But, beyond that emotional support, I often wondered if my father’s presence might have made my actual situation in the world less insecure, might have provided practical as well as emotional supports for me on that precarious path I’d taken. Perhaps he, a thinker and scholar himself, embedded professionally in America’s academic and intellectual worlds, could have found ways to open doors for his unconventionally-achieving son. (The world works that way—many of what breaks I ever did get can be traced back to my knocking on doors that my father’s first cousin arranged for me to be able to approach).
It was not until well after I was older than my father was at the time of his death at age 48 that I stopped having the feeling that it might still matter in important ways –for my current situation in the world-- that I had been left, by my father’s death, without a protector.
Since my children were born –beginning just less than a decade after my own father’s death—the desire to be a father on whom his children can depend has been very close to my heart.
That desire only intensified when the marriage that produced my first two children broke apart, from strife and leaving strife in its wake, subjecting those two young children to stresses and distresses from which I was unable wholly to protect them. When my friends are suffering, I empathize, but the pain I feel for them cannot compare to what I feel if a child of mine suffers. I don’t know how much of that is because of how we humans are wired by nature, and how much is my own make-up. But early on in my experience of fatherhood, the circumstances led me to develop intense habits of investing heavily --in terms of emotion and energy-- in protecting my children.
My third child, from a stable and lasting marriage, has not needed such protection. But I find that his disappointments and his wounds affect me no less than those of his two older siblings. And for him, too, I have a continual protective eye out and a readiness to help clear obstacles in his path.
In all three, I’ve tried to encourage the development of independence, of confidence, of the ability to navigate their own way in the world. But at the same time, for all three, I try to provide whatever counsel, back-up, and downfield blocking will help them reach their goals.
In a way, it’s doing for the next generation what my parents did for me, for both my father and mother were very devoted parents. At the same time, now that my children are adults, this strong protective impulse is also my own form of that well-known parental posture (to which I’ve otherwise been immune) of wanting my children to have what I lacked.
With no one else in my life besides my children do I feel a need to be in some way more than human.
It’s strange: more than most parents, I think, I’ve been open with my children about who and what I am, what I feel and what I think. I’ve not hid from them my foibles. I’ve been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of father, altogether human. But at the same time, I feel embarrassment before them –and before only them—to be this human animal on a trajectory that leads over the hill and downward ultimately into death.
All men are mortal, says the opening premise in the exemplary syllogism. As the passage of time requires me to contemplate the reality that I am a man encumbered by the sober implications of that premise, my heart breaks for my children that I cannot be more than that, a rock for them to lean on forever and ever.
It was not until well after I was older than my father was at the time of his death at age 48 that I stopped having the feeling that it might still matter in important ways –for my current situation in the world-- that I had been left, by my father’s death, without a protector.
Since my children were born –beginning just less than a decade after my own father’s death—the desire to be a father on whom his children can depend has been very close to my heart.
That desire only intensified when the marriage that produced my first two children broke apart, from strife and leaving strife in its wake, subjecting those two young children to stresses and distresses from which I was unable wholly to protect them. When my friends are suffering, I empathize, but the pain I feel for them cannot compare to what I feel if a child of mine suffers. I don’t know how much of that is because of how we humans are wired by nature, and how much is my own make-up. But early on in my experience of fatherhood, the circumstances led me to develop intense habits of investing heavily --in terms of emotion and energy-- in protecting my children.
In all three, I’ve tried to encourage the development of independence, of confidence, of the ability to navigate their own way in the world. But at the same time, for all three, I try to provide whatever counsel, back-up, and downfield blocking will help them reach their goals.
In a way, it’s doing for the next generation what my parents did for me, for both my father and mother were very devoted parents. At the same time, now that my children are adults, this strong protective impulse is also my own form of that well-known parental posture (to which I’ve otherwise been immune) of wanting my children to have what I lacked.
With no one else in my life besides my children do I feel a need to be in some way more than human.
It’s strange: more than most parents, I think, I’ve been open with my children about who and what I am, what I feel and what I think. I’ve not hid from them my foibles. I’ve been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of father, altogether human. But at the same time, I feel embarrassment before them –and before only them—to be this human animal on a trajectory that leads over the hill and downward ultimately into death.
All men are mortal, says the opening premise in the exemplary syllogism. As the passage of time requires me to contemplate the reality that I am a man encumbered by the sober implications of that premise, my heart breaks for my children that I cannot be more than that, a rock for them to lean on forever and ever.
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