Early this Sunday, after astronomical twilight, after civil twilight, after nautical twilight, between civil and nautical dawn, on what is the lightest and the longest of days, in a year of long delays, there is an expectation of resumption to a kind of new normal that somehow feels the same.
It’s also the day for Fathers. Everyone has had a father, but not everyone has a father. There is the Heavenly Father, who may only exist in our minds as a way to explain what may have preceded our existence, to acknowledge the fact that something put this all in motion, something came before all of this. Then there is the father who is the donor, whose apex contribution is their genetic admixture, who know the limits of their fatherdom, who steps out of the way. We can even thank that kind of father for their sole contribution. They had a hand in your creation.
There is the active father, the one who gets neckties and coffee mugs and sits at the head of the awkward table at The Cheesecake Factory, the one who put you through college. Many of us do not know this kind of father. They may live in the same house as us, they may have taught you how to fish or shave or write a strongly worded letter, they may have cried with you or you cried because of them, but they may not truly know them. Or you may know them so well that you are a reflection of them, and you make them proud.
Then there is the father figure – the one who steps in because the one who helped you come into existence is not the one who will end up staying. Those are called mothers, usually.
Single mothers make the best fathers sometimes, with or without help from others. They father by contingency, to father by an enabling act of necessity. It is true that you need a father to have a child, but it is just as true that you do not need a father to raise a future father. Or a future mother. Or a future child who will become a future adult who may never become a father themselves. They know what it takes, what is missing, what needs to happen.
Just like the beauty of civil dawn on the Hood Canal will surely continue to inspire others, there will be other fathers and other father’s days and there is a relief in knowing that it goes without you, whether you are dead or alive, or whether you are a father, will be one someday. Or whether the family line ends with you. The cycle can be stopped. It may all end tomorrow, or it could go on forever, but it took a father to put it into motion.
