe, but either I just didn’t need a father or I got my fathering from my mother, which is the explanation I tend to feel is more likely.
As a young adult I had the added burden of my father feeling that a banker son might have some value to him, so he tried now and again to gain some personal advantage by seeking favors from me, which I tried hard to sidestep when possible, but doing so politely as I could. I never had any need to confront or offend him for his deficiencies as a father. It was not an active effort by me, but just sort of came naturally. I still do not know why. What I do know is that once I had my first child, who was a son (Roger), I swore to myself that I would be a better father to him than my father had been to me. I didn’t have much of a standard to compare myself against, but I did want to do a better job. When I separated from my son’s mother, I took him on a father/son trip out west. I rented a convertible and bought us cowboy hats. It somehow seemed like something I would have liked to have done as a child. We went to every amusement attraction between Las Vegas and Los Angeles and I basically did all the things he wanted to do. It was after that trip that I finally found my father/son feelings.
What happened was that I went to see the movie Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner. At the end of the movie, Costner meets a mystical version of his father in his youth on the ball field he has built in his Iowa cornfield. The father does not know that Costner is his future son since he is still a young ball player who doesn’t really know where he is, but has come through the heavenly barrier to play once more on this field. It gives Costner a chance to experience the dreams of his father first hand and when the young version of his father asks if he wants to have a catch, Costner agrees and there is a palpable feeling of a connection between father and son that finally has the ability to be realized. I have never been a fan of fantasy movies and especially not time-shifting movies, but that one scene so deeply affected me that I spent a good five minutes sitting weeping in the back of that theater. It was a cathartic moment for me I guess. I had recently buried my father and I understood the value of having taken care of his final needs in the way I could in real life just as Costner satisfied his mystical father’s dreams in the way he could. it was a powerful moment for me and seemed to wrap up the father/son gap in my soul.
Since then I have raised two sons of my own. Besides Roger, there is the younger Thomas. I have made sure that they have each had ample opportunity to spend time one-on-one with me so that they would not have to find a moment in a movie to fill a gap in their lives as I had. While I will not pretend that I have been the world’s best dad as the plastic trophy in some box of memorabilia says, I do know that I have fulfilled my wish for myself that I would be a better father to my boys than my father had been to me. We all want “better” for our children, so I hope that they feel I have done enough to create that relationship that makes them know that I love them and that they are both as important to me as they see their sister being for her daughters. I trust I have not short-sheeted Carolyn in the process either, but my big concern was to learn to be a father to my sons, and I think that is one job I managed to get done.