The Trilogy, The Fatherhood

Now, I know it's been been a long time...I shouldn't have left you..TIME'S UP, sorry I kept you...Thanks, William Griffin for the inspiration (for the hip impaired, you may know him as The God, Rakim Allah). Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming...


It's been a minute since I was last here, but being a father has been on my mind a great deal lately...The cost of fatherhood...The cost to the child of a father absent in the physical most of the time, though he is present in the heart, soul & mind...Is it ever enough...Escaping the shadows of my past, mistakes made by my male life giver, seemingly repeating themselves in obtuse ways through me...manifesting themselves in my relationship with the one I cherish most...I am never free of these thoughts & feelings.

I have been thinking about what exactly it is for me to be a father. Sure, I helped to make my ManChild over some 9 years ago, but what does it mean to be his father? Certain circumstances in my Life, both with his mother & within me, have occurred, conspired,...whatever...to ...well...Fact is, I feel like I am missing out in the best years of my son's Life & as a result, missing out on mine as well.

I have not walked him to school on the first day of classes since the first time he ever went to school...have never taken him to a karate practice or a baseball game... But, I have taken him across the United States on trips, taken & participated with him in his first basketball camp, took him to his first swim classes & taught him how to cook. His first meal? Spaghetti...He did everything...I just supervised..He was great. When we finally sat down to eat, he asked me "Dad, is it good?", to which I replied "Baby, it's the best thing I have ever eaten!". It was nearly as priceless as the slow, sly grin that crept across his face upon hearing my pleasure with his culinary skill:)!

Maybe I say all of this to justify my absentee Dad-ism...to try & somehow make myself feel better about the distance, in the many miles between & the heart sounds, between me & one of the few things I feel I have really done right in my Life...A jagged little pill to swallow, yes, but one I have been dealing with & must deal with, at least for now.

The plans are...the plans are what we make when Life is happening, right... That makes me smile... That statement is so true as it relates to my Life. I have birthed some of the greatest ideas & plans, only to see them aborted & strangled out of existence. This has not always happened by some outside forces, as my ego is wont to try & assuage me, but by my own "doing" or lack thereof...

I mean this in no disrespect, but my plan..my goal with my son was to be a better father, drastically different than the one I had...My Dear Ol' Dad (God Bless the Dead)..I wanted to be everything you were not as a father, a parent, a friend, a mentor & guiding light... In many ways, I have avoided it. But, with the distance between my son & myself, I begin to see certain disturbing similarities, no matter how hard I try to ignore them...

I am not physically there for him everyday, to wake him up for school, eat a bowl of cereal with him, take him to school, help him with his homework...go to karate or basketball practice with him, toss a football & play video games with him...I think you get the picture! These facts eat me alive daily. Calling him alot helps some, but offering love, wisdom & support fiber optically or digitally does not a father/son relationship make!

I have this feeling that one day when he's older, I will be confronted with "Why?" & "Where were you when I needed you most?" It is the inevitable...I went through the same with my Dear Ol' Dad, confronting him on who he really was & what he really meant to me... The irony of my situation with my Dad is that he was in the home with me, but I didn't know him. He was emotionally bereft, outside the occasional barking of orders or flashes of passionate anger... He was not involved in my Life at all, truly. I resented him for years...for all of the things we missed out on sharing together when I was younger... That is until one day in my mid-20s when I realized, while looking into the beautifully innocent eyes of my infant ManChild, that I could never expect to change my father into the man, the father I wanted...needed him to be. I chose to begin forging some semblance of a relationship with my father. I could no longer be bitter about not really having a past with him anymore. I had new memories to make, both with him & with my own son... I had to look at tomorrow...and the day after yesterday, to start anew...

Recently, I was privileged enough to view a documentary film short that was nominated for an Academy Award this past year called Hardwood. It is, at its core, a story about the power of redemption & the healing of the bonds between fathers & sons, especially black sons & fathers. It struck me on so many levels...My emotions & thoughts raced out of control. The final scene was particularly poignant. The documentarian's older half brother reads a poem he wrote expressing his feelings toward a father who, all at the same time, had guided & dismayed him in the past, only to be forgiven, despite the scars inflicted. He never actually gave the title, so with all respect due, I will offer it here & re-print his words for you to see:

Painful...Thankful


There are some things I had to figure out...Painful
There are some things I never had to figure out...Thankful

I had to figure out how to be honest to my sons' mother, to be a husband to their mother & not try to own their mother, my wife, my woman...
To keep my hands off my sons' mama...to heal my past pains so that I have room to absorb my sons' pains when they come...
How to be present, even when my money is not right, because he is in high school & there are things that he can't learn from high school buddies about women, fighting, drugs, drinking, Life...that I can't tell him in drive-by lectures.

But, there are things I did not have to figure out, things you taught me well...
I never had to figure out how to get myself up early every morning to work long hours away from my family, to support my family...
How to go on family trips...How to dance around the house with my son...How to hold my son's hand...How to let my son know I am disappointed without breaking his spirit...
How to show my son how to take something apart around the house to fix it & not be able to put it back together again...How to make my son think I am the strongest & toughest man in the world..How to cry in front of my son...How to blame their mother for being late to everything...
How to love my sons in a way that, no matter what I do or not do, no matter where they go or what they may do, they'll always be able to know in their hearts that I love them...

I love them...
I love them...

There are some things I had to figure out...Painful
And there are some I never had to figure out...Thankful

I will allow you to ingest that soul food now & hit you with my own on the subject that I wrote, one in July 1996, on some airline napkins 35,000 feet over LaGuardia Airport in NYC & the other in 2002, courtesy of a rare, but nasty argument with the mother of my ManChild...

Details at 11...

plans are what we make when Life is happening