Sometimes I feel like a fatherless child

Happy Father’s Day.

The bullet points of my personal life can look pretty dismal. Relationship breakage and all that. I’m not going to point fingers — at this stage of my life, all the fingers point back at me. But I do want to say that it’s only in the last half-dozen of my 57-and-counting-really-fast years that I’ve begun to catch a glimpse of the gaping hole left by a father who wasn’t and never will be the man I admire most in the world.

He wasn’t a bad man. Just a seriously broken man. The problem is, to a girl who is 5 or 7 or 10 or 14, “seriously broken” can look a lot like “bad” when trying to look up to the man called father. I’m grateful now to understand his brokenness and to have sympathy and sorrow for him.

But I still wish I could look back and see signs that he was the leader of our family. That he was a kind man. An admirable man. A man of integrity or courage or strength. I wish I could look back and see that I’d learned what to expect of and believe about men from someone else. I wish I could look back with gratitude for a different kind of role model. Instead, I spent a good bit of my childhood hating myself for believing I was so much like him. I dragged those beliefs with me for a long time and let them drive a lot of my behavior.

So for all of you men who are making a real effort to lead and love and leave a legacy for sons or daughters, nieces or nephews, your best friends’ kids, even the young people you mentor at work, thank you for everything you do. You don’t have to do it perfectly. Just do it from a place of love and integrity. Happy Father’s Day.

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