The Men in My Life

Two things I should probably explain about this post. Timing: I’d like to say that I am writing this three days after Father’s Day because I didn’t want to be too predictable. But the truth is that I played a game of football on Sunday and have been in a world of hurt every single moment since. My ears have finally stopped ringing and I can just about move my fingers again, so I thought I’d get this out there, delayed as it may be. The Title: I recently heard that at least three of my friends from high school thought I was gay, so I thought I’d play to their biggest fears (or disappointments?) and lure them here with some salacious homoerotic innuendo. Well, questions about the ambiguity of my sexuality aside, there have been a few men in my life that I am grateful to have been lucky enough to spend time with, and posts in this series will focus on trying my best to articulate my gratitude to them.

My Dad

Whether he believes it or not, my dad has been a powerful force of good in my life. I believe that he carries with him an extreme and unnecessary burden of guilt for what he considers to be the ‘failure’ of his first family, but my brother and I keep trying to assure him – with words and deeds – that he did a stand-up job. The simple fact is that marriage is hella difficult – and getting married in your late teens / early twenties during the 1960s could not have made that challenge any easier. I often try to compare the timeline of my parent’s lives with my own, and I’m amazed that they lasted as a couple as long as they did. My dad got married (I think) at age 21 or 22. He and my mom had my brother as soon as morally possible after that, and I followed 20 months after him. That means that my Dad became a father for the second time at age 24ish. And (we all know that I’m crap at math) that means that by the time he was the age that I am now, I was 16.

I think about two things. First of all, what kind of father would I have been at 24? The undeniable answer to that question is: SHIT. In fact, I would have been a shit father well into my mid-30s, and there is a strong possibility that I may yet prove to be one in my early 40s. But the fact is that at 24, I was JUST out of college, completely unglued, still very much a child in terms of my ability to exist in ‘The Real World’ and very very much an idiot who would have sucked at being responsible for any ONE else, much less any three. To be willing and able to support a family at that time in your life is nothing short of saintly sacrifice. Of course, I also remember that being a parent in Miami in the 70s was a different kettle of fish than perhaps it is now – I don’t intend to enlist my kids at 7am on a Sunday morning to clean up after any all-night crazy-ass raves by the pool. The other thing I think about is how well I’d handle having a 16-year-old (and an 18-year-old) child at this point in my life. I think I can answer this one a little more positively – part of me even thinks that having a 16-year-old now would be better (for them and for me) than having one at age 52, which is what age I'll be when my daughter will be a debutante. I won’t be nearly as cool or as able as my dad was when I was that age – and here’s the photo to prove it. That’s me, aged 18, just about to do myself an injury that would haunt me for the next 22 years. Did YOU know that if you don’t boogie-board properly, you can end up with your ankles wrapped backwards by your ears as the sea tosses you from side to side like a piece of kelp? That’s the lesson I learn in about 20 minutes after this picture was taken. Anyway... that's my dad!

Now, like every other human being on the planet who ever was or ever will be, my dad has made some monumental mistakes in his life. One of the first ones that I can remember was the very first meal he ever tried to cook my brother and me after separating from my mom. At that point in his single life, ‘cooking’ wasn’t one of his strongest suits, having previously had a wife who was a skilled homemaker. Dad had no concept of what it took to take things from raw to edible, and his first attempt at microwaving some hotdogs for us one night demonstrated that lack of knowledge perfectly. As the burnt-out solid logs of meat literally smouldered on the plate, I think all three of us began to understand the different roles we’d played in our family to that point; Dad’s was certainly not ‘cook’. Unlike the 1980 Enjoli perfume woman, he may have been able to bring home the bacon, but he could not, in fact, fry it up in the pan.

But, if I’m honest, I think that making mistakes – sometimes BIG ones – is part of what being a role model is about. No one is perfect; anyone that presents themselves as someone who is is either lying, or selling something (or both). No one lives their entire life without wishing they’d done at least one or two things differently. And, after the sometimes impossible platitudes with which we’re all meant to be guiding our life, which is the more useful lesson to learn: ‘never make a mistake,’ or ‘learn from the mistakes you make’?

Whatever Dad’s mistakes have been, it seems unbelievably pompous even to consider that I would need to ‘forgive’ him anything. He is a hard worker, an honest person and someone who cares deeply about doing right by himself, his family and his faith. He has a strong (sometimes ironic) sense of moral absoluteness, and can be commended for having values to which he tries his best to adhere – even if those values are often more conservative than my own. He has given me many gifts, from my scrawny chicken legs to my sense of humour, and I am grateful for them all. The other bits, the bits he sometimes seems so ashamed of, were lessons to me, too, and I cannot help but be selfishly grateful for the mistakes he has made (and has been able to recognise as such) so that he’s then been able to encourage and to enable me to avoid some (not all) of them.

If that is not what being a father is all about, then I don’t know what is – and my kids could do far worse than to have a father who tries as hard as he does to live, laugh, love and learn as best he knows how.