Introducing...

Guest blogger Jon Simpson...singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist, cool dude, thinker, friend, colleague, brother in Christ.  Putting his money where his mouth is, as best as he is able.  And blogger at layin’ it down, where you can read "thoughts and happenings in the life of a musician, singer, songwriter, traveler, father, husband, brother, son, etc., etc."

Jon's thoughts and happenings this summer have captured those of us who know him and his family.  When Jon began blogging about fatherhood, I asked him if I could post a couple of his blogs.  And so we have a series of four (for now), and another perspective on fatherhood that I think you'll find interesting.  Have a read:

Saturday, July 14, 2012 

happy beginnings... 

 

i'm typically not one to wear the rubber wristbands that promote some cause or carry some kind of message. not necessarily because i think there's anything wrong with them... it's just not my thing.  215 days ago i made an exception.  that's the day i met my twin daughters.

my family and i were at the atlanta airport, anxiously awaiting the arrival of two precious, frightened, 4-year old latvian orphan sisters that we would be hosting for a month (and were planning to adopt). Our friends--a couple who are advocates for the hosting organization that connected us to the girls--arrived as we stared at the large clock above us in the airport atrium, hoping it would suddenly jump an hour.

the husband handed me a black rubber wristband.  Project 143—the name of the hosting organization--was imprinted on it. i put it on and haven't taken it off since.

but in a matter of days the wristband will be gone.  my wife and i have received approval to travel to latvia and start the next part of the adoption process.  We'll be reunited with our girls.  Shortly after we arrive in latvia, we'll be gathering our new daughters from the orphanage and (God willing) they'll be with us indefinitely.

a wonderful new beginning...

Silver Boomer Books

Interrupting the weighty musings on father to share some writing news, and introduce a guest blogger I've invited to the boatyard to write several posts.  

First, the writing front: summer has been productive, with submissions to two--count ‘em two!--poetry chapbook manuscripts.  The Boatman's Daughter, sequel to Poems from the Boatyard went to Finishing Line Press (chapbook competition in July), quickly followed by Pink Toilet Paper: The Culture Shock Poems  to Tiger’s Eye Press.  Thought I’d raise the bar this summer by entering the bracing competition of poetry contests.  To be continued...

Some random and individual submissions netted me one sale: "Grappling with Ghosts," an essay which will appear in A Quilt of Holidays, an anthology of poetry, story and memoir published by Silver Boomer Books. Check out the cover, website and author pages.  It is scheduled to be released later this month.

You can order A Quilt of Holidays from the SBB website, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.  It will make a nice stocking stuffer for Christmas. I won’t be involved in sales this time around; life is too busy and travel too high to guarantee sanity!  At some point, I’ll be walking around with some copies, but in the meantime, you can order as you like.  (I will not make any money on this; my 'paycheck' is already in the bank, and should purchase a couple of Starbucks coffees or maybe a bottle of merlot to celebrate...)  

On the agenda is an author signing at the Peachtree City Library on December 2.  Mark your calendars and come on down!  

And next post, I will introduce a friend, colleague, singer/songwriter, and father of four.  His journey as father this past year has been particularly poignant, and I have invited him to share it over the next four posts. I trust you will be moved and inspired.  

The Integrator

Wouldn’t it be cool to start seeing films with a title like that rather than “The Terminator?”  Don’t we need some broader images of father in film and TV land than the bumbling, inept, clueless, insensitive and irrelevant?  I remember when “Home Alone” was the hit—and how much I hated the portrayal of the parents.  “Father of the Bride” was the ultimate in stereotypical father-slam.  

The Bill Cosby Show was popular, and I was a fan—it represented a stable and accomplished African American family for the first time, and set the bar for quality.  But did you notice the sometimes demeaning treatment Dr. Huxtable received as the foil for his polished and accomplished wife and/or their children?  In spite of the underplayed, undermined role of the ob/gyn he played, Dr. Huxtable's glam wife far outshone him.  And although Cosby became a pop spokesman for fathers, I think he missed the mark; the show perpetuated the '80's subtle but definite diminishment of the father.  Let's bump the bar back up a bit.   

Most of what I’m going to quote here is from that book I mentioned earlier, The Forgotten Father: 

A father is “something of an integrator, a factor making for wholeness in the development of [his children’s] interests and gifts…the young hopeful learns what it means to be involved in what somebody else cares about, and to bow to what somebody else, who as a right to command, decides is to be done.”  (pg. 11)

It was certainly fun to bow to my father’s plans to build a boat.  It added a dimension to our lives that few kids in our neighborhood got to experience. 

