What does it mean to be a father? I’m not quite sure, since I don’t have any children. I have even less of a clue since I never knew my own father. I imagine fatherhood as a grand experience of both reward and punishment in equal measure. It was not until seventh grade when I realized that being a father can also be hardest thing on the planet.
I remember an incident where I was desperately trying to help someone but harmed them inadvertently. I had a friend named Cara. I would hang out with her and another friend on the bus to and from school where we all had Latin class together. When my friend complained to me about her father yelling at her about cutting her wrists, she explained to him that it was because of her recent break-up. Yet he continued to yell and she responded by saying she hated him and that he’d never understand her. She explained to me that cutting her wrists had been how she dealt with painful situations. She couldn’t possibly understand why her father would take issue with her hurting herself.
The despair and futility of her father’s situation splashed all over me like a can of paint. I was frustrated to a degree I had never felt before and of a complexity I still have trouble comprehending to this day. I remember my tears; she was so pretty and yet she felt like she did not matter because of some guy! What a damnable situation! I tried as best I could to tell her how her father felt. I tried to tell her that her father probably loved her very much and that he didn’t want to see her hurting herself over some stupid boy.
I even tried to get her to empathize with her parents’ agony. I gave her an analogy: I asked her how would she feel if she had taken care of a bunny for a long time only to find out that it had started to eat itself because it didn’t like the color of its own fur. She said that she understood what I was saying and apologized. She said nothing about her situation to me ever again. Later on in the year I noticed new scars on her wrists, and I felt failure–both on my end and his. It was at that particular moment I had realized that fatherhood was, more than anything, a journey to be understood.
To some people, fatherhood is a badge of honor that they wear proudly–a badge with responsibilities to which they commit themselves. And I suppose one can say that all that is needed for a “good father” is someone who intends to be one. On the other hand, being a father can be considered a hindrance to some—a wrench in the works, an indelible mark on an otherwise stress-free life. It is truthfully a terrible spectacle to witness how easily a man can wash his hands of fatherhood, as if it were a stain (being a product of this cleansing myself I know this all too well).
My elder cousin Jeffrey, an insufferable person of ridiculous rhetoric and asinine thought—the type to keep you up for hours with an endless conversation about his newest conspiracy theory about how the American dollar enslaves the black man—, serves as a perfect example of the dissolvable nature of fatherhood. I only really had the chance to observe Jeffrey and his situation when he stayed overnight at my relative’s house. That night he stayed up with my cousins and I, making feature tracks about slave ships that we had incorrectly named “Fighting for a Change,” but we had no knowledge of or part in. You see, my cousins had somewhat of a comedic obsession with Jeffrey where every detail about about his life cracked them up, from his conflicts with the storage place where he kept all of his possessions to the fact that he survived off of boxes of cereal wrapped within plastic bags that he jealously guarded (no, seriously!)–and even the fact that he was in his mid-fifties tying his possessions to a dirty mountain bike like a teenager. Perhaps the funniest thing they found about Jeffrey was his seemingly unwarranted disdain for his son Jeffrey Jr. Jeffrey Jr. was a lot like Jeffrey in that people seemed unable to take him seriously. He explained his ambitions for the future with the same inexhaustible energy that his father had when laying out get-rich-quick schemes, and with the same attention to detail that made others listening question the scope of his sanity. In truth it was very baffling to see two people so similar not really get along well. Jeffrey Jr. didn’t like Jeffrey Sr. because Jeffrey Sr. didn’t like him, and Jeffrey Sr. didn’t like Jeffrey Jr. for a whole list of nonsensical reasons that wouldn’t be a problem if he had stuck around to watch how his child was coming up. His complaints always sounded like missed opportunities to me: “He don’t got no respect for nobody.” “He never takes anything seriously—everything is always a game to him.”  Because of Jeffrey Sr. and his “unstable circumstances” (he was homeless, although he did state that his predicament was an advantage because he “wasn’t tied down”), Jeffrey Jr. had to live with his aunt Vivian for most of his life since his mother had passed away. Conversations between the Jeffreys were always short and awkward without actual substance in them.
Listening to them speak to each other was like see watching a cat go after a laser pointer: expending incredible energy in pursuit of something intangible.