Father's Day, Farther Away

It's still very weird to think of myself as a father. Maybe it's some lingering gender dysphoria from childhood... that message that boys act one way, while girls behave another. So if I liked bright colours, pop music and my grade 7 student teacher, Mr. Sullivan, then I must be a girl, right?

Well, no. I've actually never felt like a girl. And I certainly don't feel like a mom. I guess the closest word in my brain is 'parent,' even though it seems a little, I dunno, impersonal. I do feel like 'Papa,' which is what Pre-Schooler N calls me. It's a name that makes me feel happy when I hear it. I'm comfortable in it. 'Dad?' Well, not so much.

I called my father dad. Once upon a time. Before my girlish gait, ginger curls and generally sissified manner fomented his sadness and, I think, loneliness into a rupture that was as permanent as it was inevitable. Looking back, I think my dad was lonely. He was friendly with neighbours, and kind to the many customers at our family store who adored him, but he also seemed a little isolated... particularly in retrospect.

I think that, in a son, he had high hopes for a comrade, for a built-in friend that would emulate him, and share games of sport with him, and love him in all the suitably masculine ways that regular boys love their fathers. I think that behind his expressions of anger and disgust at the way I turned out masked a deep disappointment that he had lost his hopes for a trusted companion.

Sometimes, when I am lost in thought, in the hour before sleep tugs away my many plans and my trickier memories, I wonder what disappointments will lie between my own son and myself in the years to come. Will he yearn for a manly companion, a stoic patriarch who cheers goals and whistles at female passersby? Will he look at his friends' brusque fathers and feel embarrassed by the effeminate papa who gives him kisses and hugs with such impunity?

Perhaps.

Or maybe not. Who knows?

There's also the possibility that Pre-Schooler N will morph into a staunchly conservative christian crazypants, praying for his homosexual parent's salvation. I believe his own joyful soul and kind heart would preclude such an unlikely event, but there's just no way of telling where these roads and pathways lead.

May life have mercy on this poor child

Surely my own father had no inkling in regards to how deeply our paths would separate. He's now nearing the end of his days, felled by the cigarettes that plagued every family car trip since I can remember, and filled our home with sepulchral wraiths that glowed below every lamplight. But he's surrounded by family who love him: my sister, a stalwart ally whom he's always loved and respected, our mother, married to him for nearly half-a-century, and my sister's daughter, who is more a son to him than I could ever have been.

Niece E has truly been a companion to my father... the companion I believe he always wanted. She excels in sports, is cheerful and kind, and has a natural optimism that reminds me of him. He adores her, as she does him.

And I'm happy he finally got what he wanted. I love that he experienced sunny days of cheering on his granddaughter as she scored the winning goal, and reveled in her interest in the household jobs he always insisted on doing himself. I'm truly glad that he got that out of life, even if it couldn't have been with me, his son. It makes me feel as though I'm no longer responsible for denying him one of his great hopes in life.

It also makes it easier to accept that he is truly no longer my 'dad,' even though there's no denying that his parentage made an indelible mark upon my life.

But today, on Father's Day, I'd like to commemorate the gifts I've carried from him in my own life. Things that I know I learned from him, and that I like about myself. Here's what he taught me, in no particularly order:

How to be generous. Not in a showy, 'aren't-I-wonderful-and-benevolent' way, but in a quiet manner done with a minimum of fuss that puts the recipient at ease, and without feeling like a charity case.

My cat Charlotte and her frequent nuzzling companion 

How to make a first impression. By being genuinely friendly, finding a real pleasure in meeting someone for the first time, and expressing honest curiosity in them.

How to do it yourself. Granted, many of my fathers DIY projects ended in tears and tantrums (particularly if I was corralled into 'helping'), but he always found a way to cobble something together to make it work.

And, most  importantly, how to be kind. My father is a kind person, who is keenly observant of needs and hurts. The fact that he wasn't terribly kind to me can't negate the fact that he was tenderly indulgent to the needs of elderly customers, or the infirm, or anyone not as well off in life as he. I like to think that I'm a compassionate person, and I honestly believe that part of that compassion was learned through observing my father with others.

So, I honour those things I gleaned from him, and I hope I'm passing them on to my own son. I hope Pre-Schooler N grows up feeling my love and my amazement at the good fortune that brought him into my life. I hope that our paths travel closely throughout our lives, with plenty of convergence and shared journeys. But most of all, I hope with all my heart that, at the end of my own life, the love between us is strong,true and known.

