In the name of the father

Meditations on Fathers

I know, I’m shamelessly ripping-off the title of an (Oscar-nominated) movie.

I was on a lot of planes last week — Halifax-Montreal-New York-Toronto-Vancouver-Halifax — so I ended up watching a fair few things; and re-watching this movie was one of the better choices I made.

I’d mostly forgotten the plot line, but I knew it was the story of the Guildford Four and in particular focused on the relationship between a father and his son in that tragic circumstance. If you’ve never seen it - you should; if you haven’t watched it since the ‘90s, it holds up.

Or maybe my #substack title reference above has a more solemn resonance for you — a Catholic religious prayer. It evokes memories for me of mass in Northern Ireland or New Brunswick, before we put the “lapsed” before Catholic.

Either way, I digress.

This is a complicated day for a lot of people.

It’s a joyful day for some. And for others it is probably quite painful; acute, or more dull and achey, the pain is still the pain. Probably for all of us it has been some combination of all these things at different times.   

There are a lot of people I think about on this day.

One - my good friend - is a devoted father, and easily one of the most thoughtful humans I know. He tries to do ‘the right thing’, he works hard at building connection with his kids. Even through separation, and divorce, he’s spent considerable focus putting his kids needs’ and interest at the forefront.

I think it’s what we all hope - maybe even believe - we’d do in that circumstance; but I’m not so sure it’s universal. For a lot of people the triggers and trauma of that situation can easily pull focus away if there are kids involved. It takes a lot of work and effort to try and be the kind of parent you might aspire to, and you don’t have the ‘mirror’ of a partner to reinforce or validate that when you’re no longer in a marriage or long-term relationship.

My good friend doesn’t have his kids with him this year on father’s day, and I know that must be hard.

I have another friend who has a really big, important job - doing something that really matters. She does it with a lot of heart, intelligence and energy. I’m sure there are a lot of times she’d like to call up her dad and bounce a situation off him, to just check in, or to share a small win, or big frustration. But he passed away a few years ago, and she can’t do that anymore.

Still another friend of mine recently concluded an important business deal. It means a lot for his company, but even more for an important aspect of our lives as a country and a democracy. His father passed away over the Winter, and when I saw this friend last week I could sense how hard it was that he wasn’t able to share the conclusion of the deal with his dad - just one of many things I know he’ll miss.

I have friends who are single mothers, working hard to be the lone parent in a super-complex world, where toxic masculinity is one of many challenges parents have to contend with. One of my acquaintances approaches it with humour in her social media posts, and much aplomb in real life; even as I’m sure it feels very raw, lonely and sisyphean at times - these handful of years after her husband passed away.

Another friend has struggled with her dad’s addictions, and his transitions in and out of homelessness.

This is a hard weekend for all those folks.

My mother was a single parent for the first 4 years of my life. She made a lot of hard choices, and put a lot of herself into giving me the kind of love and home she could at the time; with a lot of support from my aunts, uncles, grandparents and her friends, before she met my dad and we eventually moved to Canada.

I didn’t ever really think before of how difficult Father’s Day would have been for her when I was a toddler.

It’s hard to validate your own parenting at any time - other than in retrospect - even if you’re partnered up and can compare notes or anecdotes or happenings as they occur.

I was reminded this week of how much we as parents really just want our kids to be “ok”. Healthy and happy, really; that’ll suffice. Not all the time, obviously - no one is happy all of the time, that’s part of being human - but happy, on balance; and healthy, always.

Finding that validation is hard.

Report cards at school? Mostly useless.

Coaching reports in sports? Of limited utility as a parent.

Grandparent reflections? Biased.

The only real unbiased feedback is the unsolicited kind we might get from friends or acquaintances - and it’s rare that people feel comfortable in saying it.

This week I was fortunate to receive that kind of feedback about all 3 of our kids, from different people, and about different aspects of each of their personalities.

