Friday, December 26, 2003
The hidden dad of Christmas
By Russell King
This time of year, most of us who call ourselves Christians focus a great deal of attention on the Nativity scene. The center, of course, is the Christ child. We sing songs about him, and those around him: mother Mary, a few shepherds, assorted farm animals, three wise men and even a little drummer boy (never mind that the animals, wise men and drummer come more from carols than from scriptures). Topping it all off is an angel or a star. For a moment, I’d like to point out the most overlooked member of the scene: Joseph, the dad.
He’s all but missing from our songs, poems, stories, sermons, sacraments and celebrations, but I think he deserves better. From what little we know of him, I think he’s a heck of a guy. I think he just might have something to say to us—the dads who follow him 20 centuries later.
What makes him so special? Joseph was a carpenter who lived in Nazareth, which means he was a peasant living in a peasant village. “Peasant” means more than just dirt poor and uneducated, which he almost certainly was. Socially, politically and economically, Joseph was on the bottom rung with no chance of ever moving up. His homeland was occupied and controlled by a foreign power--the Romans—hostile to his race, religion and culture. And living just four miles from the seat of King Herod’s government, Joseph must have been regularly reminded of his poverty and low standing, as well as made witness to the brutal injustices of such a social system.
Sounds like a big time loser. Making it worse by adding insult to his life of injury, the woman he was about to marry told him she was going to have a baby that wasn’t his. She told him that the baby’s father was God—something which, the story tells us, Joseph had trouble believing. I can imagine that most guys would have some “trust issues” at that moment.
So why do I think he’s such a great guy? Because he didn’t bolt, wallow or cave in. It doesn’t take much looking around to find a whole bunch of “modern” men who, when faced less difficult circumstances, have abandoned their families (emotionally or physically) and dishonored themselves as dads.
Joseph is worthy of our attention, because he refused to sink beneath all the best excuses for being a failure as a father. Joseph rose above the seemingly universally accepted “best reason” for rejecting the role of dad: The child was not his.
When Danny and Hannah, my adopted children, first came into my life, I learned that there is a widespread assumption that your love for children you did not “beget” is naturally of lesser quality and depth. Having only adopted children then, I had no basis for comparison, although my love for them sure felt like genuine parental love.
I can now tell you with complete certainty that this assumption is in error. Over the past 15 years, I have added two step-children, Logan and Rylee, and two I made from scratch, Jaden and Maya. I am in the unique position of having obtained my children in every legal way, and from that position I can state that bonding, loving and parenting are unrelated to genetic inheritance.
Frankly, this should not come as a surprise. You don’t become a father by making a baby; you become a father by making a choice. You decide whether you’re going to be a dad, which brings me back to Joseph. Joseph made a choice, the right choice, and for that perhaps we can edge his figurine an inch or two toward the front of the Nativity set.
In case you’re thinking, “Yeah, sure, it’s different because his child was the son of God,” think again. Your children, too, are the sons and daughters of God. And don’t you forget it.
By Russell King
This time of year, most of us who call ourselves Christians focus a great deal of attention on the Nativity scene. The center, of course, is the Christ child. We sing songs about him, and those around him: mother Mary, a few shepherds, assorted farm animals, three wise men and even a little drummer boy (never mind that the animals, wise men and drummer come more from carols than from scriptures). Topping it all off is an angel or a star. For a moment, I’d like to point out the most overlooked member of the scene: Joseph, the dad.
He’s all but missing from our songs, poems, stories, sermons, sacraments and celebrations, but I think he deserves better. From what little we know of him, I think he’s a heck of a guy. I think he just might have something to say to us—the dads who follow him 20 centuries later.
What makes him so special? Joseph was a carpenter who lived in Nazareth, which means he was a peasant living in a peasant village. “Peasant” means more than just dirt poor and uneducated, which he almost certainly was. Socially, politically and economically, Joseph was on the bottom rung with no chance of ever moving up. His homeland was occupied and controlled by a foreign power--the Romans—hostile to his race, religion and culture. And living just four miles from the seat of King Herod’s government, Joseph must have been regularly reminded of his poverty and low standing, as well as made witness to the brutal injustices of such a social system.
Sounds like a big time loser. Making it worse by adding insult to his life of injury, the woman he was about to marry told him she was going to have a baby that wasn’t his. She told him that the baby’s father was God—something which, the story tells us, Joseph had trouble believing. I can imagine that most guys would have some “trust issues” at that moment.
So why do I think he’s such a great guy? Because he didn’t bolt, wallow or cave in. It doesn’t take much looking around to find a whole bunch of “modern” men who, when faced less difficult circumstances, have abandoned their families (emotionally or physically) and dishonored themselves as dads.
