father, the lesser

My dad(/uncle,) was fair in as much as he tough-loved us all consistently. My years venturing forth on my own was a strange time, to be sure. I had just joined the Air Force when his wife, (a mother figure to me,) passed away. I spent the next two years in japan while my dad, my sister/cousin, (his daughter,) and my brother adjusted to life at home without her. I still don’t know what happened. To this day I hear references to that time but it is all a confused blur to me.

I imagine my dad adjusted to sleeping in a bed alone after nearly 20 years of sleeping with this one woman. I guess my sister got used to the idea of not having her mother around, her best friend, her partner in crime, her kindred older self. I assume my brother, who was 15 at the time, was bewildered and came to see the world as harsh and unforgiving. I bet he was a little angry.

Two years later I returned home and found my dad had just met the woman who would become his second wife. All his attention turned to the subsequent courting. My brother had been involved in some brushes with the law while I was away and he was absorbed in the gang culture represented by his artists of choice: NWA. My sister seemed an alien in the house. She came and went randomly and when I was there, the house seemed overrun by men in contrast to the effeminate place it had once been, so tidy and laden with country décor. And this was not when the tough love began, but it may be when it flourished.

My sister and Carol, my dad’s new wife, clashed from Day 1. Soon my sister fled to her grandmother’s then later to the beaches of North San Diego County. She was always attracted to the beach culture and the expanse of the ocean somehow seemed appropriate for her. For the next 10 years she was like a corked bottle bobbing in the ocean, washed up on the sand and carried back out by the tide, here and there, untethered, alone, betwixt the blinding light of the sun above and the utter blackness of the sea below.

I was perhaps more independent than my siblings from the outset. After all, I had been eldest. It was to me to at least act as if I knew what I was doing. I feigned man of the world as obviously as the cowardly lion feigned tough guy. I was lost. Lost like a child on the side of the freeway. Lost like paralyzation. I was out in the world, at school, attending parties, playing ball and trying to speak to people, but just lost, really, like everyone else.

My dad gave me tough love. He stayed in touch, every so often. When things went bad for me, he and Carol allowed me to move back in. I borrowed perhaps $200 one time and never paid it back and it hung over my head, (whether of my doing or my dad's, I'm not really sure,) always. When he got mad at me for drinking and taking Tommy down to my school dorm room, he took my car and we did not speak for about 2-3 months.

I do not understand tough love. It is too logical and too selfish for my tastes, too indiscriminate and undiscerning.

Now I have a son and I imagine myself in my dad's shoes. I imagine Mark, like my brother Tommy, going to prison, and I feel queazy and dizzy. I imagine going to him and screaming out at the system. I imagine my eyes loosening in my skull and leaking wildly, my hands grabbing at chunks of my own chest, tanking clumps of flesh away, clumps of me, and falling to my knees and to my back. I imagine remembering, the boy as he is today, so tiny and frail and demanding and helpless, the boy as he would be in grade school, so hopeful and energetic, the boy as a teen filling in the parts of his person that laid dormant, the boy growing to fullness, in his 20s, studying and playing hard, living, loving and learning, considering, and I feel a sense of failure, the disconsolation of the void in my life's work. I imagine feeling horrified. I imagine all the blame I would place on myself and knowing I would deserve every bit of it. I imagine dying in increments every time I would think of my son imprisoned, every time I recalled any aspect of him.

To actually live with knowing your son committed a crime and went to prison deservedly, is to know failure. Still, this is not an indictment of my Father, who took my brother in to his home to raise him as his own son when the boy was six years old, out of altruism. Those six years were filled with plenty of living, too. Tommy lived with various foster families numbering in double digits. He was discovered by one foster father crying near to his fallen foster mother, who never recovered from stroke. He also had an addiction problem. (At birth.) He kicked heroin in an incubator.

So it is understandable that Tommy grew up and had some issues around living within the law. I mean, it is our nature, right? A certain percentage of us have some problems with the rules at some point in time, and, to say nothing of justice systems, at least more than half of us deserve it and there's always those who got away with it. Right? So as much as we have laws and we need laws and laws, in some respects, qualify societies, it is natural to break laws.

We strive to move forward. Right? We try to be moral and to do what is right and some times we fail and perhaps most times we succeed and when we fall down, we get back up and shake the dust and try, try again, and that is all quite natural, though we may detest the bad. Right?

So, while I won't say my Dad was perfect or that he had no ill effects on any of us kids, I will say I only mean to address what this outcome, this prison-bound son, would mean to me as a father both biologically and behaviorally.

