June 20, 2007

Father's Day

I am ashamed to think that I didn't think about you on Father's Day. I have, however, been thinking about you a lot. We were downstairs waiting on B to shower and I had the TV on to Jerry Springer (trying to turn my brain off to prep for vacation and get out of the cobweb of stress from leaving work in the middle of something) and noticed her watching it and flipped around until I found the Cosby Show - wholesome TV as I remember. The episode was one in which Mrs. Cosby was out of town so Cosby Sr. comes over to help out and teaches, scolds, encourages the Cosby kids with such skill and grace that the main point is that the old man taught Cosby what he knows, that it is handed down as natural as the sun coming up every morning - that some men were born to be fathers. I cried and thought of you.

When I think of you my emotions are uncontrollable, scattered, wild, and they scare me. I feel a deep sadness for you, for the sense that you might regret later on that you aren't a part of what happened. I feel a sympathy, for what would I have done at your age on the same road? I can say I would have acted differently, and that you not being a part of our little play is a lack of courage, of 'being a man', but it rings hollow. Like all of our dealings with SK's mom, to think that it would have gone differently if you or her had turned a different way is to imagine a world without our little family, and this is equal to imagining your spouse or child no longer alive - unborn even - and it gets harder and harder every day to imagine it.

I also feel anger. That you, who were chosen - not chose - to be her's chose only to be a father and not a Dad. This normally comes at the happiest moments when I hold her and she is looking at me seriously; I break down thinking of you and where you are, so young and unaware perhaps of all of this. You know how this has gone down but didn't meet us, haven't seen either of them, haven't tried? I don't know; how often do you think of her? Do you know that she is a girl? Do you know her birthday? Will you some day wish and pray that she looks for you? How will this feel to me, to her? What will I tell her when she is older and she cannot meet you and gets only hate from the others about you?

What information do I have on you really, other than the features that appear as if from thin air on her face. In that way you are and will forever remain a member of my family; generations to come will have you - an unknown man - tracing through them. For this reason I pray for you and hope that you are well and try to understand the hard path that you have had to scramble up unexpected, ignorant, and afraid.

I also feel sometimes the clean and pure weight of having been chosen by God as your replacement. I hope that I will be there always for her and her mother; that neither fear nor circumstance will keep me from my natural duty to be her Dad. I pray that God gives me the natural skill and grace to be Daddy.

June 20, 2007 01:04 PM