Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Father’s Day

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
June 18, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

My father taught me to write. He did it in the best and most infuriating way: by looking closely at whatever school assignment I had written, pointing out what needed to be changed (he was always right), and sending me off to find a better way to write it. It drove me crazy. I would stomp back to my room, griping about “stupid topic sentences” and “stupid active verbs,” and slam into my desk chair. There I’d sit, with Brave New World in one hand and a pen in the other, struggling to find the words that would express my thoughts. Dad knew I was stewing in there. He also knew there was no way for me to learn to write except to do it; over and over, he pushed me from the nest, knowing I would fly.

That was when I was in junior high school. But really he made me into a writer, like himself, much earlier, by gentler means. He delighted in my childhood scribblings, such as the doggerel I wrote for him and my mom as an anniversary gift. Dad showed me how to touch-type on an old manual typewriter he and Mom gave me to be my own, and taught me “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which I loved. Like my mother, he himself could type so fast the keys made a drumroll, and I loved to watch him.

He instilled a love of language by loving it himself, boldly, unashamedly — he’s the kind of person who repeats a word over and over because he loves the sound of it, and actually delivers speeches from Shakespeare at the dinner table, tasting the gorgeous phrases as if they were food too. When, years later, he lay in the hospital, in the gray land between life and death, the book I read to him to urge him toward the light of day was not any religious scripture; it was The Tempest. Language was and always has been his lifeline. For both of us, it is also part of our work — but thanks to my dad’s exuberance about the English language, it was play first.

My dad scorns Father’s Day, calling it a “Hallmark holiday.” But even if it was created in order to move the consumer culture along faster, we can still use it as a reminder to celebrate fathers, who already get shorter shrift than mothers all too often. Just look at Father’s Day ads and how we seem as a culture to be at a loss for what to give our dads. My father doesn’t do woodworking, seldom puts on aftershave, and has enough ties, so I’m not sure what I would give him.

Perhaps Father’s Day is complicated for many of us by the fact that many more of us don’t have dads than don’t have moms. Dad is more likely to have died when we were young, left before we were born, or been the non-custodial parent all our lives.

And there’s something else at work: a discomfort with fathers that shows up all over our culture. Parenting magazines are directed toward mothers, with articles about fathering off to one side, an afterthought as often as not written for women about how to involve men in parenting. Parenting.com has the subheadings: Pregnancy, Baby, Child, Mom, with regular features such as “Mom to Mom” — you would think it was Single Mother Magazine. The Palo Alto Mother’s Club has only very recently become the Parent’s Club.

Parenthood has been identified with motherhood, and although women’s roles have expanded dramatically in the past thirty-some years, men’s roles have been slower to change. Fathers are still in the middle of a sea change, and that means that their role models — who are usually their own fathers — had a very different approach to parenting.

My dad seemed to bridge the gap, which is not surprising given the time in which he was bringing us up. When my dad became a dad, things were changing fast. The second wave of feminism would soon crash on our shores, and the roles of men and women, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters would radically shift. My father rode this wave pretty well; by the time I was in school for a full day, my mother worked full time, and it was my father, with his college professor’s schedule, who was likely to be home when we got home from school. He cleaned house, made many of our family dinners, and baked bread. In other ways, he and my mother were very much the children of that earlier time, when middle-class women were expected to be mothers without careers, and men made the decisions.

He was in another room when my mother delivered both of their children. That was the way things were done in that hospital and in most hospitals in the 1960s.

And so it was not surprising that he taught us in the time-honored way he’d learned from his dad: through set instruction at limited times, in those homework sessions over drafts of school essays. A weekend Dad, an after-dinner Dad, a special-times Dad, while we more often went to my mom with our daily squabbles and problems.

But because Dad was around, and because he, along with our culture, was shifting slowly toward a different model of manhood and fatherhood, he also taught us by his presence: the way a mother does, one might have said. I could absorb so much of my father’s love of language and way with words because he was there.

