On Fathering

I used to think I'd had the perfect childhood.

I grew up in a home with two parents who loved God and loved their children. I would look at my father, a gentle man who laughs quickly and cries easily, and think that he did not struggle with finances, or argue with his wife, or feel any pain at all. I never saw him yell at my mother, rarely heard him raise his voice to me or my two sisters. That model was how I’ve judged my own performance as a husband and father -- and I've been found wanting. I've fallen far short of the standard I'd expected of myself. I’ve failed.

It's in more recent years that I've started seeing my father through the lens of my own parenting, and began forming a different idea of who he is, and ultimately of who I am. I've looked back at the times when I worked beside him and felt hopelessly inept, occasions when he did lose his temper, when I've heard the frustration in his voice. I can remember vividly a moment of my childhood that defines that feeling for me:

My father is a carpenter who builds houses for a living. When I was growing up, he also had a barn that held over 14,000 chickens at a time, and it was the absolute bane of my young existence. Every couple months, we would get a fresh batch of day-old chicks, shipped in crates on a trailer truck, which my father and I would literally dump out onto the fresh sawdust of the barn floor. Six weeks later, those chicks were full grown and ready to be shipped out for slaughter, which then left us only a few days to clean out the barn and prepare for the next round.

On one of those occasions, when I was probably 10 years old, I can remember my dad hooking up a plow to his old orange Allis Chalmers tractor in order to push the manure out of the barn, where it could then be loaded onto a spreader for a local farmer to use on his fields. It was my job to shovel out the corners, to follow behind and get the spots that couldn't be reached with the plow. The ammonia stench of raw chicken manure is eye-watering - we would wear paper air masks over our nose and mouth to help filter the dust and smell. We wore unwieldy gloves to prevent blisters, and sometimes plastic goggles over our eyes that would immediately fog up with sweat and condensation. It was miserable work. On that day, I simply remember that at any point in which my father was not within sight of me, I would quickly put down my shovel and start walking towards the house. This happened numerous times -- once, I had gotten far enough to touch the handle of the front door. Inevitably, he would call me back, with anger mounting in his voice, and with the anguish that only a 10-year old can truly express, I would go back to shoveling the bird shit into the path of the plow.

There are other examples, when I was older and working with him in construction, that would often leave me feeling inadequate, more nuisance than helpful. I would drop a hammer off the roof, or forget how to cut a shingle, or be unable to find a box of nails. "If it was a snake, it would bite you in the boot," he would yell down impatiently, clearly unable to fathom my ignorance. When I recall the times that my dad was angry or upset, I have always seen those moments as responses to my own shortcomings as a son. I'm starting now to see that those moments were not my failures, or even HIS failures, but the truth of his struggle: children are annoying! Parenting takes time, and repetition, and patience, and consistency, and so often our own lives and expectations and time-lines get in the way.

My family (my parents and sisters) do not have a history of talking easily about difficult things. It has been our nature to avoid conflict, to find something more comfortable to talk about -- to get along. And while that may look "perfect" on the outside, it is not enough to build a life on, nor is any life that simple or one-sided. Certainly, there is laughter and joy in raising children. But there is also uncertainty, and sorrow, and fear. There are mistakes, and tears.

I am not giving my children a perfect childhood.

I yell at my wife. I yell loudly and often at my children, and I can see that my own fears and frustrations are being put onto them, that they're carrying far more than their share of guilt.

In many ways, being a father has given me the opportunity to completely break apart and examine my own person -- to see parts of myself that would never otherwise see the light. Many of these parts are ugly, and wounded. For all of my life, I have wanted to avoid those pieces of me, to hide them, and hide from them. Being a husband and father no longer allows me to do that. As I encounter every day the ugliness of my own heart, I realize that there is no other way to begin changing it than by acknowledging those selfish habits and desires. The pain and difficulty of confronting my own failures, of breaking down unrealistic expectations, is also the only way to take the first step towards bringing healing to myself and my family.

The other day, my son and I were doing housework together. I was downstairs mopping the kitchen floor, and he was upstairs cleaning his room: putting away books, picking up toys, making his bed. After not nearly enough time, I heard the front door quietly click shut. I put down the mop, found my son on the front porch, and redirected him back to the job I'd asked him to do. And with the anguish that only an 8-year-old can express, he went back to folding laundry.