Fatherhood and the Relentless Feeling of Being

What’s it like, being a father? It’s calm and it’s frustrating, perilous and safe, secure and uncertain, all at the same time. Think of it as your favorite piece of sweet candy surrounding a tart nucleus. But most of all, it’s a sense of being.

Being present.

Being honest.

Being strong.

Being wise.

The list goes on and on, but the meaning remains the same. Fatherhood is less about what we do and more about who we are. It rarely announces itself in grand gestures. More often, it takes shape in the shadows, carrying its weight quietly behind the scenes.

Fathers are seen as providers, a mantle we all take up with pride not because it’s expected of us, but because we would move heaven and earth for our children. We fight dragons for them when they are little, then teach them to fight their own dragons as they age. We take off the training wheels from their bicycles so that they learn how to balance themselves when life starts to move too fast. We put bandages on their knees when they fall to teach them that being hurt is not the same thing as being broken.

These are all things that we, as fathers, are proud to work ourselves out of. Soon the dragons become less scary, the bicycle soon turns into four-wheeled versions that grant a modicum of independence, and our children too soon realize that they no longer need us to apply those bandages. All we have left are the thoughts behind the actions. Sometimes that is enough.

Far too long ago, when my daughters were at a texting age, I let them know that text lingo would not sit well with me. I’m old. I don’t get it. “You can text that way with your friends, but when you send me a text, I expect full words and punctuation.” I was met with eye rolls, of course, but after correcting all of the inevitable text lingo they would try to get past me, eventually (if not begrudgingly) they came around. Perhaps one of my proudest moments came years later when one of my daughters thanked me out of the blue. “For what?” I asked, confused. She was thanking me for insisting that she used whole words, whole sentences, hell, even punctuation, when texting.

An actual Thank You. From a child! Proud papa territory right there.

Fathers’ words, fathers’ actions, may go ignored in the moment, but rest assured, our voices ring true in their heads at some point in their lives. And we hope that those words, if not exactly, are passed to their children, and the children following them. Life is fleeting, fatherhood is merely a drop in the bucket of time, but in this sense, we are immortal. We may not be around to reap the fruits of those lessons, those actions, those moments of presence, but the values linger. They persist.

I’ll leave you all with another quote imprinted on me from my own father.

“You eat your food and play with your toys; you don’t play with your food eat your toys.”