For my sixtieth birthday, in May, I got three and half yards of dirt.
Talk about a healthy dose of mortality.
“But it’s also about growth, too,” said Emelie, my wife and mother to two of my four children. Thank God I have her around to set me straight. Now that soil is feeding tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, pumpkins, cucumbers, cauliflower, carrots, Swiss chard and a bunch of herbs.
Possibility, growth, maturity.
Still, as I make this big round-numbered turn into the final third of my life (I’m being generous), thoughts of The End do creep into my mind, especially in the middle of a deadly pandemic that clearly will continue for a while.
“To dust you shall return,” says the Lenten prayer, and that’s most certainly true, but I ain’t quite ready to get “dusted.” So I’ve used that big pile of triple-mix to plant a big garden instead, calling upon the same nurturing instincts that, I’m told, have carried me through nearly 34 years of fatherhood without too much damage to my son and three daughters, or to my already wobbly sense of self-worth.
In fact, I’d say that among all the vagaries and challenges of modern life I’ve negotiated so far, being a decent, involved, loving dad has been, and remains, a path of least resistance.
Not that it’s been easy, nor is it for any guy. Despite all the books on fatherhood out there, there is no panacea, no hard-and-fast roadmap, for negotiating a successful journey through the most daunting and comforting and soul-expanding journey a man can take.
It’s a snap to become a dad: Just toss some seed out there and see what happens (or not, for far too many “slip out the back, Jack” types), but being one, a “good” one … well, that takes grit and grace and, above all, faith.
Take my father, who died a few days after suffering a stroke, at age 76, in 1998. He somehow held on a few days, enough time for most of us siblings to assemble at his bedside and say our goodbyes. He passed several hours after the Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers in his beloved Super Bowl. He and I had bet on the Pack – damn that John Elway and his helicopter touchdown – and I kept our losing ticket in my wallet until it crumbled to, yes, dust.
Though he was baptized Episcopalian, Dad hadn’t darkened a church’s door, except for weddings and funerals, in my lifetime, and probably for many years before I was born. Yet he lived a life of faith, gratitude and sometimes grudging but always evident joy. He married a woman with four kids, which some would say is the definition of insanity, then fathered me and my brother as his 40s set in. He was nothing if not a stalwart patriarch, guided by faith even if he didn’t outwardly state a belief in God. He carried himself with a mix of don’t-mess-with-me authority and sneaky vulnerability – the latter rooted, I believe, in his mother’s suicide when he was in high school. It was a deep scar he never exposed to us until we found out the truth via my uncle, his youngest brother. Shame is a ruthless taskmaster, and Dad never fully shook it.
But he did persevere, combining hard work with a wide-open lust for life. Dad loved broadly and generously, even recklessly. He cussed and cried, yelled and laughed. He gambled and drank and kept some interesting friends, but he also provided for us all, without fail; when he and my mom divorced just as I graduated high school and headed for college, he kept on providing for me and my brother. He went on to find another love and seemed to grow deeper into his own brand of faith.
In my estimation and to my continuing benefit, he kept growing into fatherhood, and manhood, right up to his last days. He taught me the value of respect for others — and, by default, for some higher power he chose not to name but somehow kept in contact with. He gave me a quick-fire temper that brings on a brand of temporary blindness that so many guys recognize, but with it came the capacity to gain a deeper self-awareness in the storm’s aftermath, a brighter path to finding meaningful, healing words of apology, rather than band-aid blurts of shallow shame.
I inherited his complications, his optimism and, I hope, his powerful sense of loyalty to family and friends. And he gave me the foundation to build a life on faith, in whatever form it took through various points in my life. Sometimes that meant a lot of prayer, sometimes sin and repentance, sometimes despair and self-destructive behavior and, eventually, rebirth.
I accept it all, the good and the bad of Dad’s legacy, and he remains atop my personal heap of heroes, who I think of when I think of a man in full, 22-plus years after his death.
Now that I am 60, with kids ranging from ages 33 to 20 – two marriages, two kids each — I spend more time reviewing my own efforts at fatherhood, where I’ve failed miserably, where I’ve somehow hit the mark of mentorship, where I’ve achieved that overused but still honorable goal of loving my kids unconditionally.
And when Father’s Day rolls around, minor “holiday” though it is, I find myself fighting the urge to grade my “performance” as family patriarch, individually and collectively. I don’t believe that any god would want me to keep score, but we’re built to label and limit ourselves with such arbitrary markings, aren’t we? Not exactly the definition of grace-filled living.
There’s no doubt that being a white Christian male, born at the tail end of the baby boom, has strengthened my hand as a father in America, especially on economic and social fronts. It’s folly to deny that I was born on at least first base, more likely second. And I must acknowledge that I passed along my sense of privilege, blatantly or implicitly, through much of my kids’ formative years, even as I also worked to instill in them a sense of common purpose toward the greater good, of sacrifice and empathy and generosity – of moving through mortal life with the tenets of Matthew 25 as crucial mile markers. Of being like my own dad, a man they barely or never knew.
I’ll give myself a passing grade in that class. I’m sure I have a lot of company, especially among my fellow men “of a certain age.”
Of course, we dads have all failed our share of tests. For me, those black marks came through flares of anger and the verbal (but never physical) abuses they ignited; through spates of even inattentiveness, veering dangerously close to indifference, thanks to work distractions and travel; through bouts of self-loathing that would send me in a depressive funk; and through venal, self-involved pursuits to mask or medicate the fear of failure, to numb the pain of parental (and marital) pressure.
I’ve always managed to fight off the guilt, the pangs of inadequacy, but I’ve never done it alone. My wife, friends and, especially, my kids come to the rescue by returning my halting efforts at boundless love, tenfold. Suddenly I’m whole again, the Dad I strive to be, if only until the next wave of humanness washes over me, and the brokenness surfaces.
Still, I’m here, and my family is intact and close.
In their own very different but equally impressive ways, my three daughters comprise the smartest, toughest, most loving and inspiring female sibling triumvirate in Northern Nevada, at least to me (and that’s all that counts, right?). Then there’s my oldest child, and only son, who spent nearly a decade overseas, first as an Army specialist in Afghanistan, then as a private defense contractor in that country and others. I’m beyond proud of him, too, and always have been, even as physical distance and the passage of time threatened to put a strain on our relationship in several ways. I sometimes feel as if I failed him through those crucial twentysomething years, then realize that I had somehow given him, and his sisters, the greatest gift a parent can confer on a child: The freedom to be his or her own person. It was up to me to just get out of the way with love and trust. With my son, as our all-too-seldom conversations via phone or text wound up, we never failed to say or write “I love you.” That’s something. That’s manly stuff, for real.
Now he’s back stateside and we talk or text regularly, even as COVID-19 has caused our physical reunion to be delayed – until this weekend, my first Father’s Day with him in many years. I’m biting the masked bullet, loading up on hand sanitizer and hopping a (hopefully not full) plane to Colorado. We will play a lot of golf, and I look forward to rebuilding some of those father-son muscles – different from those that have blessed me with the strong bonds I enjoy with my daughters, but just as powerful. I welcome that blessing, that opportunity, that gift.
Again, I’m sure many guys my age can relate.
For you younger guys, who either haven’t yet experienced fatherhood, or are just getting started – well, get back to us, will you?
Just don’t wait too long. The dust awaits us all, down the road somewhere. In the meantime, there’s plenty of fertile soil to till, as fathers, and sons, and grandfathers. Thank God.
A slightly different version of this story appeared in the Summer 2020 edition of “Foundations,” the Lutheran Men in Mission quarterly newsletter.
Fatherhood is the experience like no other...Great post, Vic!