Joseph is worthy of our attention, because he refused to sink beneath all the best excuses for being a failure as a father. Joseph rose above the seemingly universally accepted “best reason” for rejecting the role of dad: The child was not his.
When Danny and Hannah, my adopted children, first came into my life, I learned that there is a widespread assumption that your love for children you did not “beget” is naturally of lesser quality and depth. Having only adopted children then, I had no basis for comparison, although my love for them sure felt like genuine parental love.
I can now tell you with complete certainty that this assumption is in error. Over the past 15 years, I have added two step-children, Logan and Rylee, and two I made from scratch, Jaden and Maya. I am in the unique position of having obtained my children in every legal way, and from that position I can state that bonding, loving and parenting are unrelated to genetic inheritance.
Frankly, this should not come as a surprise. You don’t become a father by making a baby; you become a father by making a choice. You decide whether you’re going to be a dad, which brings me back to Joseph. Joseph made a choice, the right choice, and for that perhaps we can edge his figurine an inch or two toward the front of the Nativity set.
In case you’re thinking, “Yeah, sure, it’s different because his child was the son of God,” think again. Your children, too, are the sons and daughters of God. And don’t you forget it.
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
Dad, you're not what you think
By Russell King
Fatherhood gives you pretty high standing in the first few years, then it seems as though it plunges you into the depths of ill repute. Up until second or third grade, kids see their dads as godlike creatures—all knowing and all powerful—but the view changes over night.
You go to bed a superstar, you wake up a bum. All other dads are cooler. They’re richer, smarter, nicer and have fewer rules. You, on the other hand, are so out of touch with reality, so worthless, as to be laughable. Worse yet, you have a job and answer to a boss. You’re not a professional musician, athlete, actor or rapper. You’re so out of it, so far from hip, that you actually think your time is better spent nurturing your children’s physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual health than performing tricks on snowboards, skateboards, rollerblades or dirt bikes.
You’re downright embarrassing.
Or so it seems. You parent, and they smirk, sass and roll their eyes. They appear never to be listening and sometimes actually turn their backs on you as you’re speaking. At the end of the day, you congratulate yourself for resisting the urge to express your anger, frustration and wounded ego with a whack or two on their backsides.
You wonder what’s wrong with them. Then you wonder what’s wrong with you. What are you doing wrong? Why can’t you reach them? Why don’t you matter? What more of yourself can you give to this thing called fatherhood? Just how badly are you messing up and how many years of therapy will it take to undo the damage?
Then your 10-year-old son brings home his journal from school. In it, you find stories about his hobbies, his siblings, his grandma. And one titled “My Dad.” Oh no, he’s going to share all of your weaknesses with the world. You can imagine the “Daddy Dearest” memoir in the bookstore window and you hope that he’ll at least wait until you’re dead. Prepared for the worst, you begin reading.
The words come off the page the way a sudden December sun glistens on the snow after an endless dark November:
“It seems like my dad can do anything. He sometimes leaves work for me. He puts time out just for me. We play catch together. I’ve gone to Packer and Badger games just with him. He says it’s father-and-son. He is also my sports coach.
“My dad has the most creative mind. He can make something boring into something you’ve never done in your life. When I’m mad, he makes me feel better.
“My dad tells the best stories. He tells me stories of his past. I also like the stories he makes up from scratch. Robert Frost is his favorite poet. He’s memorized every poem of his.
“My dad knows the best jokes. Sometimes they’re inappropriate, so he only tells them around me. Sometimes his jokes are so weird that I don’t get it, but he and my mom are cracking up for some reason. I love his jokes.
“By Logan J. King.”
For a while, you just sit to let it soak in. You know the moments he’s writing about, and you know everything that fills the spaces between the words. There’s a lot there. The thought that keeps coming back is, “This is how he sees me?”
It’s not a Sally Fields moment—“You like me. You really like me!”—but a fatherhood moment –“I matter. I really matter.” You can’t admire your own work, because you know how many times you have failed, but for one sweetly shimmering moment, you can be proud of yourself.
I enjoyed that moment, and then the realization hit me: It’s not that he sees me as less than I am, but more. I know I’m not half the dad he thinks I am. I am not worthy of the love, respect and admiration he has for me. I have work to do. And it matters.
By Russell King
Fatherhood gives you pretty high standing in the first few years, then it seems as though it plunges you into the depths of ill repute. Up until second or third grade, kids see their dads as godlike creatures—all knowing and all powerful—but the view changes over night.
