By Henrylito D. Tacio
“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for their father’s mistakes….” ― President Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
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Just recently, I was reading some back issues of Health and Home when I came across a very informative article written by J. Grant Swank, Jr., who has written five books in the United States. What caught my attention was this anecdote:
One evening years ago, I had a tussle with my then seven-year-old son. It was time for him to get ready for bed. I felt as if the evening had been rather botched up.
After he curled up under the blanket, I sat on the edge of his bed and started to pray. It was hard to find the right words, but I made a stab at it.
Should I turn the prayer into a mini lecture, trying to get in one last punch? Or should I turn tender to love the little fellow to pieces? Would that be copping out — or wisdom?
His face turned away from me. He was wondering too what approach Dad would take!
Then I caught his big, brown eyes turn a bit more to size up my expression. With that, I wilted. After all, he knew he had done wrong earlier. But there was the look of hope in his face. Could there be mercy in the court?
I started to pray, “Dear Lord, thank You for my boy. You know I love him. Now we thank You for this night’s sleep. And may tomorrow be a good day.”
He swung his body around toward me to hug me tightly around the neck. His eyes were closed tight. There was no more reason to glance in wonder.
“Daddy, do you love me even when I am bad?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I answered, “I always love you.”
Why I am retelling the story here? It’s because every third Sunday of June, some parts in the world celebrates Father’s Day (Mother’s Day is celebrated every second Sunday of May, if you haven’t noticed it).
There’s an interesting story on how Father’s Day came to be. Wikipedia gives us some historical background: It was started by a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, who was born in Arkansas. Her father was a civil war veteran, a single parent who raised his six children.
After hearing a sermon about Anna Jarvis’ Mother’s Day in 1909 at Central Methodist Episcopal Church, Sonora told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them. Although she initially suggested June 5, her father’s birthday, the church pastors did not have enough time to prepare their sermons, and the celebration was deferred to the third Sunday of June. Several local clergymen accepted the idea, and on June 19, 1910, the first Father’s Day, “sermons honoring fathers were presented throughout the city” in Spokane, Washington.
In 1913, a bill to accord national recognition of the holiday was introduced in US Congress. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson went to Spokane to speak in a Father’s Day celebration and wanted to make it official, but Congress resisted, fearing that it would become commercialized. President Calvin Coolidge recommended in 1924 that the day be observed by the nation, but stopped short of issuing a national proclamation.
In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.
“A father is the one friend upon whom we can always rely,” Emile Gaboriau said. “In the hour of need, when all else fails, we remember him upon whose knees we sat when children, and who soothed our sorrows; and even though he may be unable to assist us, his mere presence serves to comfort and strengthen us.”
That’s why being a father is a tough job. “It is much easier to become a father than to be one,” Kent Nerburn penned in Letters to My Son: Reflections on Becoming a Man. Robert Brault has the same idea when he said: “You will find that if you really try to be a father, your child will meet you halfway.”
“A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Ethics. “In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father.”
Dan Pearce, author of Single Dad Laughing, shared some thoughts about his father: “I’ve watched my dad move our family from extreme poverty to extreme wealth and then everywhere in between. Never once did I see or hear him be anything but a cheerleader for the accomplishments of others. It didn’t matter if he was down or up in life, he wanted everybody around him to succeed.
“I’ve even watched him praise the very people that have tried to destroy him over the years and then very publicly wish them success and happiness. He taught me the enthusiasm that should always come at the success of others. He constantly taught me that when others succeed, it gives us all more opportunity to succeed. He taught me that when there is conflict, minor or major, you can almost always walk away at the end with a handshake.”
To all daughters, the father is almost always their first love. American actress said it clearly: “I am not ashamed to say that no man I ever met was my father’s equal, and I never loved any other man as much.”
In Hitch-22: A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens explained it this way: “To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”
To all fathers out there, here’s a final statement from Clarence Budington Kelland: “He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”
Happy Father’s Day! — ###
