Last month, I spent Mother's Day getting more and more frustrated - and sad - by the pounding of the "do something for Mom" messages, and I wrote a diary from the perspective of the motherless child.
This morning, I won't let frustration be my muse, but rather longing and love... for I am also many years without my father.
Whereas my mother lived well into her 80s and got to see both my rising adulthood and my nephew's, my father died five days shy of his 60th birthday, when I was barely 20 and my nephew was about to turn 5. I became an adult - really an adult - without Dad around, just at a time I needed him most. To this day, I envy my much older brother and sister (13 and 15 years older), who got to know Dad as an adult - had discussions about life, work, love, politics, and religion as adults do. To this day, my memories of my father are largely snapshots, and to say what my father was like or what he might have believed is almost entirely acquired, not first-hand, knowledge.
And yes, I know there are many who did not know their fathers at all, and so to have a memory filled with moments is better than none at all.
And yet... I recognize the influence of fathers in my life. Maybe because I continue to feel the loss as a dull but constant ache, I notice fathers. I am not looking for a father figure, but I find myself noticing really good fathers, and wondering if mine was good or would have been good for me as an adult.
One of those men is my brother - in my nephew's youth, my brother was loving and playful and stern when he needed to be, full of forgiveness and strength. Now that my nephew is grown, his father is open and understanding (made my nephew's coming out as easy as saying "hey, I baked you some cookies"), offers a sage ear, comfort, and is his friend as well - just yesterday they went to NYC to kick around some museums, see a show, and have dinner - just to be together.
Another is someone very close to me, whom I have never seen with his children, but who speaks of them with a kind of love mixed with awe, gratitude, and pride that gives me pause, and leads me to wonder if my dad felt this way about me. It makes the loss of my own father sharper, but it also makes me happy that there are children out there who experience that kind of paternal love.
And yes, 26 years later, I still miss my dad. I'm surprised sometimes when I am overwhelmed with the grief - tears streaming as though he died yesterday - but what I mourn is perhaps less the loss itself and more the decades I haven't had to get to know him.
Anyway. I promised a song, and I find myself at sixes and sevens over it. I refuse to use the overplayed "Cats in the Cradle". I also won't link to songs like Paul Simon's "Father and Daughter" and Creed's "Arms Wide Open" as they speak of the experience fathers have when they have kids. There seem to be no songs of longing that capture what "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" does. And... Dad wasn't a big music fan, or if he was, I don't know what he liked (my memory of Dad's albums ran more along the line of Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman). However, I do have a memory of Dad and music...
I was little - maybe 6 or 7 - when we went to see The Carpenters at the RPI Fieldhouse. I suspect that Dad was one of the reasons recording devices started being banned in concerts and shows, because he hauled in this rather bulky cassette player and recorded the concert for us to listen to again and again. Of course, one playback revealed that most of what he recorded was coughs, shifting chairs, audience members singing along, and applause - but he was still glad he'd done it.
So in honor of the daddy I knew, the man I didn't, and the men in my life who are fathers, I offer "Yesterday Once More". (FYI - the lyrics are embedded for those who require/desire captions.)
Blessings.