You go to bed a superstar, you wake up a bum. All other dads are cooler. They’re richer, smarter, nicer and have fewer rules. You, on the other hand, are so out of touch with reality, so worthless, as to be laughable. Worse yet, you have a job and answer to a boss. You’re not a professional musician, athlete, actor or rapper. You’re so out of it, so far from hip, that you actually think your time is better spent nurturing your children’s physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual health than performing tricks on snowboards, skateboards, rollerblades or dirt bikes.
You’re downright embarrassing.
Or so it seems. You parent, and they smirk, sass and roll their eyes. They appear never to be listening and sometimes actually turn their backs on you as you’re speaking. At the end of the day, you congratulate yourself for resisting the urge to express your anger, frustration and wounded ego with a whack or two on their backsides.
You wonder what’s wrong with them. Then you wonder what’s wrong with you. What are you doing wrong? Why can’t you reach them? Why don’t you matter? What more of yourself can you give to this thing called fatherhood? Just how badly are you messing up and how many years of therapy will it take to undo the damage?
Then your 10-year-old son brings home his journal from school. In it, you find stories about his hobbies, his siblings, his grandma. And one titled “My Dad.” Oh no, he’s going to share all of your weaknesses with the world. You can imagine the “Daddy Dearest” memoir in the bookstore window and you hope that he’ll at least wait until you’re dead. Prepared for the worst, you begin reading.
The words come off the page the way a sudden December sun glistens on the snow after an endless dark November:
“It seems like my dad can do anything. He sometimes leaves work for me. He puts time out just for me. We play catch together. I’ve gone to Packer and Badger games just with him. He says it’s father-and-son. He is also my sports coach.
“My dad has the most creative mind. He can make something boring into something you’ve never done in your life. When I’m mad, he makes me feel better.
“My dad tells the best stories. He tells me stories of his past. I also like the stories he makes up from scratch. Robert Frost is his favorite poet. He’s memorized every poem of his.
“My dad knows the best jokes. Sometimes they’re inappropriate, so he only tells them around me. Sometimes his jokes are so weird that I don’t get it, but he and my mom are cracking up for some reason. I love his jokes.
“By Logan J. King.”
For a while, you just sit to let it soak in. You know the moments he’s writing about, and you know everything that fills the spaces between the words. There’s a lot there. The thought that keeps coming back is, “This is how he sees me?”
It’s not a Sally Fields moment—“You like me. You really like me!”—but a fatherhood moment –“I matter. I really matter.” You can’t admire your own work, because you know how many times you have failed, but for one sweetly shimmering moment, you can be proud of yourself.
I enjoyed that moment, and then the realization hit me: It’s not that he sees me as less than I am, but more. I know I’m not half the dad he thinks I am. I am not worthy of the love, respect and admiration he has for me. I have work to do. And it matters.
Monday, December 01, 2003
Fatherhood is all about choices
By Russell King
Two friends of mine lost their fathers this week. Both men were in their 60s and, judging from what I know of their children as adults and by the what is being said and felt by their children, they were successful in the most important job of their lives: fatherhood. During their lives, these two men apparently made more good choices than bad, and that got me thinking of two celebrated dads who, by my reckoning, made very poor choices.
The first is Rob Hall, admired for his ability to climb mountains and made famous through the film about the Mt. Everest climb that took his life. We watched Hall as he, helpless and dying, talked via radio with his pregnant wife. He was portrayed and acclaimed as a hero. One writer gushed that “we mortals ... will likely never be tested in this way,” giving Hall godly status.
All I could think was, “How dare he?” He knew the hazards of climbing Everest, and he knew his wife was pregnant. How dare he put his life at risk? How dare he risk his life when his wife and child needed him to be alive? How dare he make climbing a pile of ice and rock a higher priority than being a dad?
I had the same reaction to the gruesome death of Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal bureau chief who was executed by rabid Islamic thugs in Pakistan when his wife was six months pregnant. How dare he? Pearl was a Jewish American who pursued stories about vicious killers from vicious killers in a part of the world where nothing is hated more than Jews and Americans. He may as well have been swimming with sharks while covered in raw meat. How dare he put pursuit of a news story ahead of the need and the right of his child for a dad?
By all accounts, including the one in his widow’s book, Pearl was a great guy. Mrs. Pearl writes that her husband’s “religion” was “ethics and truth” and that he shunned all real religions because he didn’t want them to compromise his “objectivity.” One might point out that this is a rather non-objective view of religion, and that his vehicle for finding truth, the Wall Street Journal, is anything but an objective. Even so, there is no escaping that Pearl was a loving husband and one of our brightest and best. He would probably have made a great father, but he made a choice that sacrificed his child’s father for unattainable abstractions. That’s a choice that earns my disdain.
