Why I Celebrate Father's Day

My father is one of the reasons I chose to have a child. Not to honor him or continue my lineage, but to fix the parts that he broke. 

Too many of my memories are of a childhood and family irreparably damaged, achingly sad, or completely dysfunctional. I wanted to replace these memories with positive ones of my own creation, and to experience through my child’s eyes the childhood I didn’t have. Sure, it’s terribly selfish and probably more than a little misguided. But people have had children for far worse and far fewer reasons. 

For example, take the playground. My father rarely played with us in the yard. There was no kicking soccer balls, throwing baseballs, no balls of any kind really. We grew up food-stamps-poor, so there were rarely any trips to local museums or science centers or cultural events. But we did have Sunday Family Day sometimes when I was little, where the four of us would pile in my father’s shit brown Ford mini pick-up truck and go somewhere like a local school playground. In this particular memory, my brother and I had been availing ourselves of the metal monkey bars and hard rubber swings for what seemed like hours, but was never long enough. My dad declared that it was time to go, and of course we resisted. There was probably a lot of back-and-forth arguing, the kind parents do with uncooperative children who don’t want to leave a fun activity to go home to dinner. And then came my dad’s solution: to frighten us into submission. He said that if we weren’t coming, he was leaving without us. He put my mom in the truck and drove away – far enough away that we couldn’t see him anymore. The school had been built off a farm-to-market highway miles from any real neighborhood, it was cold, there were no cell phones, we had no quarters for pay phones and no one to call anyway, and we were alone. Alone enough for long enough that I cried many frightened tears and tried to think very hard with my young brain about how to get us back home. Could we hitchhike? Would someone take pity on us? Or would we have to stay there and sleep in the empty parking lot until the school opened up on Monday morning? 

I don’t know how long we were there alone – probably not very. But the damage was done and trust was broken. My dad came back for us, and we and our tears got in the truck, thankful not to be left overnight or found by police. I remember my dad asking my mother during the drive home, “Did I ruin it?” 

“Yes,” was all she said. I don’t recall ever going to the playground on a Family Day again. 

With my precious child by my side, I can begin to replace that playground memory with more positive family experiences, like the joy on his face as he slides down the slide into my waiting arms, the pitch of the “wheeee!” he screams as he runs from one climbing apparatus to the next, and the look of happiness on my husband’s face as one of us pushes the swing from behind and one of us pushes from the front. That playground so long ago begins to fade, and what materializes in its place – in bright, beautiful colors – is love.