Wounds

Father’s Day

Recently a strange holiday passed that, as a child, I never gave a second thought.  Father’s Day was just like Mother’s Day, but for dads, just like a birthday, a day where you get or make Dad a gift, write him a card, and spend the day the way he wants to.  I thought this was normal, and the way everyone spent Father’s Day.  Of course people all over don’t spend their days the same way.  A large family Christmas is very different from a lonely one.  But for some, Father’s Day was never a holiday.  The last 2 schools where I worked as a teacher basically turned a blind eye to Father’s Day.  We didn’t look up cool art projects to make, like during Halloween, Christmas, Hanukah, and the 4^th of July.  We didn’t mention Father’s Day, and if we did, it was to select few children who we knew hadn’t been abandoned by their Dads.  Of course there are many reasons for someone not to be there.  People die, people get divorced, people have to work far away, sometimes in different countries, but the deadbeat mom was rare, leaving Father’s Day to celebrate what should be but is not.

I have always been interested in fathers, men taking care of kids, being tough but also being caring.  What made me this way?  Simply being a man?  Not all men are so focused on fathers, we know that for sure.  Did I want to be a father?  At 12, and throughout my teens that was not something I could imagine.  What about my own dad?

Teens

My dad didn’t leave me when I was a kid, nor treat me badly, nor exactly fit the mold of the big tough but caring father.  He always made me feel like he loved me and cared for me and has always been there for me.  But, like most teens, I felt that my parents were preventing me from being who I was.  They had rules that didn’t seem to make sense.  “Okay, I should be nice to people, I shouldn’t spend all my money, I shouldn’t get a girl pregnant, okay I got you!  But why worry about if I get home at 5:05 when my curfew is 5:00.  I mean, yes I’m late but does it matter?  Dudes?”

“Yeah, I cut school, but my grades are fine.  What, that doesn’t matter?  Why?  Why?”

Of course these are silly examples.  My parents were fair, and though sometimes I didn’t feel that their arguments fully made sense, they were never mean or unreasonable.  Still, I felt that I had ideas and wishes that were hampered by the rules of adults.  I think that this is a common, if not universal feeling among those making the difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Music

My theory is that one reason for the popularity of hip hop among youths is that the music is filled with this same sense of frustration from a group of people towards another group of people for not allowing them to be themselves.  Somehow, as early hip hop distilled the social ills of the world, specifically the white power structures effect on black people, teens of all races felt a kinship with their own struggle against adults.  Yes, I realize that these aren’t the same things.  The Man though in control, is not our parent, but I think you see what I’m saying (Na mean).  Or maybe I am simply projecting how I felt as a youth being drawn to hip hop music.

It all started because rap was cool.  In my day, in my town, being black was the coolest thing you could do.  If you couldn’t do that, or be Latino, you could dress the right way, and listen to the right music.  So I started listening to KMEL, buying rap tapes, and thinking long and hard about people different than myself.  One could say this music was a great departure from the music of my adolescence; Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Huey Lewis and the Stones, but I think political and storytelling songs like Man In The Mirror, Simple as That, and Living For The City all helped set the stage for my ruminations on the state of the world.

Manuscripts

When I was in middle school I began my first novel.  I had recently learned that there was a time in American history when slavery was still legal, but bringing new Africans into the country as slaves was illegal.  I imagined an alternate reality where this state of affairs continued into something like the present day, and a radical movement began among slaves to commit suicide as a way to end slavery.  I called the book Genocide.  It was set in a middle school.  The main character was named Joe (after Joseph, my middle name.  It was much cooler to be named Joe than Dan and I often gave my characters the nomenclature I wished to have in real life).  Anyway, a racially mixed group of friends, race wars, assassinations, a new constitution, and phrases like “why you pushing up on my girl” and “luckily I shot him in the face” made for quite a read.  Yes, the title was Genocide.  I still have the original, unfinished manuscript, written in terrible handwriting that is only slightly worse than my writing now.

