With Father’s day being near I decided to share a quite raw and somewhat brutal piece I wrote about My father about 8 months ago…It’s harsh, it’s rough but it’s hopeful.  I know I have written about him before but I have just felt led that this is what I was supposed to post tonight.  Please try to understand the hope in this piece…

New Balance

Dead-beat waste of life, uneducated, hopeless, withering soul, substance absorbing seed donor.  You see my papa was a rolling stone.  With no high school diploma he successfully had four children with two different women.  Typical black man, right?  The man loves that white meat, he preys on their insecurities.  His once found confidence was to die for, but was backed with nothing.  To resist his dark skin and alluringly wicked charm was hard to do, his words were convincing but riddle with shame and misfortune.  He has a love for music and has an unlimited catalog of musical knowledge.  A dreamer with no dreams he strikes rhythms to hopefully go somewhere.  That somewhere took him to years of swallowing, inhaling and absorbing into the hole in his chest.  The man did this to himself.  Now I have to live life scared to the point of shakes that I will inherit these addictions.  Whispering promises is something he has been wonderful at, but if he shouted his promises he would be liable to let down more than just his children.  Waiting by the door looking out the window for his arrival that never came are some of my best memories of him.  The butterflies I would stomach when he would say, “I’m on my way to see you” are ones that will never return, for they are forever stuck in their chrysalis that is so hard to break through from years of disappointment.  Perhaps I should try to remember something better, like the walks we would go on together to the liquor store when he would get himself a tall boy of Budweiser and buy me a little bottle of Sunkist and a bag of cheese doodles.  My pulse stops when remembering the sound of his staggered footsteps and the look of his new balance sneakers when the sun would strike the reflector on the N in the middle of the sneaker as he would drink the tallboy wrapped in the wrinkled brown-bag on the walk back home.  The stale smoke and grilled cheese scent of my short stayed childhood home is one that haunts my memory, but whenever I have visited that place I still felt at home.  I would wonder if he loved the “boy down the street” more than me as he would push me to play drum beats that were too difficult for my 4 year-old frame.  With a can in his hand he would threaten me to the “whoopin’ chair” if I couldn’t play as good as he.  That is when he was there.

I remember looking to the sidelines of my soccer games seeing proud fathers cheering their children to victory, as my mother tried hard to fill that role.  I now fear that is the reason why I hated competitive sports as a child and teenager.  When I watch my New York Giants, I am stunned with shameful thoughts of wondering, “Maybe that coulda’ been me.”  The knowledge I lacked in my younger years about professional sports, are to be completely blamed on him.  I wish we were able to watch football like most of the boys in my neighborhood did on Sundays with their fathers.  I loved our discussions of Michael Jordan, that were never face-to-face, but always over the phone, I remember when the phone calls stopped, I was a teenager.  In my most vulnerable moldable years he was stomping the streets of brick city forgetting his past, as I was trying so hard to learn to be a man and foresee my future.  My heart was hardened to fathers.  The idea of the strength of a man was far from home to me.  Being surrounded by women is something that I had to cling to.  Years went by with close to no contact with my father, the man who watched me spring out of my mother’s womb, gone.  I am the man’s only son, how can one let go of that.  When I think of all his let downs the biggest one is that I have learned nothing from him.

All of these things I say to destroy his already small statured reputation are now the things that bring me joy to who this man is.  You see I had a self-realization moment a few years ago around the brink of me deciding I wanted to get married.  How can I be a husband or a good father with no contact with my own?  How can I have kids and them not have any clue who there Grandfather is or where their roots dwell?  My heart broke at the reality of this idea.  I needed to have this relationship, I needed to tell him about my needs, cares, and how our future didn’t need to be but was going to be.  This conversation was a pivotal moment in our relationship.  It was a bit of a shocker for him, catching him off guard with the words that his boy (who is now a man) loaded in his shotgun of love and aimed straight at his chest.  His defeated demeanor and shaky voice was riddled with something I needed from him, Hope.  Hope of a future.  Hope of a relationship.  Hope of a father.  Hope for a son.  I wasn’t looking for instant gratification, not just an “I love you and care for you” then to go back to the way it was.  I needed his concern, and to hear the sound of his voice more often than what I was hearing.  I needed him to try.

This conversation was over 2 yeas ago.  I can’t say that he is the best father ever, or the most amazing male figure in my life, but I can say he is trying.  Although it is likely he may never be either one of those things, I still find an overwhelming amount of joy that I hear from him every week or two since then.  His effort is what makes me understand now why I love him.   I would think to myself in earlier years why I love this man so much, I think it is just that God-given love mechanism that we have that makes us love our family whether we like them or not.  I burst with a prideful scream now that I actually have a reason to love him.  Understanding why I actually love my father is a new feeling that is very hard for me to express, instead of thinking of all his horrible traits and terrible habits, I instantly think, the man is trying.  I also have come to grips that I hate the term “Typical Black Man.”  I have many friends of many different races and back rounds and I can only claim two or three of them with fathers that are better off than my own.  So perhaps we should say “Typical Man?”  If so I refuse to take refuge in that title, I will not be that man.  I’ve learned too much from my father to end up that way.