Next week: a return to humour as I plan our escape from Pride Day!

Dance Monkey Dance!

"Okay sweetie, sing your special song for Auntie J!"

"No honey, the other song. You know the one, the special one! "

(Start humming along helpfully, finally breaking into full song at the chorus to child's mortification. Child mutters along half-halfheartedly just to shut you up).

"That's right, that's the one! Oh, we can't hear you honey, sing a little louder!"

"Yay! That was sooo good baby! Yay!!! Again, again!!"

It is while graciously accepting compliments at my son's lackluster effort to be rewarded with another bowl of raspberries that I realize I have somehow morphed into Gypsy Rose Lee.

I have no idea how this happened. I am fully, painfully aware that Pre-Schooler N couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, and that his dance abilities fall squarely into the 'bounce up and down until you fall over' category of gracelessness, but for some reason any effort at musical entertainment seems to bring out the worst sort of stage parent in me.

Because let's face it, parenthood is a competition. It's a blood sport. It's the fucking Hunger Games of the playground. And no matter how hard you try to resist, you will still be pulled into the wet sucking mud hole of 'who did it first' and 'who did it better' as soon as the first Mama Katniss enters the field of play.

It's not like I was unprepared. I'd seen the excruciatingly polite eviscerations that occur on the playgrounds or at daycare. "Oh, I see little Eustace is still wearing a diaper. We were so blessed that our precious Brittanie-Lee-Ashleey-Kahytlinn toilet-trained almost immediately after delivering herself by C-section. Have I shown you the marvelous job she did stitching me up before clamping off her own umbilical cord? But I'm sure he's juuuuust fine. After all, there are so many programs for backwards kids nowadays.'

And those are the nice ones.

I have to say that I've escaped relatively unharmed during such skirmishes. It seems that the mommy wars have little use for gay adoptive fathers, so many of us get a pass because we're male and homosexual -- ergo, someone they can bitch to about the other moms, and occasionally tap as potential adviser to difficult home decor projects or the occasional home hair-care emergency.

I knew parents lie. All the time. They invent cute little stories, photoshop snot out of family photos, and enlarge their child's modest achievements to proportions even more unrealistic than a clueless single guy filling out the "penis size" section of an online dating quiz.

I was determined not to be the same. I love my kid, and am happy that he's a normal, appropriately-developed nearly-four-year old child with nice manners and a lovely smile. But there I was, making him perform for his supper (well, dessert) like one of those nauseating pageant moms on reality television.

So, why? Why the impulse to show the world how wonderful our kids are? For me, I think it's the lingering worry that my kid will develop some sort of delays or behavioural issue. When we first moved to Quebec, we plunked him into a daycare that was billed as bilingual, only to discover that the vast majority of kids and workers spoke little or no English. While the other kids sang French nursery rhymes, Pre-Schooler N would be off to the side, playing with trains.

His teacher, a bossy, earnest woman who proudly declared she had gone to school in English, expressed deep concerns about his development. Granted, she had to repeat it a few times, as the manner with which she masticated le langue de les anglophones reminded me of the way my  aged grandfather used to work his way through a tough steak. She mentioned ADHD (every parent's nightmare), language delays and even used the word autism at one point -- always quickly backtracking and pointing out she was not qualified to make such a diagnosis. She simply repeated that there was 'something wrong' and that we needed to take him to a specialist tout de suite.

So we dutifully carted our son to Montreal, where he was put through a rigorous series of test by a very nice (and actually bilingual) specialist. She told us he needed to work on his ability to enunciate the letters d and g.  That's it. No sign of ADHD. No sign of Autism. No sign of anything. His language comprehension even tested slightly higher than his age group.

She also pointed out that anglophone kids who went to French or bilingual daycares often didn't talk much while in that environment. It's confusing for them to hear words in an unknown language, and English words spoken in heavy accents with poor grammar. It doesn't make sense to their developing minds.

A month later we moved Pre-Schooler N into a home-based daycare that is predominantly English. He loves it there. His language skills are just fine, and they're great with him. But maybe that explains my brief descent into the world of utterly-annoying stage papa.

Either way, I'm quite finished with those impulses. Naturally, if my child suddenly develops the ability to chirp arias while accompanying himself on harp, only breaking for an elucidating interpretive dance during the third stanza, well, then all bets are off. But until then, he's my little tone-deaf shuffler, happily working his way through childhood with a toy train clutched in one hand, and my heart in the other.

This one is actually us.