Clearly I was thinking hard on the state of the world, race relations, hip hop, and accurate phrases a middle schooler would say.  There is no way this book would have been written had I not gone to school in a racially diverse setting, or if I hadn’t been drinking rap music in through my ears like a bass heavy elixir of the gods.  In rap I found others unlike, but like, myself, struggling, and I found in their struggle a purpose bigger than myself.  I wasn’t black (still not) but I wanted something tangible to fight against, something besides my loving parents, something that was holding them back, holding us all back.  Being white, this something was also partly inside of me.  Luckily, MJ had already told me what to do, in words that meant and have meant more to me than I could have known at the time.  If you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make that…change.

Wounds

To continue the hip hop created analogy of teens in an adult world and minorities in a white one, there were many great rap songs in the 90’s about the absence of fathers in their son’s lives.  Here was a strange braiding of my struggle as a teen mixed with that of the people in the music.  Here the caretaker had abandoned his charges, charges that were also male.  2PAC’s Papa’z Song and Naughty By Nature’s Ghetto Bastard stirred me down to the base of my soul.  Lines like “had to play catch by myself, what a sorry sight, a pitiful plight so I pray for a starry night” still make my eyes water, maybe because I feel surrounded by children with no fathers.  I recently bought a tiny mitt for a boy close to 5 years old, and we played catch for the first time.  Pac’s words echoed through my head over and over, and the smile that seemed to spread from the boy’s lips to his entire body, to the entire park, and the lack of his father in his life, twists my heart as if I am the boy, and the absent father, and the storyteller all at once.

But why?  I don’t mean why do father’s leave, because that is a question I couldn’t begin to tackle.  Why does it effect me so?  My father never left, so why do I act as if there is a wound there?  Because he didn’t also love rap?  Because he didn’t seem to get me as a teen (oh my god, dad, come one!  Stop trippin!)?  Or was it the couple of years, as I entered the realm of teendom, that my father had to take a job in Washington D.C.?  He made good money, but was gone during the week, or for weeks at a time.  Did I ever fear his plane would go down, or that he wouldn’t return home?  I never gave this any thought.  In fact, I remember feeling proud of myself for not blaming him, for understanding this was something he had to do for the family, and knowing that resenting him wasn’t fair.  But I also remember thinking to myself that I would never work far from my family like that, no matter what.  My father remembers one day when the two of us stood near the Cliff House, looking over the ocean.  He says I was nasty, I believe is his word, nasty and angry about the fact that he’d been gone.  I said he didn’t understand me anymore.  Was I so sensitive that even as I thought I understood, I had buried hurt and angry feelings?  These seeds grew into two interlocking trees.  One, watered by an obsession with boys with absent fathers, the other fed by the deep feeling that my father didn’t really understand me.  I’ll skip the years of therapy but I got over myself and realized that my dad and I have probably the best father-son relationship of anyone I know, that we have always got along really great.  I have also realized that maybe I did feel hurt and abandoned as I entered my teenage years, and that this may have effected my fatherhood obsession, as well as my interest in rap music, 2Pac, and the ills of world.  It can be no coincidence that for over a decade I have fulfilled a fatherly role for a child where her father didn’t, or why I feel I deep pull toward my students who have no men in their lives.  My experiences, but especially my wound, relatively small, have helped me to understand those larger wounds that other’s carry, that our nation carries.  These wounds have helped me see that we all live our lives in reaction to these wounds.  We are all children, raised by children, all of us squinting in the darkness.

They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever – Suzanne, Leonard Cohen

We’ve all got holes to fill, and them holes are all that’s real – To Live Is To Fly, Townes Van Zandt

How can I be a man if there's no role model?                         – Papa'z Song, 2Pac

I'm gonna flaunt it, gonna know when, and not now
How will I do it, how will I make it, I won't, that's how            - Ghetto Bastard, Treach

Think it was September, the year I went away,
For there were many things I didn't know.
And I still see him standing, try'n' to be a man;
I said, "Someday you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now each and ev'ry mother's son
You better learn it fast; you better learn it young,
'Cause, "Someday" Never Comes."            

- Someday Never Comes, Creedence Clearwater Revival

I love you dad!