Father's Day is complicated

Like many people, Father’s Day is a complicated day for me. I’m a proud father of four kids and I’ve known I wanted to be a parent since I was about 10 years old. On the flip side, I have a biological father whom I’ve never met and a step-father, who was around my entire childhood, who was and is an alcoholic. I take considerable care to stay away from services that could potentially connect me to my biological father and I’ve been estranged from my step-father for years.

I’m not afraid to open up about my parental situation, I often see it as an opportunity to show people there are many who have similar experiences and its okay to talk about it. Normally I don’t think about it much, its just kind of a thing I know exists but it doesn’t come up much. However, in the last month I’ve been thinking about it more.

What triggered the father figure contemplation was a conversation I had with my wife where I asked her if she had any men in her life who made a good impression on her growing up and who she considers to be good men. She asked me the same question and I had to think about it for a long time.

Honestly, the answer is no.

I can’t think of anyone in my life, as a child or now as an adult, who I consider to be a positive influence on me as a man. I have many, many examples of men who I work diligently to be the opposite, but not one I would say is anything close to a positive influence. I had grandfathers, one who was fine to me as a child and another I hated with an overwhelming passion. I have uncles, but not close to any of them. Plus, most of my extended family are a bunch of degenerate junkies. I have a brother-in-law, and a soon-to-be son-in-law, but both are friends not role models. They are good dudes, just a different relationship.

Another reason I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic is I saw my step-father about a month ago. We are still estranged, but he lives in the local area. I saw him in passing, looking more desheveled and intoxicated than ever. It was a reminder of my relationship with him and any father figure in my life, something I hadn’t given much thought recently. His mother, my step-grandmother, passed away in the last week. This also brought up a lot of conflicting emotions and dug up complicated memories. Talking to my brother, who is the biological son of my step father, we both expressed our concerns for what will happen our father figure and how concerned we should be for our personal safety, which is another layer of complicated feelings.

When I speak to my immediate family, as well as my siblings, I consistenly say I wish I could be released from having a father. I wish they would both just disappear so I can don’t have any fathers remaining, so I don’t have to continually fear personal encounters with them. It is odd to want to be a father, while also wishing my fathers would die and relieve me from having one.

I work hard to be a good man and to be a positive male influence on my kids, my siblings, and others around me. I’m the oldest of my siblings, which means I often fill the father figure for them. I try to be a good uncle and fill the grandfather role for my neice and nephew on our side. My wife has a strained relationship with her father and non-existent one with her brother, so I also want to be a positive male figure for her, obviously in a different way.

It doesn’t make me sad, personally. I’m fine with not having a father. It makes me sad for my kids as they don’t have any grandfathers in their lives. But, I also work hard to be a good father for them.

I don’t have a positive ending here, any sage advice, or lessons to teach. It just… is. It, in fact, do be like that sometimes. It just is. There’s nothing I can do about the situation, it just is.

Fathers’s Day is a complicated day.

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