"What Would We Do WIthout Fathers?"
by
Maria Whittaker
What would we do without fathers?
Who would throw us up in the air and catch us?
Wink at us?
Drive us places?
Let us ride on their backs?
Cook spaghetti 4 us when we were sick?
Tell us stories while we were sitting in the car waiting
for mom to come from the Doctor’s office:
---Riki Tikki Tavi, the mongoose
---how he and his best friend “Junior’ who lived
across Chapel Street from him in the Bottoms all his
life got paddled at school.
Take care of us when our birth father abandoned us?
Love us unconditionally?
Accept us completely the way we are?
Protect us?
Let us go out on dates at 14 without my mother
knowing?
Let our ‘dates’ into the house?
Not tell our mothers when we got in the car and
traveled alone around the country, camping out?
Save our lives?
Pick us up from the airport on our first trip home
after going away to college?
Jump my car when I left it parked somewhere with
the lights on without even telling me?
Repay me the $400 cash I loaned him without
knowing what it was for?
Give me a brother so I would not have to grow
up alone?
Only ask for money once?
Introduce me to his girlfriend when he was still married
and living with my mother, so I would understand that
sometimes everything is necessary?
Take care of me?
Take care of my ill mother 4 me?
Teach me how 2 be?
Show me how to be?
Bring letters to me from my boyfriend in the army
secreted in the trunk of his car so my mother would
not find and destroy them?
Take me and my brother when I was 9 and he was
8 and all our little “kid” friends in his car up and down
the steep and roller coaster hills of Blendon Woods,
where we laughed and giggled until we couldn’t
anymore?
Promise to take us to Canada!
“We’re going to Canada kids!” He would go faster
and faster and the car would jump off the
viaduct and surely we felt as if we must have
flown to Canada in that moment of laughter,
giggles and pure happiness?
Drive me and pick me up from ice skating lessons,
my dream, every day in the summer of 1974?
Never get mad at me at 15 for “stealing” his car
at night with my brother and teenage lifelong friends.
He just took the alternator out! We only discovered
it after we had pushed the car out of the parking
lot under his bedroom window, and down the driveway
so he would not hear us start it. (His bedroom window
was right above where he parked the car and it was
open because it was summer. We, my brother and I
and some of our lifelong teenage neighbors/friends
had to push the car back up the driveway (up a hill)
and back into a parking lot, under his window!)
Be imperfect, flawed so I would learn how to understand
and love people the way they were so they could
grow and heal.
Let me take love 4 granted.
Fall in love with men, masculinity.
Have a family, cousins, grandmother, aunts, uncles and
neighbors.
Have a connection to the past.
Take us to ‘the plant,” the B&T Metals Company, where
he worked all his life and show us all the tools, machines,
locker room, big equipment, and pin up poster still there
from World II.
Drive me to swimming practice every day and two times
a day in the summer.
Pick me up from swimming practice.
Let me go on dates.
Take me on dates with my “little boyfriend.”
Do all the housework and complain about it for years
until you finally told him “Thank you” and that you were
sorry for his suffering and he simply replied. “It weren’t
nothing.”
“Manipulated you so you’d know when you were being
manipulated in the future.”
Teach you what love is.
Be so present for you when he was alive, he was always
with you after he died, so you would know death and
everything is a mere illusion.
Be your rock.
Show me how to be my own rock, all without words.
Be present in me after the death of his physical body.
Love dogs.
Take care of “your dog.”
Beeeee soooooo much fun!
Beee laid back.
Make homemade spaghetti.
Take you to his local bar, the Tippin’ Inn, when you were
a child with him and let you overhear him tell the
bartender to tell his wife, my mother, who was calling,
“I’m not here.”
Get drunk with you present and say stupid things
so you would know noone is perfect and what real is.
Be sexually inappropriate when he was unconscious
and drunk, so you could know trauma only endures
when there is not enough love to dissolve it.
Take you and your “little brother” fishing at Madison
Lake and Nelson Park and know nothing about it.
Visit and clean your studio apartment when you were
a graduate student at a big, fancy, top three law school
in the US and think nothing of it.
Drive you to a prospective law school to visit your
step grandfather who married your grandmother, your
mother’s birth mom, from whom your mom had been
tragically kidnapped at 2 days old by a great aunt.
Beee ridiculous.
Bee absurd.
Beee humble, so when you grew up, you would know
and remember what it meant not to have an ego and
what “Godliness” was.
Be there so when you grew up you would know what
gratitude was.
Beee there sew U could take having a father 4 granted.
Beee there so you could smell his aftershave and go to
the barbershop with him on Saturday mornings on
Mt. Vernon Avenue in the middle of Columbus’s Black
neighborhood.
Beee there so you could know what it meant to have a
good man in your life.
Beee there so you could know what it was like to have
a crush on a man.
Be there so you did not have 2 worry.
Be there so U could know what peace meant.
Be there so you could take sacrifice 4 granted.
Be there sew u could know what it was like to be
taken care of and loved, not perfectly, but imperfectly.
Be there so you would never ever know what it was like
to be alone even after he died.
What would we do without fathers?
Copyright Notice
This work is distributed under the Creative Commons License.
In brief, you may make and distribute copies of the work herein so long as you give the original author credit, and if you alter, transform or build upon this work, you distribute this work only under a license identical to this one.
The author of this work is Maria C. Whittaker and Spiritual Agroecology: Human Spiritual Growth through Agroecology and Beyond, http://fssg.blogspot.com/, a 501(c) (3) nonprofit founded by Maria C. Whittaker under the laws of Kansas, USA.
The official name of this nonprofit is the Ohio Chapter of Family Farm Defenders. Family Farm Defenders is a national 501(c)(3) in the USA, founded by the amazing John Kinsman, a family farmer who led the work to raise awareness of the nature of the Family Farm as a critical and important way of life, and a healthy and sustainable way to produce human food. https://familyfarmers.org/
Family Farm Defenders is located in Madison, Wisconsin and advocates for the Family Farm!
For the rest of the details of the license, see http://creativecommons.org./licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode
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