“Mothers tend to promote the fulfillment of their sons from behind; fathers tend to require the obedience of their sons from above.  The first kind of love ministers to the needs of the beloved; the second kind dethrones the one it loves and presses him into its own service.  An only son in his mother’s house can easily become first and central; in his father’s house he is more likely to be kept second and subsidiary.  He will have not only a helper behind him, but a normal corrective, a protector over him.  He will know the safety of being second, of not being the one round whom everything revolves, but of begin dependent on somebody else who is ‘greater than I.’” (pg. 12)

The safety of being second…how’s that for a counter-cultural, politically incorrect statement?!  Here’s another gem from TheSearch for the Real Self:

“Like the world of toys and the other mysterious rooms of the house, the father is someone to practice on.  He is different and stands for nonmother experience.  Exploring realty through him has a special quality of exuberance…Father, coming from the outside world or reality rather than the fused symbiotic state, does not trigger symbiotic fears.  When father is firmly established as both an exhilarating adventure into worldly reality and a safe haven where the child can test his intrapsychic perceptions about that reality…the real self will emerge with confidence.”  (pg. 33)

Anyone want to try filming that?! 

"Go ahead! Jump!"

I could cite a bunch of miserable statistics about the effects of fatherlessness on children, but I won’t. Statistics can be manipulated.  But pick your favorite site, and the news isn't good. 

If father is a good thing, vital for the emotional development and well-being of the family, what do we lose when we don’t get that?  What are the spiritual implications of father/no father?  What does father bring to the table in a family, besides the bacon?

I was fascinated to learn many years ago from the depth psychologists how a newborn is wired to receive certain signals from the father.  Voice, touch, presence—the infant needed to receive certain things, and at precise stages of its development.  A missed developmental goal could create all sorts of havoc; not a fatality, but an increased risk.    

At later stages of development, the child listens for the father’s voice telling him “Yeah, go ahead and jump off that roof, I’ll catch you,” while mother’s voice cries out, “Get down from there!  It’s dangerous!” 

More generalizations but here’s a classic scenario: the child falls and scrapes a knee.  Mom comes running to the rescue, with band-aid and hugs, soothing and comforting and making sure the child doesn’t need stitches.  Dad, assuming he notices, says, “You’re fine – get up!” 

Mom wants to keep Child home, safe in the nest.  Dad kicks the child out, to discover the big wide world out there, and charges the child to go, explore, discover, overcome.  Then Dad can relax and enjoy his empty nest, while Mom texts hourly to make sure Child is okay.    

It was Dad who took us for driving lessons each summer, before we were legally allowed, finding the right back roads where we wouldn’t be disturbed, and couldn’t hit much more than a broken clamshell.  Mom was terrified to drive with us even when we were of age!  

When I first discussed moving off the island, Mom blanched; Dad lit up and suggested I try the West Coast—jobs were plentiful out there!

Generalizations I know—but 1 in 3 kids in America today will never get the driving lessons, the boot out, or the invitation to jump off a roof.  What else will he or she miss?        

Where's Your Daddy Gone?

I was feeling fatherless, for the first time (thank God) in my life, but I didn’t like it.   

In spite of all cultural arguments to the contrary, I don’t believe families without fathers can manage just fine, or that single women should have a child because they want a child.  That’s not enough for me; never was.  Because that child would grow up without a father, and that is a great loss.  We have experimented with this scenario in the past few decades and found it wanting, to say the least.  I have watched many of my single women friends go into single motherhood; anyone not notice the hardships of that situation?!  Anyone want to argue the point that the present fatherless generation is a good thing?

Disclaimers: this is not to deny or gloss over the fact that some fathers are horrendous examples of fathers; this is not to deny that some women who have not married live with tremendous pain and stigma at being childless.  I'm also not speaking of single women who adopt orphans for the right reasons, not to fill emotional pain. 

But for those who attempt to adopt to avoid men--quite possibly because their father was one of those horrendous examples--or for those who try to fill the pain of singleness with a child, I have two concerns: they may remain in their relational pain, which a child cannot cure, and the child grows up without a father. 

If you want to see a beautiful visual example of what I’m grappling with, check out visual artist Paul Hobbs, of the UK, and his piece, “Where’s Your Daddy Gone?”  As Paul writes, “In each picture the father is absent in different ways - a shadow, under censorship, or cut out completely. Collaged into the panels are articles discussing fatherhood today, the second panel referring to women who want children without even sleeping with a man. The images reflect the present damaged state of fatherhood. An implicit reference to the Madonna and Child decries the unholy nature of this broken relationship between father and child.”

 

Paul was responding to a newspaper article on in vitro fertilization. I grieve with him in the present cultural absence of father, in the mocking and minimizing of this key role in a family.  The spiritual implications of father transcend human experience.  There is more here than meets the eye. 

Yes, I miss my dad, but what is so important about fathers that I feel vulnerable without him, and the world is increasingly trying to do without fathers?  

A Death in the Family

It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now,it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them: that of the fathers of families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns.— James Agee

Among our favorite books, my friend Martha and I have two especially favorite ones: To Kill a Mockingbird and A Death in the Family.  Two classics in American literature, both by Southern authors. 

