fathers day 21/06/2009 12:02:08 PM
It's the first day of summer. The longest day of the year. It's all downhill to winter from here.
It's also Fathers Day, National Aboriginal Day and beautifully sunny and warm where I am. This is significant only because the weather has been really crappy lately.
It's tough for me, days like this. My two boys are half a world away where their day is more than half over and I woke knowing they would not be reaching out to me today. My daughter is a budding teenager and carrying some resentment still at my absence from her home. It's unlikely I will hear from her either. I know she loves me, I know my boys love me. It doesn't help.
Most of us have ways to ease the pain of days like today. They almost always involve family and on a lonely Fathers day who best to turn to then one's own father? Sadly, mine is gone, and gone from me at a time when I have questions I know only he can answer. That I came to ask them so late in life is another story and in no way ameliorates the angst I feel on days like today. I am long over my rage but I do have moments of loss, still. An empty place that only a father knows how to fill.
I am stuck in Fathers Day purgatory. Neither giving nor receiving the joys of fatherhood, where all the desire and want means nothing. Somedays life just sucks, beauty notwithstanding.
How nice it is to be able to look at precious moments past, and remember that we love our family, not matter how far, no matter how long. Happy Fathers' Day, Dad.
