Somebody asked me today if Father’s Day was difficult for me since I don’t really have one. “Nah,” I replied, “Not really.”
After all, I wouldn’t be nearly the hard-ass that I am today if I’d had a Dad around who’d let me be a soft girlie-girl back in the day. In my book, being a hard-ass has come in a lot more handy in my life than being someone’s little princess would have.
Back story: When my parents split up, my Dad left and never looked back. Trying to get him to live up to his financial obligations to three children was a joke, and my brothers and I paid the price eventually, in one way or another, for his neglect.
My mom, like a lot of moms, worked and struggled to keep herself and her children fed, clothed, housed, and in a good school.
My brother Geoff worked paper routes to earn money. My brother Khris and I were too young to work, but many freezing, predawn mornings in Ohio, we were bundled up in fluffy white blankets and tucked into the back seat of the family car my Dad had graciously left behind, while my mother drove Geoff around to deliver the morning papers to our neighborhood.
I can’t imagine how tired my Mom was on those mornings. I can’t imagine how her heart must have hurt to see her oldest son jumping in and out of the car, busting his hump to earn a few dollars. Worrying if he was warm enough, worrying about how he’d do in school later in the day.
I’ve wondered what she thought about during those gray, miserable mornings, while two children slumbered in the back seat and the other made his way through snow drifts and icy front stoops. Stopping in front of homes with “real” families – fathers and mothers – and their children – everyone snug in their beds. What did she think about while the car was idling?
I remember one morning the papers were delivered late to our house and my brother Khris and I, as little as we were, had to stay awake in the back seat, stuffing the papers with sections that had to be added in, and then passing them off to our older brother through the half-open window. I watched him while he blew on his hands to try to keep them warm.
Some of those mornings before we headed out into the cold, Mom would turn the oven on and open its door and we’d stand close in front of it while she dropped homemade Bisquick donut holes into a pot of boiling oil.
My father never knew our struggles. Never knew the nights we didn’t have enough to eat or the times we had blisters on our feet from too-tight shoes. Never knew the terror my Mom must have felt when my brother Khris fell out of the bunk bed in the middle of the night and cracked his skull. Never knew about the time my brother Geoff stole Easter eggs from someone else’s yard so I could have some on Easter morning.
I never knew anything much about him either and I guess I like it that way. I think he must have been a pretty rotten son-of-a-bitch and my life has probably been infinitely better off without him.
I don’t blame a husband for leaving his wife. But I can find plenty of fault with a father who deserts his children. My Dad’s desertion did teach me one important lesson though: even the people who are supposed to love you and care for you the most will only do so as long as it doesn’t get in the way of what they want. The minute that happens, all bets are off.
Color my cynical, but I’m just a realist. I’ve seen this theory born out time and time again … even in the lives of children whose fathers stuck around. I’ve yet to see this theory disproved.
So, no, Father’s Day doesn’t mean a heckuva lot to me. You can’t miss what you never had.