Father’s Week #1: Paying My Respects

I see them clearly, sitting on porches in rockers or straight-back chairs, straw hats pushed back from their foreheads in the summer, making small talk, sometimes ambling out to somebody’s car to fill half-empty co-cola bottles with whiskey hidden under the front seat. They were largely silent and ineffectual and they were the father figures in my young life.

While they sat and rocked and sipped, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and great-grandmother bustled around in hot kitchens, getting food on the table and talking non-stop about family problems and family news and family decisions. The women were lively. They laughed, they knew what was right and they knew what mattered — each other, us kids, people long dead, good food, home. The women in my life I loved and respected.

The father figures I loved, for the most part. But I didn’t respect them. They were irrelevant to the emotional fabric of our lives. Beside the women who ran the world as I knew it, they seemed colorless and weak. So it is little wonder that I’ve been unable to sustain a healthy relationship with men. I learned early to discount men as relationship equals.

In this week leading up to Father’s Day, I’ll try to re-vision the role of men in my life by looking at the ones who broke through my resistance and became the father figures I’ve needed. Whatever my childhood perspective on the men who influenced me early in life, I was too young to understand the whole story of my family. So this week, I’m going to celebrate Father’s Week by paying my respects to the men in my life.

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