My Father Is Ill
By RCB
My father is, and has been, ill all of my life. When a father's pain brings to parenting primarily negative influences, who fulfills that father's role?
I am the youngest of three grown children, with brothers four and two-and-one-half years older. It is the middle child in our family of origin, Dave, who is my primary model of fatherhood.
When Dave was six or so, he stated, "When I grow up, I want to own a gas station and give gas away free." The spirit of our great-uncle Eric prompted Dave's remark. Generosity of spirit, the hallmark trait of a good father, spills over from my brother. In his working life, he gives fuel for running the soul in his teaching position at an Indiana liberal arts college. Symbolically, he has fulfilled his gas station wish, with the ubiquitous excess of outlay and low remuneration of academic life. At age forty-five he told me, "I can't believe I get paid for doing what I like to do best!"
Flash back to Dave in his early teens, busy with basketball, a daily paper route, and junior high band. Most Saturdays around ten a.m., the doorbell rings. When I open the door, I see a neighbor boy's face, on equal latitude with mine. "Can Dave come out and play?" Tommy, Ben, or another neighbor kid, at least five years younger than Dave, desire his companionship. More often than not, Dave sets aside chores, or activities of his own choosing. He plays catch at Huntley Park with the neighbor boy until one or the other gets the "Come home now" holler for lunch. Picking up his bat and ball, Dave saunters home, unaware that he has just taught fathering skills to a lad completely outside our family circle.
Upon their marriage, Dave and his wife agreed never to spank their children. Their two boys were the most free of the eight cousins on Dave's side, and many wondered whether their "Let's talk this out," egalitarian approach to parenting would create monsters or men. Today, at twenty-nine and twenty-two years of age, those two sons are definitely men - men with principles, concern for justice, and generosity of spirit. Like their dad, they are equipped to father in exemplary ways.
Where did Dave learn such intuitive fathering, since our own father could not provide it? A partial answer is that he fosters in himself the breadth of mind to see beyond our family of origin. He hones his global perspective and investigative objectivity with ever-lengthening antennae on humankind.
Yet there is more to his fathering. I, his sister, have this incredible certainty in my life: "I am safe with Dave. He will not hurt me, will shoot straight with me, and will never abandon me. He will play ball with me until his dying day."
