The photo at left was taken by my mom back in 2002. The original is surely stuck inside one of her many photo albums. All I have is this poorly scanned, cropped version that I once used as my LiveJournal profile pic. My son was seven, maybe eight years old. To this day it’s one of my favorite pics of the two of us, despite the distance and the low-res haze. Something about our shadowy faces and that sunbeam between us strikes a certain poignancy for me.

Like most all-purpose bloggers, I’ve written about various holidays at length in the past. Father’s Day is one of those for which I wish I could present you with something warm, fuzzy, life-affirming, and role-model-ish. Truth is, he and I play the day so low-key that I imagine some relatives probably worry about us. He’s not the most expressive or enthusiastic when it comes to holidays, family gatherings, or mushy moments, and I’m not one to force hugs and pleasantries from others. That’s my wife’s zealous area of expertise.

For us Father’s Day typically means dining out, doing something fun together (either video games or a movie, typically), and calling it a day. He’s now living up at college year-round, but this year’s get-together will look similar, a benign combination of food and entertainment. I love him and I always look forward to spending time with him, but cards and presents aren’t a part of the process. I wouldn’t turn down free stuff if he offered it, but I’m not the kind of Dudley Dursley to demand it.

As for how my Father’s Days work in the other direction…

That part’s tough to write about while so many interested parties are still around. Many of them rarely venture far into the internet, let alone know this site exists, but who knows what the future might bring, either long-term or immediate.

Not that I’m cloaking some dark, juicy secrets that would require trigger warnings or merit a book deal. Doubtful. I grew up basically without a father.

He was alive the whole time, mind you. Still is. But his participation in my childhood was limited to sporadic cameos and a token event gift once every 3-4 years. Mom and Grandma handled all the parenting, nurturing, bonding, and forging of actual relationships that I’m told are the baseline expectations of an ordinary childhood. For that I’m eternally grateful, especially to Grandma. I don’t know all the reasons for his voluntary removal from the picture, but the few I’m superficially aware of are enough to merit a response of, “Oh, well, no wonder.”

Short story cut even shorter: he was young and dumb, and now he’s old and forgiven.

He made some astoundingly bad choices, probably more than I’ll ever know, but I’m old enough now to acknowledge the destructive power of the young-stupid-male phase. It was relieving long ago to let go of that old, bitter grudge that once soured my outlook. Seeking a relationship with my heavenly Father helped with some of that, along with other key players, moments, and epiphanies along the way.

But my acceptance of the situation didn’t rewrite history.

That first eighteen years of my life — the crucial section of a youngster’s timeline when all the bonding and patterning and emotional connecting and forging of relationships and cementing of capital-F Family usually happens in the mental makeup of a growing lad — that whole time frame progresses in a unilinear fashion, based on what actually happens during that time frame.

My childhood can’t be retroactively rewritten to include him in my memories of special occasions or everyday living. Forgiveness allows me to move forward, but it doesn’t retcon my life like a mishandled DC Comics character and add him to my origin story ex post facto. There’s no shocking untold story of how he really was in my family along, just like those surprise new relatives that Marvel keeps adding to Cyclops’ family tree every two or three years. I didn’t wake up the next morning and find him hanging out in the dining room like Buffy’s magical sister Dawn, abetted by freshly implanted memories of father/son quality-time anecdotes. Life doesn’t work that way.

The time to be a father to a child is while that child is a child.

I can’t speak for everyone who’s had a deadbeat dad in their lives, but I’m a little old for bedtime stories, role modeling, dating advice, and Being a Guy 101. Like too many other kids, where my female relatives were helpless to pick up the slack, I gleaned what I could from other dads, which frankly didn’t fill too many notebooks, and picked up the rest from movies and TV, which would explain a good number of my deficiencies. Science hasn’t yet invented the time machine that would allow either of us to travel back and cleverly reinsert fathering sessions that would reconstruct, redefine and create our father/son relationship. Twelve Doctors driving twelve TARDISes would be powerless to alter those fixed points in time.

I don’t hate my dad, but there’s no reason he should receive equal billing with my mom and absolutely not with my grandma. Strictly speaking, in the end credits of my life, he’d rank somewhere below Charles Ingalls, Cliff Huxtable, Mike Brady, Ward Cleaver, my sixth-grade math teacher Mr. Gaston, Ben Parker, Jonathan Kent, and arguably Papa Smurf.

For what it’s worth, we do chat once every year or so. He’s into golf, retirement, woodworking, industrial arts, and probably sports and guns and other things that are the opposite of me, so the recreational segment of our calls do lack a bit in interactive dialogue. I appreciate that he’s kept me abreast of his medical conditions so I’ll know what to dread in the decades ahead. When he had life-threatening cancer surgery a while back, I prayed for him just as I would any member of our church or any other third-party prayer need brought to my attention. He’s still human and therefore deserving of the love that God commands us to demonstrate unto others.

But Father’s Day?

I’ll be spending that the same way I’ve been spending it for years: showing up for my son.