This outcome would be proof of my failure. It would represent my own selfishness and how I did not take the time to nurture the boy and truly teach him how to live, how to make choices, what to consider, what to value.

I think I would go to him, take an apartment outside the prison grounds, build a meager life around visiting hours, apologize to him almost daily, tell him I love him, cry in front of hardened strangers, laugh at myself and maybe cry some more. I imagine the pain being like a cactus I carry in my lap, that I can't drop, that I must hunch over to carry around with me as it sticks and pricks me in the abdomen and forearms and chin and thighs and groin. I would be dead but walking. I would be asleep but writing this life out daily. I would be so sadsorry, sad-sadsorry.

My dad tough loves my brother from afar. He has visited him in a prison in another state 1,000 miles away. Once? My dad was quiet that day, reserved. He was sad and slightly emotional, while also leading with his toughness, his sense of oh well, his sense of let's keep plodding forward because this life happens to you and we're all subject to the filthy fingers of fate, stifling emotions until the last second when the facade opened a crack, as if a jack were wedged in a stone-walled damn but with so much macho pressure it can be held ajar for mere seconds, 5 or 10. No more. Then there is time for clean-up, for recuperation, for adjustment, for composure. My brother and I learned that behavior and we practice it to this day. If there is emotion to be showed, it is because the situation calls for it and it is limited. We do not act out in public or wail in any sense of the word.

My Dad spoke to Tommy occasionally when he was incarcerated. He asked about the weather, general questions about the conditions in the joint, discussed Tommy's favorite teams and how the sports world was unfolding, (so new and different from any other year.) (Please allow me that fine bit of criticism.)

I won't let Mark go to jail. I mean, I just won't raise him in such a way as he ever gets that far away from me and the values I will share with him liberally. This will not happen. It just won't. This is not a mantra repeated in order to increase odds. This is the certainty that parents are and should be responsible.

To those who were natural and full-time fathers, from the infamous fathers of killers who make their appearance on a television newsmagazine or are merely written about but who claim to be the victims of chance, to the more average who were merely absent a lot, or self-absorbed, or bad examples, I indict you. To be known for who you are, is what I want for you. Instead of being allowed to hide behind what is unknown, or behind the notion that you were respectable in tough-loving, instead of being allowed to not understand what it was like to walk in another man's shoes while retaining the personal dignity of society's upright citizen, I would you were known as the lesser.

father, the lesser.

For not taking the time to learn enough to provide your own son with whatever it took to avoid substantial jail time,

father, the lesser.
For not making yourself better, by equipping yourself with the knowledge that would have freed you, and your son, literally,

father, the lesser.
For not reading,

father, the lesser.
For not conveying the importance of intimacy, in word and deed,

father, the lesser.
For lying,

father, the lesser.

For lying by directing him to be straightforward and honest in every action but again and again showing dishonesty with Mother by hiding relationships with other women. For lying by professing to be a superman but then giving into vices regularly. For lying by preaching the ten commandments but then lobbying for unfair laws and seeking loopholes to capitalize on in order to avoid one's fair share towards the common good. For lying by claiming to be of family values but really only displaying selfish values that self serve at every turn. For acting as if it is good and normal to vote for a politician based on his abortion stand, instead of how he is going to affect the masses in serving them,

father, the lesser.
For not being well enough informed about public life and how it affects a person, the son and society, for claiming instead a lack of time but having plenty of time to take in sports or drink with buddies or go to some hollow church to practice a display of self-righteousness worthy of puke, or worse still, laying around watching television,

father, the lesser.
For not actually wanting the best for your son, for nurturing dark feelings of jealousy in comparison to your son,

father, the lesser.
For not intiating conversations on important topics,

father, the lesser.

For playing the victim, for pretending circumstances put you anywhere, ever, instead of owning the fact that you are exactly where you intended to be, (intention being based on your every action,)

father, the lesser.

For not involving a community, for pompously asserting that you knew best when you were guessing and hoping, for enthroning yourself the king of your castle and demanding affection, taxes, utter confidence and loyalty,

father, the lesser.

For thinking that just being there put you in the top 20% of fathers in and of itself when the top 20% is not even close to good enough,

father, the lesser.

For giving gifts and compliments, and for showing up, just to make yourself feel better,

father, the lesser.

For getting to the point where you actually believe you did a fine job as a Father,

father, the lesser.

For accepting gifts on Father's Day,

father, the lesser

For believing in imaginary creatures,

father, the lesser.