Fathers Matter

by Jim Burke

I don’t need an alarm clock. My one-year-old’s feet habitually wake at 5:45 a.m. and begin working me like a treadmill; if he fails, my four-year-old son stirs by 6 a.m., the first words out of his mouth announcing his hunger. If I show any reluctance to move, Evan marches over, pulls back the covers, grabbing first the left then the right leg, and swings them down to the ground. He completes his task by taking my hand and pulling me out of bed. During this ritual Whitman’s feet finish their turn on the treadmill and begin to practice on the trampoline he dreams I will someday become. Soon after making Evan his first peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich of the day, I leave for work, Evan slipping past me to retrieve the newspaper which he then hurls towards the kitchen, somehow never breaking anything---yet.

Being a father comes without any practical instructions. You can read all the books you like, watch "Bradshaw on the Family" religiously, even interrogate longtime fathers---still you will not understand what being a father or a parent means until you have become one. It reminds me of strategy sessions we held before our high school football games: the coaches outlined all the past strategies the opponent has tried, how they won, who to watch out for, what to expect in the second half. Then we charged onto the field where we met the other team only to find ourselves suddenly amazed and overwhelmed by the complexity of the real game. The noise of the crowd didn’t help; only in my game, parenting, the noise is a crowd of two that never seems to lose its enthusiasm, its rage, or whatever other emotion has them in its grip at the moment.

How, for instance, could I be prepared for a son who woke up for an entire year at 4:30 a.m. and demanded to be fed, his shrieks rising like a siren in our dark room. Having usually worked until 1 a.m. grading papers or preparing lessons, I rarely responded to these demands with the compassion he sought. I often came home at the end of the day embarrassed by my predawn anger only to be amazed at the enthusiasm of his greeting and his ability to forget it ever happened. On other nights, when he lay crumpled with fever amidst his twisted sheets, I could not have anticipated the violence of my own emotions as I sat there overcome by feelings of helplessness. Perhaps no other experience so troubled me as the period during which the boys, having become entirely dependent on their mother, would wail and scream when being left with me at night so my wife could take a class. I could explain it, even understand it but never accept it.

Unlike many, however, I don’t leave my kids at home and go off to work with other adults. I teach high school English on the Peninsula. Thus my little world consists of many kids, two of whom are my own, the other couple hundred belonging to other people but spending part of their day with me. I say a couple hundred because once they pass through my classroom I cannot help but see them as "my kids." And while I wouldn't dare see myself as a father to these teenagers, the truth is that I find myself playing that role at times whether I want to or not.

Just last month I received a letter from Sara, a former student of mine who is now in her 20s, telling me she was about to have her first child. The week before I got Sara’s letter a long letter came from Bryan, another former student, in which he asked my advice about serving as a missionary in South America. When such kids write---or those whose future success and happiness seemed less certain---I cannot help but feel something like what I feel when my own son, Evan, presents me with, for instance, one of his new specialty pies--sand, raisins, and flour--or a particularly good drawing that he is proud of having made.

What I have learned through all this time with teenagers, time spent at my son’s preschool, and, of course, time with my own two boys is very simple: Fathers matter. They matter for all the reasons we already know but cannot uneasily understand because their role and meaning changes as we do, as they do, as the world does. They are the ones who often challenge when mothers caution. Some of the adventures are misguided, but it is the spirit that counts. When I think of my own father images crowd my memory: walking dawn-lit fields for pheasant after breakfast in a diner smelling of coffee, smoke, bacon, and sweat; taking me out on his motorcycle only to return with my leg burned and bloodied by a spill, but thrilled by the experience; or working together in the garage every night to rebuild an old car we dreamed of touring in together. Their approval and support, perhaps because of these earlier adventures, seems to matter more at times (unfortunately) than any other person’s; we all want to show our fathers we can respond to the challenges life presents us.

Recently my son’s preschool held a Men’s Night. Perhaps 60 men came. We gathered around brightly colored tables marked up with paint and crayon and sat in tiny chairs. We discussed what being a father meant and how it changed our perceptions of our own fathers. One point on which we all agreed was that just being a parent--and thus, a father--had changed. Some of the men around the table were the ones at home with the kids all day; most of our wives worked; some were single parents or the divorced fathers of children being raised by other men whose children now called these stepfathers "Dad"; one was a gay man raising an adopted child with his lover. We were a motley bunch of men united by one thing: our common love for our children.

The meaning and importance of Father’s Day changed forever last year. Within the short span of six weeks my wife lost her father, a great man whom I enjoyed, we had our second son, and my own father died. I had been thinking about fathers for some time as our fathers were both terminally ill; but also because both my parents’ fathers left when they were still young. I did not know that my father’s "father," the man I called grandpa, was not my dad’s real father until I was 21 and we were burying him. My father was young, only 54, and he died before he could see his second grandson born only seven days earlier.

But I remember him every time I show Evan how to hold a hammer. Whenever I talk to him about the importance of honesty, of integrity, my father is present. Whitman loves to be held up to wall of photographs that line the staircase. I show him his grandfather in his World War II uniform and tell him how hard he worked his whole life. I point to my father laughing while he holds Evan as a baby and tell him it is important to laugh, to have a sense of humor, one of the greater gifts my father gave me. And gesturing to the whole wall, I try to convey to both my sons that they are part of a history of good people, part of something larger than themselves.

On warm San Francisco evenings I like to sit out on the deck of the house my wife’s family has owned for 80 years. In the fading light of such days I watch my sons play in the small playhouse my wife’s grandfather built for her mother. I like to look at the deck, to feel its strength, to remember when my father, father-in-law, and I built it. It is the last thing we built together, the summer before our first son arrived. I would warn them that it must be strong enough to hold their grandchildren and all who would follow.

I often think at these moments about my sons and how they teach me to be the father they need. I think about my students and how they teach me through their questions to be the teacher they seek. Reflecting on my own father, I can think only of my gratitude for all his hands taught me to do, for all his words told me I could do, for what his life gave me the chance to be. Eventually I go inside to work, to read, eventually to sleep--only to wake again to Whitman’s feet, Evan’s hunger, my students’ questions, to the realization that the cycle never ends.