One told me they thought one of our boys was a kind-hearted young man. Someone told me they wish they’d gotten to know another of the boys years earlier. Another that they thought our son was a great influence on so many of his peers.

When it’s unsolicited and genuine, it can feel a little like someone climbed inside your skin - strange and uncomfortable - so you (or maybe just I?) want to change the subject, and soak in their words later on, when they’re not there to see how happy, or teary, it makes you.

After 20 years of parenting, I still don’t know how to take that kind of feedback with anything approaching elegance or grace.

I fumble to accept it, and deflect - or worse, maybe I say “That’s so lovely - I just wish they’d learn how to clean their room!” which undermines or even negates what the person is offering — and it is that; an offering.

I sometimes worry that in my desire to be humble in hearing and assimilating this kind of feedback (which of course we ALL WANT TO HEAR about our kids from time to time), I undermine the giving of it.

I’m still a work-in-progress on that front.

I almost went stir crazy last month. All 3 of our kids were on another continent for 5 days. The illusion of being able to step in and fix a problem for them - which somehow persists when they are physically more proximate - can evaporate quickly into the ocean they are on the other side of; which it did, for me.

three kids waving from a plane flying over an ocean

It’s different than me traveling solo - which I do, a lot - or us as parents traveling somewhere. In the latter instance, they are with grandparents and we get non-stop updates. In the former case, I’ve spent years perfecting flight schedules and contorting ways to leave after breakfast and be home before hockey/soccer/supper the following evening in an effort to miss the least possible. And, still, every time it feels like a little bit of a failure.

But it was different last month because they were all “gone”.

I used to be a professional political ‘fixer’, of a sort. I was a problem-solver, and sometimes I style myself that way as a father. It could just be an illusion, or a story I tell myself, because I wasn’t ever really taught those ‘guy things’; so I’m not the father teaching someone how to change a tire, build a shed, or shoot a moose.

When they were “gone”, my problem-solver persona was gone with it; and that felt acutely uncomfortable.

I began to worry that this was what it might be like in our house, all the time, and…soon; my utility, in a way a big part of my parenting identity, would have to change quite significantly. Two of our boys will be at university this fall, and one is starting high school.

It reminded me of how I felt - and how far I’ve come - from the “Spider-Man” feelings and associated pains in my hands, when our oldest went to Uni a couple of years ago.

The days are long but the years are short, eh?

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like for my folks to absorb when I was heading to Uni, or a couple of years later when they made the decision to move across the country. Popping by for tea, to do laundry or have a warm meal that isn’t Kraft Dinner doesn’t happen at a distance of 6000km very easily.

phone cord stretching across map of canada

That must have been hard. There was no “find my iPhone” to check on me back then (thank god!), only emails, snail mail and weekly phone calls from a phone booth, or Rez phone.

This Father’s Day has significance in different ways for our family.

My father is retiring this week. He’s spent ~45 years observing the hippocratic oath, helping and healing - and probably far too often (for once is too often, isn’t it?) - losing people, in the process.

As a doctor he first came of age in early 1980s Northern Ireland - an environment where the late republican hunger striker Bobby Sands was being treated in the same hospital where he was training, and in others he worked at where car bomb victims succumbed to their injuries.

He’s worked in emergency medicine, surgical assists and family medicine, and lately that has included assisted dying. He has put his proverbial hand up more than a few times when someone shouted “is there a doctor in the house?” following a roadside accident or fainting spell.

He was supposed to retire last year. But the island couldn’t find a doctor. So he agreed to stay on for another year to give them a chance to find a replacement. A decision some of us disagreed with - but it wasn’t ours to make.

He was feted in an “un-retirement” party last year instead, since the food had been ordered and a plan made, which might make his last day of work a lot more anticlimactic later this month.

They’ll never find another him - he’s too unique a human, anyway - but in 2024 the idea that they will hire a doctor who will minister to the people of Texada Island for the next ~26 years is unfathomable.