Many fathers have been told, one way and another, not to be there — that their proper role in the family is almost that of outsider. I saw an old film once, made to instruct school children and teenagers in the proper behavior at the dinner table. It was called “A Date with Your Family,” and the gist was that one ought to give Dad a peaceful dinner. That meant: don’t complain. Don’t raise difficult topics or emotional issues. Dad’s responsibility to the family is to bring home the bacon, not deal with emotions or tend relationships. The narrator starts off, promisingly, with “With your own family you can relax. Be yourself,” but then follows up with “Just be sure it’s your best self.” Dad is not supposed to have to deal with works in progress. Unfortunately, that’s what families are.

The Dad in the film would have been born around 1910, 1920. But the message got through, as it was meant to, to plenty of men of the next generation. One of them writes,

The saddest thing[s] I own are the memories of my father. He was alive for nearly forty years of my life, yet I never knew him. I knew which cars he liked, which teams he rooted for, which beer he drank and which cigarettes he smoked, but I never knew my father. I don’t know what he thought about politics, God, or me, for that matter. ¹ 

Another man named David, who was involved in a study of fathers, remembers his dad as a buddy in his later childhood, but says of his early years,

I look at the way I grew up and I didn’t know my dad at all until I was like five or six years old, until I was able to play ball and get in with the go-cart. Then my dad just took me and we were two buddies. But you know until then I guess he was always working. I found out where I didn’t know much about him.² 

When David became a father himself, he followed this model, to the detriment of his parenting partnership with his wife.

I guess I went in with that too. I was just trying to make sure I had the extra income coming, and that things were all settled, you know, things for the kid … And put too much emphasis on the work and not enough into what she needed … And maybe she thought if she had another kid, that I’d be the same way, not really participating until he was five years old, where she’s got to do it all.² 

His wife confirms that one reason they had only one child was that she was silently determined not to “raise another child by [her]self.”

What I wonder, here on Father’s Day, is not so much the impact that this approach to fatherhood has on a man’s partner, but the impact it has on his relationship with his children. Because fathers are still very much in that bind. It is financially impossible for most people to both take off from work, or to each work half-time, when the children are young, and so if there is a mother and a father, it is almost always the mother who stays home. Even in cases where the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid leave when a new child comes into the house, the expectation from employers and co-workers is generally that a father will not use it all, so that the only time they have with their kids has to be squeezed in to the weekends and the small space between dad coming home from work and the kids going to bed. A father who stays home with his children is still “Mr. Mom,” instead of simply “Dad.” As a culture, we expect fathers to be the financial backbone of the family, which requires them to be out of the houseÐwhile more and more we are asking them to model their parenting upon that of mothers, that involved, emotional style, being not just buddies and instructors to children but their emotional soundingboards. Fathers are being asked to be themselves with their children and encourage their children to be themselves, not just their “best selves,” yet this takes time, day-to-day presence, and we need to give fathers more support for that: logistically, financially, and socially.

So what is it we really need from our fathers, if we have them?

• We need their time.

• We need their attention.

• We need their affection. It can be expressed in many ways — a pat on the back as well as a kiss, an afternoon playing catch as well as a heartfelt letter — but we need to know they love us.

• We need to know something of their inner life, who they are, what they value. This, too, can be shown through actions as well as said in words. A man who takes his son to serve food at the homeless shelter is saying more about his commitments than he would do in an eloquent speech.

• We need whatever wisdom they can offer.

• We need their steady presence: knowing that we can turn to them with our troubles.

It doesn’t sound so different from what we need from our mothers. And what our fathers need from us seems to be pretty much what our moms need too: to know that we appreciate them, to see how they have done well, to know that where they have made mistakes, we love them anyway. So if your dad doesn’t use aftershave or work with power tools, don’t fret — call him up or write him a letter. If he is no longer alive, you might want to write that letter anyway. Hallmark and the department stores might have had something else in mind, but what Father’s Day is really all about is the love between children and fathers, so all you really need to do for your dad today is say “I love you” in whatever way he will hear it. I’m going to send mine this sermon.

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