Remote Fatherhood
When psychologists plumb the depths of who we are they tend to use easy mechanisms like listing the things with which you might complete the sentence, “I am…..”. There are many things I can come up with to complete that sentence, but none is higher on the list than the answer “a father”. That doesn’t make me especially unique among men, but the priority I place on fatherhood as an institution is perhaps stronger than normal for several key reasons. My own father had a list of priorities that superseded his role as a father and in most ways that fatherly role model was provided more by my hard-working and hard-charging mother than by my father or any other surrogate. That was so much the case that except for one time in 1962 when my mother took the opportunity of her brother John and wife Kitty passing through Wisconsin, heading to Southern California, to ship me off to meet my father, I never really had any male role models to guide me. There were no Big Brother programs or close friends of my mother’s who tried to provide male guidance. And yet, I feel that I learned well how to engage in all the manly pursuits and assume the traditional male roles. Most of that was due to my mother’s tough-as-nails and no-nonsense approach to getting through the challenges of life. Some was perhaps due to general reading, TV and movie awareness (everyone gets more and more of these influences from the media). And whatever else was needed to make me a reasonably well-rounded modern man came to me from my own common sense and intuition. I know the outcome of an issue like fatherly tendencies is highly subjective, but I feel like I got what I needed to be a responsible father.
My father was almost entirely absent from my life from age four until age eighteen (other than that few months in 1962), with nary a birthday or holiday greeting. It did not create a gap in my psyche, it was just not something I got or expected or knew to expect. When he did show up it was almost better had he not since it involved unmet promises, flamboyant trinket gifts with little or no thought behind them and unreasonable requests for help for his benefit. Even his eventual death was less about the loss to me than about my extracting from the obligations that fell suddenly into my lap, a sense of closure and giving in order to feel that I had somehow risen above the need for receiving benefits from the relationship and could be gracious in my settling of his affairs despite his abject lack of fatherly involvement. In sum, my father was an anecdote and perhaps a syncope, as Good Will Hunting might say when he quotes Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in court.
What my father did most decidedly do for me was make me serious about trying to be a better father to my children. That is no small thing. In fact, as I have thought about it, I believe it might be the most important thing he ever gave me. Given that I can only recall and point to one set of gold sombrero cuff links from him, it wasn’t much of a contest but it is a meaningful bequest nonetheless. My father was married many times and I was far from the only child that he left in his wake like so much flotsam and jetsam. I went through great angst when my thirteen year first marriage came to an end when I was thirty-five and had two small children. I knew my strong-willed and resilient wife, Mary, would be fine. I was most concerned about my son Roger and daughter Carolyn. Outwardly they both said they were and looked fine with the upcoming familial arrangement, but I knew them well enough to know that the feelings were down too deep to see. Nonetheless, it was never lost on me that it would take a consistent effort for many years on my part to make them actually be as fine as they pretended to be at the time. I was next most worried about my eternal soul since I knew that I would never forgive myself if I did to my children what my father had done to me, which was best defined as a passive abstinence of love.
The effect was that I made sure to have a home with a specifically designed room for them both and a commitment to see them every moment allowed by our joint custody arrangement. While Mary and I always coordinated easily and got along very well with regard to splitting time with our two children, there was a greater issue of wrangling for more time with me moreso than less time. Weekends and dinners were easy, holiday time was more challenging, but we both respected the times that the other cared about the most (Mary, for instance, was always very Christmas-focused), so it generally worked well from what I could tell. If there were negative manifestations on the kids of our separation they were understandable and manageable, like Carolyn’s upset whenever I sold a house and moved to another. There was Roger’s desire to rent as many videos as he could carry since his mother had a strict one video rule.
But one mistake that young parents often make is that they think that when the birds fly from the nest that they no longer need parenting…even if and when they themselves become parents. This is just not the case, and the needs and guilts of the absentee parent linger on for a lifetime. No matter how well I have tried or have done as a father, there is the ever-present “what have you done lately” that keeps the role fresh and poignant well after the college tuition bills have stopped. In fact, strangely enough, I think that the more effort you have put into your job as a father along the way, the more your children turn toward you for ongoing advice and counsel or even help of a more tangible sort, whether for better or worse. I think a notable and negative recent example is the Mary Trump story of how Uncle Donald tried to get his father to sign a codicil to his will on his deathbed so that it could favor Donald, who had come to rely on the good graces and wallet of dear old dad.
Fred and Donald had the benefit of always living very close to one another no matter how distant they may have been spiritually. I have always tried to stay resident near my children until this year and now with COVID, we have been apart for most of this year (I last saw them in MYC in early March and before that in early February). Nevertheless, I speak with all my children at least several times per week and I suspect that is even more frequent than when we were closer physically. It is toughest during the holidays, but absentee fatherhood has always had to make allowances and I feel like we are getting through this as best we can. I actually feel more engaged with my children’s lives today than I felt a year ago. That may be no more than a wishful thinking, but I think its true.
My kids are very open with me (I think) and are not hesitant to tell me when I need course correction. One just did so this morning and I know that one other gave me a few pointers not too long ago. I would like to think that they all call me when they are troubled (I know my sons do, but my daughter checks in with Kim first and only then calls me). I attribute that less to my being an unapproachable bear than to Kim be angelic and an easy listener and counselor. I suspect that absentee fatherhood all these years, combined with my gift from dear old dad make me more prepared than most for the new era of remote fatherhood we are all forced to work through at the moment.
One of your best!