Ships

Next Monday marks the ‘official' start of summer but before we get there, I have a word or two (okay, more like five hundred) on this Sunday, which is Father’s Day (singular possessive rather than plural possessive while I wonder why it’s a possessive at all but that’s a rumination for another time). 

Being my wife's spouse and our children's father are the two things I do best in my entire life and, between us, most days I am not all that good at either of them. My wife makes the former work for both of us. 

As for the latter, I didn't take classes and while I yearned for an indeterminate probationary period, there was none. And nothing but on-the-job training. Speaking I suspect not only for myself, fatherhood is the hardest job I could ever love and despite what I believed while I was on the giving end, Dad is the highest compliment I can receive in the whole world. 

Of course, all of us who are fathers have people to thank (especially our children without whom technically....) but I won't even try to list all the fathers whom I have had the good fortune to know because that list would go on forever.

True story from when our oldest, Patrick, was our only child. He, in his car seat in the back, and I are stopped at a traffic light (he is about three years old). I am waiting for the light to change. "You know what?" he asks me, "if Mom had married someone else, I would have a different father." Thanks for playing, indeed.   

Father’s Day reminds me to pause and thank the father I argued and too often angrily fought with, whom I shared with my brothers and sisters. I recall an Amish saying that goes, “the older I get, the smarter my father becomes,” and realize its truth and it stings a little.

Damals: Patrick and his sister, Michelle
or as Michelle likes to think of it,
Michelle with her brother Patrick

Both of my brothers are fathers, so I hope they have Happy Father's Days, too. I suspect like dads everywhere they’ve discovered what you learn after you know it all is what counts the most. As they used to say in Freshman Orientation at my imaginary Dad's College: Help Your Kids Do Well and Be Happy.

Admittedly as a dad, you can't do too much about skinned knees or first true loves that break hearts except tell yourself, and your child, 'this, too, shall pass' because you know it will even when they know it won't. All you can wish for your son or daughter is that they are well and happy, two conditions for which they, themselves are most responsible. I used to waste so much energy worrying about what I couldn’t give them, but they grew up never missing what they never had. 

Today, both of our children are adults with lives very much their own and, I hope, have accepted that in his heart, their dotty, doting Dad, like all fathers, loves them maybe without always saying the words. And should/when they choose to have children of their own, I think/hope/pray they'll have good memories from their own childhood to draw upon and help them as parents. 

Happy (early) Father’s Day to Dads everywhere.
-bill kenny