More than on his birthday, I miss my father on Father’s Day. It wasn’t as if this Hallmark holiday was special in our household, but now that I’m father myself, the day simply reminds me of things incomplete: I can’t talk to him about what it’s like being a father, what it’s like to worry and fret over things you can’t control or to share the mysterious joys of Baby’s first steps, words, or smiles.

This is ostensibly a literary blog; Dad was not a lover of literature. However, he was a learned man, his tastes veering to math and science, history and politics, and his forays into literature were mostly in genre fiction.

That’s one of many reasons I never told him that I’d gotten a literary agent for my novel, much less let him read it, despite his numerous protests otherwise. It was almost parental in nature: you’re my son, I raised you, I have a right to see your book, even though you don’t want your old man to read it. 

But there was a more cowardly motive behind my reticence. I didn’t want Dad to think that the insanity of the teenage protagonist’s home life — the narrator’s family suffers a massive reversal of finances and social status as he enters adolescence — was based on my own. Of course, we really never had a massive financial position or high status to reverse, but the portrayal might have stung him.

He had a difficult life in many ways, usually due to problems of his own creation. My father did calculus for fun, but never could never really translate his prodigious smarts into a decent living. He chose the wrong jobs, the wrong professions, and usually sabotaged himself with inappropriate displays of temper. 

I spent a good deal of my teens and early adulthood cataloguing my father’s faults, which were not just aligned with his inability to make money, while letting resentment slide towards the scale of "hatred." I promised myself that when I grew up, I wouldn’t be like him.

That point of view changed, thankfully, long before he died. He always supported his children and never criticized us for our failings in school, athletics or otherwise. (The only thing he disdained was when we quit or didn’t try.)

My father liked debate, and insisted no matter what our beliefs, my siblings and I should have a good reason for believing them. But even if he disagreed with what I believed or did, he always stood behind me, be it my choices in careers or significant others, or even how my siblings and I pursued our religious beliefs.

And when the chips were down, he always made things better. When I was a child and first cognizant of death, one night I started crying in my bed, fearing parental abandonment, until Dad came in to my bedroom and calmed me. When I was in college and in despair of a financial matter, Dad was able to help. When I was an adult and slept with someone I shouldn’t have, ultimately leaving me depressed and upset, it didn’t occur to me not to call my father. And he made it better (and didn’t tell my Mother).

When he was in the hospital before he died, he said to me, "You’ve done well for yourself — better than I’ve done," which at once made me proud and broke my heart, and now, in retrospect, I see that it was something that he probably felt compelled to say.

For though my nobody thought his pneumonia would fell him, Dad was hedging his bets. It was his way of saying he was proud of how I’d turned out, and his apology for what had transpired when I was growing up. Perhaps it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear, but it was the best he could do, and I will always be thankful he said it. 

In the last decade of his life, he sought help for his demons, despite a lifelong distrust of psychology. His life improved immeasurably, even if his finances didn’t, and my mother has said many times that the last 10 years of their marriage was the best of their 42 together, most of which were not smooth.

It’s sad that I could never tell him how proud I was that he’d decided to get help for himself, as I was never supposed to have known. 

At this point, the best way I can honor him is to be the best father possible, which is to say, take all the good things I learned from Dad about being a parent and relive them with Baby.

So what I’ve learned is this: when Baby is scared, confused, in need of a hug or support, if I can make it better, my father taught me something rare indeed.