Oh, Dad, Dear Dad

Remembering the Real Father

On this Father’s Day I want to write about my father. Not in the Hallmark way: “you taught me all I need to know about how to be a man.” Not in the Facebook way: “We had this wonderful celebration of Father’s Day; such love!!” 

Not in a traumatized, angry way, either: “My Dad got drunk, slapped my mother around, yelled at us, and fell asleep in front of the TV set and then he ran away for the rest of my life.”

The Hallmark and Facebook versions are often evasions, avoiding the inevitable shadows in our lives. Trauma makes good C&W songs and news stories but fails to capture the way most of us learned from our fathers or the things they taught us. Each of us lives with dad’s shadows and his gold. We learn lessons he wanted us to learn and we learned the things he didn’t know he was teaching. We reject him and we mirror him. If we are lucky, in the end, we forgive him.

For male children, like me, these lessons are often about what we learn about maleness and manhood. The model a father sets for becoming an adult male can be complicated. 

I grew up in the west where the model around me was John Wayne. A man was strong, rode tall in the saddle, was outdoors most of the time, was very silent and contained, and defended the weaker women and children. He shot first and asked questions later. And he never cried.

My father didn’t ride a horse, camp, fish, hunt, play sports, swagger, or carry on. Thinking it was what a dad should do, one day he gave me a .22 rifle and took me to the park for target practice against soda bottles. It never happened again. I don’t own a gun.

As a teacher and academic administrator, he wore suits and ties most of the time. He taught his whole career at one college, until he retired at 70. I started in teaching but left it for the political and policy world. He was a churchgoer; I became one, but only until I was 19.

He was an intellectual, a professor of English, regularly correcting his family’s grammar and speech. Used full sentences; spoke in paragraphs; never let the offensive “uh” interrupt the flow. Same here.

He was beloved, admired, and celebrated in our hometown. A Rotary member and active citizen, he was invited to run for Congress; he declined. He was passionate about theater; acted on stage all his life into his 80s. The college named its theater after him. Everybody knew who he was.

Surely a Hallmark candidate, you say. So, let’s move to the shadow lessons.

He had an extrovert’s presentation, but completely fit the stereotype for the emotionally buried male. Reason, and only reason, was the way to relate to the world.  He was one of those fathers who never told their children “I love you.” When I was about 11, he told me one of his proudest achievements was learning to control his anger. When I was sad, frightened, or upset, he would reach into his basket of memorized religious quotations to say “this too shall pass.”  His version of comfort; my version of unacknowledged feelings.    

As I aged, I began to wonder about his passion for the stage. What lives, what feelings was he living there, through some other character. Were his own feelings safer expressed this indirect way? Were they easy to leave behind when he came home?

Like many fathers he was devoted to his work, at the price of time with his family. He attended academic conferences, traveling frequently across the continent. His gifts on his return were often a soap or candy bar, provided free by his hotel. I yearned for his return; waited expectantly in the pine tree outside simply for his walk home from the office.

The most complex shadow lessons from my father (and my mother) went to the core of “manhood.” They were about gender and sexuality. My father grew up in a rigid, judgmental, moralistic Mormon family in the early 20th century. Gender and sexual confusion were very present for him, as his diaries from ages 16 to 30 reveal. He was attracted to males, but ashamed of these feelings. He worried about not having girlfriends and found dealing with females awkward. He yearned for marriage as a way of quieting his father’s and mother’s concern. He lived through a short, loveless first marriage; his second was very long – 59 years and three kids.

Through all 59 years, they battled over gender. My mother was the John Wayne-type western woman. She schlepped the three of us camping, hiking, fishing.  Dad never came. She built three houses, laid the flagstone and the cement block walls, could saw, drill, hammer with the best of them. Things Dad never did. They were both shocked when my brother, the model of athletic ability and popularity, came out as gay in 1960.

They argued over gender until the day he died, exchanging angry notes (which I only saw after they were gone).  He was “too feminine,” and she was “too masculine.”

Occasionally the fight would spill out. I can still hear my mother saying, as she often did, “why do I have to wear the pants in this family?” It was not because she preferred jeans (she did), but because Dad was not doing what she thought a man should do, including teaching me to be a man. 

Gender confusion galloped through our family.

The gold in this gender shadow lay in Dad’s gift to the gay and lesbian world. 

As he lay on his deathbed in the hospital (on whose board he had served), with the immediate family gathered around, the door to his private room opened and two, tall, slender, young men walked in, tears in their eyes. I asked them to leave; “he’s dying,” I said.  

These two gay men had come to pay their respects to the man who had founded the local chapter of PFLAG – Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Who had welcomed and advised them when their families or loved ones shunned them, helping them through times of great stress and sorrow. 

He had counseled my high school girlfriend when she came out as lesbian years later and was disowned by her strict Methodist family. He was expelled from his beloved Presbyterian Church when the new, evangelical pastor learned he had been teaching classes on homosexuality, with permission, in the basement. 

All of us honored this gift of understanding, love, support and empathy he bestowed more on others than on us.

When he died, I kissed his forehead and said, not for the first time, “I love you Dad,” knowing he could no longer turn quietly away without responding.

I learned many lessons from this complex history. To value reason and thought. To speak smoothly, authoritatively. To work hard. I learned a love of language, of poetry, of acting, all of which enrich my own old age.

I also learned to bury my feelings until they scarcely existed and then, painfully, over years, to let them show, gold and shadow.

I am learning slowly to build my relationship to family. To forgive myself for my own inadequacies as a father. To grow into my own, more fluid sense of my gender (masculine, feminine, both and neither). To speak with my real voice, feel and show gratitude, compassion, and vulnerability.

Not to be a better man, but to be more fully human.

Parenthood is hard and parents are imperfect. Hallmark and Facebook don’t show that. I valued and loved my father. He was a real person, not a greeting card. There are good lessons to remember. Tolerance, the ability to grow. There are things to forgive and things to cherish. Perhaps that is the ultimate lesson.