The former I could read over and over again.  There are many great themes in that book; but the image of father that Gregory Peck incarnates in Atticus Finch is one of the best I know.  Tender with his motherless daughter Scout, he sets his lawyer face like flint against injustice and racial prejudice. 

  

The second book I can only read when I’m in a really good head and heart space, and I’m glad I discovered the book long after I was in any personal grief.  In spite of that lovely quote above which opens the story, it is a grueling look in excruciating detail at a Death in the Family—the title says it all. 

When my father died, something like what Agee described happened in our own family.  It launched a grueling year; time slowed to excruciatingly detail. We lost our center of gravity.  Strange stirrings began in my own heart.  Although I was 50, and had lived some distance from him for years, (overseas in fact), I suddenly felt vulnerable, unprotected, exposed spiritually.  The sensation was so strong and compelling I talked to my sister about it.  Maybe it was because I was single, and still looked to my father for advice; perhaps if I had a husband...

"No," my sister replied, "I feel it too."  We fell silent for a while, and wondered what it meant. 

Some context: my father was a good father by most standards, although of course he had his own demons.  He was a strong personality, a dominant authority, but also the parent who made us lie on the floor with our eyes closed and listen to Beethoven’s Pastoral, or Zorba the Greek.   

Never afraid to launch us out into the world, he brought my older brother and I into New York City a number of times when we were quite young (I remember one trip at the age of 10).  We would commute in with him, and he would show us the extraordinary design showrooms of architecture's heyday in the '50's.  Then he would set us loose in that megalopolis for the day while he worked, instructing us to return at 5 for the commute home.  Can you imagine doing that today?!

He bought little gifts from his occasional international trips, and could be counted on for a secret stash of licorice somewhere in the house, which maybe he would share.  When he blew, we scattered, for he carried the rage of most World War II veterans returning from war, in an era before we had the label “Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.” 

So when he died, the vacuum was huge for all of us, and on one level that took me by surprise--this feeling of being exposed and vulnerable.  What were the spiritual implications of fatherhood that made our family planet spin off its axis?   What is the role of ‘father’ in a family?  Why is it so potent?  

For over a decade now, I’ve been probing those implications, the Unseen Real[1] that has to do with 'father,' and why ‘father’ is so important in the Christian tradition.  In time, my journey intersected with a book, “The Forgotten Father.”  And that book brought an “Aha” moment, and earned favorite book status on my bookshelf (which you can see on my Library thingy if you scroll down). 

But this post has already gotten long, so I will stop there and ponder more for next week.  In the meantime, maybe you want to ponder the mysteries of ‘father’ yourself.  Or pick up a copy of "Kill a Mockingbird"--a fantastic summer read.    
 

---

[1] a term used by Leanne Payne to describe invisible spiritual realities.

Perfect

How perfect that I re-open this blog on Father's Day.  

Many of you know the back story to Poems from the Boatyard, and its particular link to my father, and fatherhood in general. So it's perfect to start thinking again about my father, and the genesis of the poetry, on Father's Day. 

Some of you may have read the series of earlier posts (which begin here) that were basically the breakdown of an essay I wrote in France, shortly after my father died.  For those of you who aren’t au courant, here it is:

In the late 50’s or early 60’s, my father decided to build a boat in our backyard, on suburban Long Island.  This caused quite a ruckus, and a lot of excitement, among the adults in our community and family.  Lines split down two majority opinions:

1.  "What are you crazy?!" 
2.  "Wow!!!  How exciting!!!"

My own reaction was, “Yippee!!!  What’s a boat?!”  (So you can see how young I was.)  This reaction was largely based on my big brother’s reaction, who fell into category #2 above.  There may have been jumping up and down involved.

Nevertheless, the boat got built…almost..that story is unpacked in those earlier posts.  It has also gone into a long narrative poem that will be part of the sequel to Poems from the Boatyard.   Here’s an excerpt:

XXV.

And I have finished my walk around this cemetery. 

My father is buried here, his father in another. 

I wonder where I'll end up, and if there will be poplars. 

We don't always get things right in our family,

but we get them done—by God!—

because our father breathed moral fiber into us,

like wind in a sail, like the wind in these poplars,

whose scent I now inhale and say, Thanks, Dad.

At least you tried to build a boat.

My father died in 2001, and the loss remains keenly felt in our family a decade later.  We remain boatyard rats, coastal huggers, and clam shack diners.  Ask any of these questions and watch agendas get reworked, if not entirely tossed out the window:  “Want to go out on the boat this weekend?...Want to walk down to the marina?...Want to take a drive along the shore?...Lunch in Matunuck?”  Life is good when viewed on a salt marsh safari, or sitting at a raw oyster bar, or watching the breakers off Watch Hill, RI.  

After a funeral, we're likely to take a ride to the water.  After a hurricane, or any major storm, we definitely are! In the inevitable conflicts that arise in families, even in the greatest tension points we have ever had, a one-word question can defuse tempers and turn aside wrath: “Boatride?” 

In large part, all because of my father.   

Thanks, Dad.  This one’s for you.