This brings me to realize that I have learned things from my father.  I have learned what it is that I should not do when dealing with my wife and my children.  I have learned that I must lean on higher powers instead of substances.  My favorite lesson so far is that I have learned to maintain hope, and that people can be resilient, he is showing me much resilience in his reparation of our relationship.  I pray this will or is leaking over to my siblings, if not I hope they can have the conversation that they need to have with our father for it has been much more of a blessing than a curse.  I realize I have inherited things from him.  I am a drummer like he, my love for music is almost as large as my love for my life, my favorite sneaker is New Balance, and I as well have a heart to be resilient in my relationship with him.  They may not be deep or very monumental but I still find that these things are far from coincidental.

Do you think God intended some children to have relationships with their parents like this?  Do you see beauty is repaired relationships although there was a lot of years of hurt?  Could you respect a parent in the way God wants you too if you are or could have been in a similar situation?  Thoughts, cares, concerns and discussion are appreciated…

About 4 years ago I had a conversation with my father in-law who at that time was just my girlfriend’s father.  He took me out to lunch to get a better feel of who I was and my background.  It was a few days prior to father’s day.  We talked for quite some time and he asked me innocent questions of my past, present and where I wanted my future to be.  I’ll never forget how he seemed truly interested in the things I told him and my plans for life.  He asked me about my father and let me know that my dad must have been a good one because he did a god job on me.  Unfortunately I had to let him know that my mother is to credit because she was my father and my father was a let down and no where to be found in my youth.  He went on to ask me questions about him, in which some I didn’t have the answers to because I didn’t know much about him.  In the effect that it was close to Father’s Day and my father in-law is a God-Fearing, spiritual, Bible quoting, wonderfully challenging man, he challenged me to do something I will never forget…he said I should call my father on Father’s Day.  I was slightly shocked because my wife (Rebecca) had been challenging me to talk to my father as well ever since we started dating.  I asked him why he thought I should call him,  he said “The Bible tells us to honor thy father and mother, period.”  I had a very perplexed look on my face, and then he continued, “It doesn’t say honor thy father and mother only if they are really good people and parents, it just commands us to honor them.”  That statement haunted and consumed my thoughts for about 2 years.

A couple months ago I saw the film “Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire.”  It was one of the most brutal, honest, painful, sad, and hopeful movies I have ever seen.  It was about a 16 year old girl’s journey of learning to read and write while dealing with physical, emotional and sexual abuse, being raped by her father and beaten by her mother.  She was pregnant with her second child, both children given to her by her father.  Her resilience was fascinating and her drive to learn and make her children’s lives better than her own gave me a vision of hope in which I have never seen.  It was one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen.  I was moved by this story, although it was fictional it was derived from real life situations that women have been in.  I am going to stop here with the description of the plot because I feel it is a film that everyone should see and I don’t want to spoil this inspirational story, read the book too, it will rock your socks off…neither the movie nor the book are for young audiences.

Now how do those two completely different paragraphs even pertain to anything I could be thinking?  This I shall explain.  Precious has caused me to do a lot of thinking in the last couple months, helping me realize the amazing blessings I have had in my life and the way God has always seemed to get my back.  It’s helped me count my blessings in my life with the situation I have with my father.  My wife was even led to say “I feel as though I should never complain about anything in my life ever again” after watching Precious.  I have been stirred up in thought about my own father after watching this movie.  My situation with my father is not at all in any way similar to Precious’ situation, it just made me think about bad fathers in general and how up to about 2 years ago my father hadn’t been really a father to me at all.  I began to think about others in my situation or in worse situations such as Precious and how earthly fathers are so important to the foundation and growth of a child.  When there is a lack in a male spiritual mentor it does truly effect a child. I didn’t realize it effected me until about 2 years ago when I was 24 years old.  It was quite a pivotal moment in my life when I woke up and realize that I was severely depressed by the status of my father and I’s relationship.  The feeling was suffocating and crippling, I felt as though I could not properly manage  loving my own children (when I have them one day), unless have some sort of relationship with my own father.  To make a long story short, we had a talk and I told him how our relationship was going to be, and what I needed and expected from him.  It turned out a lot better than what I was anticipating, he seemed to respond to my pain and relate with my feelings.  It seems that this trend of fathers has been in many generations of my family besides this one, and unfortunately my father had fallen into that mold.  Our relationship has grown tremendously and my father has been able to inspire me to understand reasons why I love him, which is quite refreshing (hope and resilience, like Precious).  This was truly inspired by the challenge that my father in-law and wife had issued me some years ago, and it’s one of the many reasons I love both of them with all my heart.  If you were or are in a situation that Precious was in would you be able to honor your father or mother?  If you were or are in a situation more like mine with a father or mother that shares empty promises and was never there for you, would you be able to honor your father or mother?  Think deeply and hardly.