Medicine is changing, and so are the expectations of young doctors — they want a ‘life’, not just a living. (Plus, we may all have Doc-bots a few years from now; who knows).

robot doctors

My dad isn’t someone who remembers his patients kids’ names, their favourite movie, or what they did for passion/love (before they did whatever they do now for work) because he has to. He is someone who loves what he does. And someone who might be a little lost, for the first while, after he’s no longer doing that full-time.

A little like I might be feeling again this Fall, and even moreso when our youngest finishes high school.

Same, I guess, but different.

This Father’s Day will also be a hard and sad one in our house - my partner’s father passed away 4 months ago last week.

In February, my father-in-law died of cancer; he was 81. I was reflecting that I only knew him *after* the remarkable and impactful career he had as a teacher and coach.

His legendary exploits as a student-athlete at Acadia University will live on in part through a scholarship established in his name, and first awarded last year: the Rea Clark Scholarship. You’re welcome to donate at that link if you’re so inclined.

The personal legacy he left was evident during his final days, and as people reached-out with personal stories of how he impacted their life trajectory in seemingly-small ways...evidence of which resonated for them ~55+ years later.

There are lots of reasons to remember him this weekend beyond Father’s Day - because this really was his favourite time of year.

As a teacher of more than 3 decades he was winding down his classes at this time of year. His family would pack up their car and head north to the family cottage right after school ended. And they would stay there for the better part of 2 months.

As a retiree it was now that he was settling in at the cottage - if the weather was good he’d been going up, or staying up for weeks by now - and where he and his brother (at the cottage next door) could strike off the days and weeks spent at the cottage, and compare it to previous years.

It was there that many of the memories shared by family and friends at his celebration of life - this past family day - took place. His fishing trips with buddies (on Father’s Day). His golfing trips with buddies (on Father’s Day). Kids learning their timetables while fishing with him. His perfect dives, his legendary waterskiing…you get the drift.

I miss him.

My relationship with him wasn't always smooth, or uncomplicated, as it can sometimes be with in-laws, or even within our own nuclear families. I have realized on reflection that I “reconsidered” him more and and more the older I got, and the more space I gave myself for that to happen.

He was dependable. He was straightforward. He valued effort. He respected tradition. He was a valued friend who kept a remarkable circle attached to him.

Being a father - however that manifests -is complicated stuff.

Twenty-five years ago this month the idea of Father’s Day became a little more complicated for me; at least intellectually, not in my heart. I went home to Ireland to visit family, and meet my biological father for the first time.

I laid eyes on the person without whom I wouldn’t exist, even if he played no role in my life for the previous 22 years.

I met my half-brothers, and most of my 20 uncles and aunts, and some of the many, many dozens of cousins I have in that part of my family.

I still haven’t fully assimilated what it means to be a father, biologically, and a father/dad - when those aren’t the same person — and what the differences are in nature and nurture. If I figure it out I’ll let you know (and then I’ll write a best-selling self-help book!).

I also saw a truly lovely, heartfelt obituary this week that I wanted to share with you - to the late, Honourable Bill Estabrooks; who passed away last week.

It was written by his daughter, Trish.i have often remarked to people that a non-formulaic, authentic obituary with a voice and a perspective is one of the nicest tributes someone can be paid.

I worked with Bill on and off for 13 years. I travelled with him, drank beers with him, canvassed with him and helped him juggle two government departments after the NDP were sworn-in to government in Nova Scotia 15 years ago last week.

Bill was the kind of person who left a lot of individual legacies, some I’m sure those who benefited from them will never relate.

Just like with my father in law, Rea (about whom stories of quietly helping people emerged after his death that we would never have guessed at).

And for my father, Kevin, many of whose kindnesses will remain under doctor-patient privilege.

So to Bill, to my late father in law Rea, to my good friend, to my biological father Dermot, to my father & dad Kevin — and all the fathers, grandfathers, people who are fatherly, or play that role for for someone, and to the moms or significant others — I hope you know that you are loved, appreciated and valued.

You make the world a better, brighter and funnier place.