I theorize that our response to Fathers and Fathers Day is usually personal and visceral, I know mine is. My own father was a looming presence in the living room and a frowning menace at the dinner table for the first thirteen years of my life. After removing himself from the lives of his five children, he became an occasional support check and a reminder that his young girlfriend was more important than those children or their lives.
It's not that I learned nothing from Dad. He and I learned animal husbandry and farm work together, raising chickens and goats and a lot of garden dust. He was a good Scout Leader and wilderness guide for all of us. He was politically active and his children have kept that legacy. We also learned that if you needed succor, he just didn't have it in him. That's what Mom was for, Dad just wasn't warm and huggable. He was; however, a thinker and an intelligent man. I thank him for teaching his children how to think and to be introspective.
That habit of introspection became immensely important to me as a father. If you only react to the needs of the day, your children may be fat and happy, but you and they will ultimately fail at life. I have had the great pleasure and annoyance that comes with having children who are intellectually my equal or maybe even my superior. Without the advantage of introspection and forethought, they'd have run amuck and I'd have run screaming. Luckily for parents, children's brains don't grow up as fast as their bodies. You can sometimes get ahead of them.
There is in the modern model of fathers a disturbing trend. Many fathers don't seem to understand the need for ongoing commitment to the process of fathering. Just as children grow physically for the first eighteen years and mature emotionally for several years past that, parents must remain engaged in the process for at least that long. It seems to me implicit in the sex act that genetic combination and new life may ensue. If that's true, someone must be bound to ensure the viability of that new life - that new genetic combination of he and she, our culture requires that both parents be so bound. Men you can't pretend that you have no interest here, after all half the genes are yours. Not only are you required by the laws of nature to protect your genetic heritage, but the cultural norms and laws of your state and country require it as well.
My Father like many others chafed at the need to go on husbanding the children of his first marriage after he remarried and Fathered two more. I can sympathize with the difficulty of his task. He chose to father seven children and I can only suppose that he had the forethought to know the cost of spreading his genes so widely. If he failed to understand these costs, perhaps his IQ was not quite as high as was recorded?
I have had the privilege of paying to protect the genetic heritage of profligate fathering. I would have preferred that the fathers at least acknowledged their debt. Since they haven't, I have felt free to count their genetic contributions as gifts to Clan MacKenzie. I have not felt aggrieved at being able to raise so many fine humans to adulthood. I bask in their reflected achievements and am content.
I have heard from some Fathers that the reason that they don't help more in husbanding is that their (the children's) Mother is a bitch or a whore or you name it. Well there you go, that's perfectly logical. If you don't like some adult who you mixed genes with that's a perfect excuse to starve or ignore your genetic descendants.
The reality of parenting's difficulty is hard to ignore. Parents, Fathers and Mothers, give up much to raise children. Our parents, our schools, our society all fail to prepare us for the work necessary to raise children. That said, there is no reason we shouldn't give our best effort. Remember, these are your own genes you are saving from oblivion. Even if the genes aren't yours, growing up children is eminently satisfying and you can always add them to the clan.
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