father's day

So a hundred years ago, a woman was sitting in a Methodist Church and, listening to a sermon, came up with idea for this day. I am sure Hallmark, restaurants, makers of grills and Stanley tools are grateful to her, or should be.

As for me, of course, I am grateful to my dad, but it wasn't an easy path to get to this place of gratitude. From childhood pics, I think I was loved, but I remember the pre-adolescent and teen years when we butted heads. I got the raw end of his hands or a paint paddle when I "talked back", but it didn't stop me from talking. I diverted my father needs to Mr. Eisner in junior high and high school and his advice to me, given as he drove me home from babysitting his three girls, helped me avoid common teenage mistakes. It was also Mr. Eisner who got me a teacher's scholarship, but first I had to "serve time" at the community college for a year to prove to my dad that I was worthy. He also made me take out a school loan which, he told me years later, he had always planned to pay off if I finished college, which I did. But our tumult was yet to continue: when I moved in with Mark, Dad wrote me a scathing letter and "disowned me." A year later, he didn't come to our desert wedding but he did pay for a post-wedding dinner when Mark and I went back to Illinois after the wedding. A year later, he "came 'round" with Mark when we were both in graduate school in DeKalb and Dad got to see that a) his son-in-law was a hard worker and b) life was going to change no matter how Dad tried to stop it.

Fast forward six years and Mark became a dad. I was pushing parenthood a couple of years before that but it wasn't just "happening", so the path toward adoption was added to our options and it was the path that opened up for us. Mark took paternity leave from the UA and tended to Aron with me in those first three weeks. Always a workaholic, devoted motorcylists and, until a fall, avid bicyclist, it wasn't natural for him to be a Dad. I don't think he had a very strong role model for the responsibilities outside of income-earning, but, partly because Aron was such a happy kid, being with his son became a joy-relief for Mark. They had Saturdays at Micky D's, archery practice, golfing (for a brief while), and we three always enjoyed movies, Star Trek and X-Files tv shows.

As with me and my dad, the teenage years were troubled, but, as Aron moves toward thirty, I see traits learned from his dad have emerged: commitment to work, loyalty to family and friends, passion for sports (different than Mark's avid interest in motorcyling, but still "a guy thing).

I tremble to think how I could have been a mother without Mark as a father. If my dad had checked out early in my life, my mom would have had to be a different person, too. I am grateful to them both--to my Grandfather Dice, also, who tended gardens with stoic conviction, although my Grandpa Fonte is a detached memory of the smell of beer on his mustache and anger that swirled around his living room chair.

Men are different from women. The role of father is different, still, from that of a mother. Memories of both, if one is lucky, form a stability for a child, even when she/he herself has entered post-middle age.