This weekend, 75% of Americans are celebrating their fathers on Father’s Day. I’m a father by way of biology, adoption, the foster care system, and community, so this is a busy day for me! However, the holiday has also always been a complicated one, as I spent the first two decades of my life both loving and fearing my father, Charles Franklin — often at the same time.
My relationship with Dad changed significantly as I stumbled into fatherhood, figuring things out as I went along, and realizing that my dad had done the same thing. Like me, Dad had gotten married and became a first-time father in his early 20s. The extension cords and switches cut from trees that he brandished were no different than the leather belts and bare palms I applied to my eldest daughter’s behind very early on. Her last whipping (or “spanking” for the white folks in the room) was when she was just two or three years old, over her penchant for sticking metal bobby pins into electrical outlets.
Luckily — for both me and my first-born, Janet — it wasn’t alcohol that fueled the corporal punishment I inflicted on her. It was immaturity, inexperience, and fear. I was too afraid of not knowing what I was doing to take the time to figure out a better method than the one that had been used when I was a kid, by someone who had been spanked as a kid.
Luckily — for me alone this time — Janet doesn’t have any memories of my whipping her, although she will tell anyone who’ll listen that she was a teenager before she was brave enough to plug anything into an outlet without adult supervision. I’ve never laid a hand on her younger sister, Kristina. However, they would both probably tell you that I had no problem disciplining them as they were growing up!
My father has been gone for over sixteen years now, after we managed to coexist and, to an extent, love and appreciate each other. I miss him every day. But a couple of events over the last couple of years have intensified my longing for him, which is always exacerbated on Father’s Day.
About a year and a half ago, Kristina stumbled into parenthood in the passionate, proverbial heat of a moment, just as her mother and I had done decades before. The twins were to have been born in April of last year, but just before Christmas she called me in the midst of a painful, premature delivery of a boy and a girl. One of the children would live for just hours, while the other survived a couple of days. At just 19 weeks, the babies just couldn’t hang on to lives that I had just been able to wrap my brain around. I was to be a grandfather, but that was only to be for the shortest of times.
Kristina named my grandson after me, and my granddaughter after her mom. As young and inexperienced as we both were when we became parents, we must have done something right.
As I often did while parenting my kids, I borrowed from everything my Dad had done well, did the opposite of everything he did wrong, and did what I could to help Kristina recover. Last Father’s Day, just six months after that trauma, Janet (who lives just down the road from me) affirmed that I hadn’t totally screwed her up — as she does every day. Tina lives on the other side of the country, and she’s more like me than I care to admit, so it’s harder for her to tell me what she feels for me. But I know.
This year, with the pain of those births and deaths a year farther behind all of us, I looked forward to a more normal Father’s Day, whatever that means, before getting a hysterical call from my 80 year old mother just a few days ago: my 58 year old brother, Charles Franklin Jr., had just been hospitalized with complications caused by congestive heart failure.
This Father’s Day morning, my brother remains hospitalized and his doctors have managed to jump-start his heart, but that organ has been given a two year expiration date. Chuck (as only family calls him) is leaning away from his doctors’ recommended surgical implantation of a heart pump. He says he’s “tired,” after facing a myriad of health problems for several decades. His wife, my mother, and our entire family are shaken.
But in the midst of this storm, and at the risk of sounding too much like Oprah, I know a few things for sure:
First, I know God can bring peace in the midst of the storm. (Thanks, Shirley Caesar.)
I know that Chuck’s doctors are only making their best, albeit educated, guesses with regards to his health. At one point, my father had been given six months to live, and he survived for over a decade on that diagnosis.
I know that the decision about treatment is Chuck’s to make. I know the decision I would make — I’m holding on to life for as long as I can, for my kids if for no other reason. Hell, they can install whatever needs to be installed. They can make me into the Black Bionic Man if they have to, but leave me here.
And finally, I know I’m not ready to say goodbye to my brother. And especially not at this time of year, when Father’s Day wounds are raw.
Say a prayer for me and my family as I close this laptop, pick up the phone, try to channel my Dad, and love and support my brother this Father’s Day Weekend, before enjoying the time and company of my kids.
And if your father is still here, love on him, hug on him, and let him know that YOU know he did the best that he could…and that you love him because of and in spite of it.
Michael's Mind's Eye 