Objectivity is lost the moment we are conceived and our genetic inheritance is bestowed on us. Our mothers add to the filter through which we view the world with their prenatal diet, exercise, mood, health, and drug use. From the day we begin our life experiences, the filter grows ever thicker, and our view of the world becomes ever less objective. As Einstein put it, "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18." The objective truth that Danny Pearl sought is not available. In practical terms, it does not exist.
Danny Pearl and Rob Hall were great at what they did, but the things they lived and died for were not worthy of being placed above their roles as fathers.
Both men had a higher calling that they failed to heed. They could have applied their exceptional traits to the challenges of fatherhood; they wasted them on lesser goals. They could have found meaning, value and joy walking beside them, hand in hand; they wasted their lives on the futile and the meaningless.
Both men knowingly put their lives at risk after knowing they were about to be fathers, and neither man had a right to do so. Once you have created another life, your own no longer belongs to you alone. By the choices they made, Pearl and Hall failed at fatherhood, the most important job of their lives. Fathers are the birthright of children, and neither Hall nor Pearl had the right to trade the birthrights of their chidlren for their personal or professional pursuits.
Neither do you or I. My job may not be killing me, but if I am putting it ahead of my children’s right to my time, attention and devotion, then I am no better than Hall and Pearl. When I am gone, will it be said of me that I was loved as a father, that I had succeeded at the most important job of my life? My answer will be written by my choices.
By Russell King
Two friends of mine lost their fathers this week. Both men were in their 60s and, judging from what I know of their children as adults and by the what is being said and felt by their children, they were successful in the most important job of their lives: fatherhood. During their lives, these two men apparently made more good choices than bad, and that got me thinking of two celebrated dads who, by my reckoning, made very poor choices.
The first is Rob Hall, admired for his ability to climb mountains and made famous through the film about the Mt. Everest climb that took his life. We watched Hall as he, helpless and dying, talked via radio with his pregnant wife. He was portrayed and acclaimed as a hero. One writer gushed that “we mortals ... will likely never be tested in this way,” giving Hall godly status.
All I could think was, “How dare he?” He knew the hazards of climbing Everest, and he knew his wife was pregnant. How dare he put his life at risk? How dare he risk his life when his wife and child needed him to be alive? How dare he make climbing a pile of ice and rock a higher priority than being a dad?
I had the same reaction to the gruesome death of Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal bureau chief who was executed by rabid Islamic thugs in Pakistan when his wife was six months pregnant. How dare he? Pearl was a Jewish American who pursued stories about vicious killers from vicious killers in a part of the world where nothing is hated more than Jews and Americans. He may as well have been swimming with sharks while covered in raw meat. How dare he put pursuit of a news story ahead of the need and the right of his child for a dad?
By all accounts, including the one in his widow’s book, Pearl was a great guy. Mrs. Pearl writes that her husband’s “religion” was “ethics and truth” and that he shunned all real religions because he didn’t want them to compromise his “objectivity.” One might point out that this is a rather non-objective view of religion, and that his vehicle for finding truth, the Wall Street Journal, is anything but an objective. Even so, there is no escaping that Pearl was a loving husband and one of our brightest and best. He would probably have made a great father, but he made a choice that sacrificed his child’s father for unattainable abstractions. That’s a choice that earns my disdain.
Objectivity is lost the moment we are conceived and our genetic inheritance is bestowed on us. Our mothers add to the filter through which we view the world with their prenatal diet, exercise, mood, health, and drug use. From the day we begin our life experiences, the filter grows ever thicker, and our view of the world becomes ever less objective. As Einstein put it, "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18." The objective truth that Danny Pearl sought is not available. In practical terms, it does not exist.
Danny Pearl and Rob Hall were great at what they did, but the things they lived and died for were not worthy of being placed above their roles as fathers.
Both men had a higher calling that they failed to heed. They could have applied their exceptional traits to the challenges of fatherhood; they wasted them on lesser goals. They could have found meaning, value and joy walking beside them, hand in hand; they wasted their lives on the futile and the meaningless.
Both men knowingly put their lives at risk after knowing they were about to be fathers, and neither man had a right to do so. Once you have created another life, your own no longer belongs to you alone. By the choices they made, Pearl and Hall failed at fatherhood, the most important job of their lives. Fathers are the birthright of children, and neither Hall nor Pearl had the right to trade the birthrights of their chidlren for their personal or professional pursuits.
Neither do you or I. My job may not be killing me, but if I am putting it ahead of my children’s right to my time, attention and devotion, then I am no better than Hall and Pearl. When I am gone, will it be said of me that I was loved as a father, that I had succeeded at the most important job of my life? My answer will be written by my choices.
