I was touched by the words and photo with this post about fathers and wanted to make mention about some of the fathers in my life, both past and present.
My father is still alive. He is 74 years old. He had a major hemorrhagic stroke 6 years ago on June 6. We are sure he has had other smaller strokes since then because his cognitive function has declined. In the beautiful photo in the post that I have linked to there is a 78 year old man holding his great grandson. I doubt that my father will be alive when his great grandchildren are born. My son is 20 and is not currently involved, nor is he in any hurry to have children.
My great grandfathers had all died before I was born. I got to know two great grandmothers, one on my mother's side and one on my father's. One of my paternal great grandfathers was a lieutenant in the Czar's army before coming to the United States, where he would work as a butcher. During the Depression he would give people meat and tell them to pay him back when they could. According to my father, every single one of them made good.
One of my maternal great grandfathers was a farmer in upstate New York. He ended up developing septicemia after gouging his arm on a nail, and this killed him.
My paternal grandfather was a veterinarian, working primarily with large animals. He worked for many of the racetracks around the New York area. He is the grandfather that I knew best. He died when I was twelve from a heart attack. He was 64. He had scarlet fever in childhood, which weakened his heart at an early age.
I did not know my maternal grandfather well. I mostly remember him sending me things from his vacation home in Florida, which would become his permanent home in the last years of his life. He sent me shark's teeth and other such things. He was somewhat estranged from his own children and thus not very close to his grandchildren either. He left my grandmother for another woman while my mother and aunt were still in high school. My grandmother had a nervous breakdown, and so the household tasks fell to my mother, who was the eldest. My aunt rebelled and ran wild. She recalls my mother locking her in her room and my aunt sneaked out the window to go driving around with her boyfriend.
My father has a good soul but a propensity for driving other people crazy with his obsessiveness. I always felt like I could never do well enough to please him. The truth is that nobody, including himself, can ever do well enough. Unlike me, he would not, and at this point probably cannot, acknowledge that he has a psychiatric issue: obsessive-compulsive disorder. My father used to come into my house unannounced and start picking things up and throwing things out. The one positive to the stroke, I'm sorry to say, is he can't just come over any more. I hated when he would do this and I would end up screaming at him. This was also in the days before I knew I was bipolar and began taking Lithium, so I would really lose it. I have some fond memories of my father, but this is not one of them.
My ex husband is creating a huge chasm between himself and our son by his behavior. I have warned him that his actions are having negative consequences on his relationship with his son, but he won't listen. My ex husband quit his job near to 8 years ago now. I told him not to quit unless he had another job, but he did. He hasn't worked since then. For a while he was helping his aunt and uncle in Montana and then he came back here. He had noplace to live. He asked if he could stay in the spare room "for a couple of months." This was back in December. He is due to go back to Montana in July because we can no longer tolerate his presence. Our son at this point refers to his father as "a whacko," and says that when he has kids he doesn't think he wants them to meet their grandfather. He is ashamed of the fact that his father really hasn't worked in 8 years. He says that when he was in high school and people asked what his parents did, he would say "my mother works night shift at a nursing home." If they pursued and asked, "what does your father do?" he would say "he work(ed) at the newspaper," not enunciating the "ed" part of "worked" clearly. The thing is, we have tried to get him to go into counseling, and if he lifted a finger to help around the house it would be different. He doesn't. And while I may be Oscar Madison's spiritual daughter, this man is more than a slob, he is the most socially inappropriate individual you could ever imagine: scratching, farting, belching, spitting...
I can't wait till he leaves. And I did warn him that unless he cleaned up his act, his relationship with his son would suffer.
My brother never had any kids, but I feel the need to mention him. Because of him, there are people whose kids are still in this world with them. He is a firefighter/paramedic and he has saved a lot of lives. So in a sense when we celebrate father's day, we should give thanks to those people who allow fathers to have more time with their kids--whether those people are fathers or not.
Hopefully your relationships with your fathers are more good than bad, or if not, hopefully there has been a decent surrogate father figure in your life. If neither of these are true, then I salute you for having had to parent yourself. You did a better job than you could imagine, I'll wager.
Cheers.
