Blogocentric Formulations

Fathers

"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"  | Day 3127 Prompt ▼

Fathers. “If there is any immortality to be had among us human beings, it is certainly only in the love that we leave behind. Fathers like mine don’t ever die.” — Leo Buscaglia. What role has time played in your assessment of fathers and fatherhood?

The more I spend time as a father, the more convinced I am that time is the most important aspect of it. We started fostering our kids when my son was almost five years old and my daughter had just turned three months old. Now that my daughter is five and my son is closing in on ten, I look back on the time spent with them and realize that the time itself has been the key element of our relationship.

There are parenting choices I've made that have turned out brilliantly. There are also parenting choices I've made that have turned out to be a total fail on my part. My kids sometimes do things that make me proud, and sometimes do things that drive me crazy. There's no rhyme or reason to it either; there are times when I'm sure I've got this whole parenting thing figured out, and others where I feel lost and out of my depth.

But as I sit here on the evening of Father's Day, having just spent most of the day with my family and looking at the handmade gifts they created for me, I realize that I've been truly blessed to have spent as much time with them as I have. One of the few silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic was that I spent a lot of time working from home and being home, rather than being squirreled away in a corporate office somewhere, only being home for dinner on the days that I was really lucky and traffic wasn't too bad. My wife and I were talking the other day about how, from March of 2020 through the end of 2022, we could count on one hand the number of nights that all four of us weren't around the dinner table together. That's truly special, and remarkable in this day and age.

When I think about my own father, the things I remember most are the times we spent together. Not the arguments, or the differences of opinion, or the occasional absences when he had to work; it was the times that he was there (which were plentiful as I was growing up). I remember backyard barbecues and camping trips, summers at my grandparents' lake house where he would let us push him off the dock. And, more recently, the times we sat and grieved together after losing my mother.

Time is the one thing we're all universally short on, and so it makes sense that those fathers who invest the most time in their children and their families are the ones that live longest in our memories when they're gone.


(442 words)