New Son Provides Chance to Right Family Wrongs

I was 14 years old when I caught my father with another woman. It was the ninth grade and I was experimenting with cutting classes. I came home late one morning giddy with the thrill of my deception only to discover a greater deception unfolding.

My father hadn’t gone to work and the “other woman” was skirting out the back door. Although I didn’t catch them in the act, it was obvious what had occurred just minutes before. For years, my father never admitted it.

He didn’t have to. When I was 17, he left my mother, sister and me to move in with that very same woman. Looking back, I see that his departure was inevitable. My father never beat me, never abused me emotionally or physically, but he was rarely there for me or the rest of us either.

It’s all immaterial, except that now I have a son, just 1 year old, and suddenly I am asked to be a father.

The task is tough and the stakes are high. I’ve seen how a father can devastate a family. I’ve felt the hurt of abandonment. I can never claim ignorance if I fail as a father. And I want nothing more than to be a good one.

I start with one strike against me--I share vicariously my father’s guilt. My father was known in our neighborhood as the adulterer, the deserter. I will always be my father’s child. Through high school, although I was no different than other boys my age, mothers warned their daughters about me. He’s his father’s son, they said. Beware the father’s son.

I did for many years, in fact, have a terrible time with commitment. I feared commitment because it meant confronting the same weakness in me that I detested in my father. And I feared breaking up with whomever I was dating because I sensed that breaking up would be an admission of guilt. It was a strange Catch-22 that kept me in limbo for years until I resolved it with the help of my wife.

No sooner had I adjusted to married life than my wife became pregnant. I didn’t want a son at first. I was afraid of failing as a father in a father-son relationship and hoped for a daughter.

Why I thought it would be easier to father a daughter I don’t know. As the gods would have it, we were blessed with a beautiful baby boy. From the moment of his birth, I never regretted his gender.

But I was left suddenly to define a new relationship. How do I love him? Discipline him? Befriend him? Quickly I discovered that, like many men, I had no role model on which to pattern my own try at fatherhood. I was on my own.

I may have yearned for my father’s guidance when younger, but I missed it more now when the cameras began rolling and I lacked a director for my most important role.

Maybe I can forgive him for fleeing the family with another woman, but I don’t know if I can forgive him for ill-equipping me for fatherhood. In my mind, that was his greatest sin.

As I grow older and see the ways of the world, I understand just how serious a transgression it was. Sons are like their fathers. My father was like his father, who possibly was like his father before him.

To be a good father, I must halt a tradition of benign abuse that has governed generations of men in my family, intelligent men. For all I know, this tradition is etched in my genes and all my attempts to reverse it will be in vain.

But I must try. I have no choice. Raising my son will be my lifelong challenge, my chance to be a quiet hero.

Without my son, I would have passed through life never knowing whether I had the strength to undo my father’s harm.

And so I play with my son, crawl alongside him, change his diapers, feed him strawberries, laugh with him, cradle him in my lap and pray.

I pray I can change our little family history. Pray I can learn to be a good father without the benefit of a teacher. And pray that the power of my will can overcome the unseen forces attempting to guide my destiny.

My son, of course, is oblivious to all this. When he grows up and has a son of his own, I hope he remains oblivious to it.

I hope that being a good father will come naturally to him because I was a good father. And I hope my dilemma will be as alien to him as the thought of having a good father is to me now.