Father’s Day
Blues
Originally published in the American Men's Studies Association Quarterly, 04 June 2015
After a sojourn as an English professor in Saudi
Arabia, looking at Father’s Day tributes on Facebook made me feel blue. Part of
this was having lived amongst so many men living alone in Riyadh. Most of the
millions of men who worked in that
city had traded separation from family for a high wage. These men from
Pakistan, India, other parts of the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. were separated
from their children by thousands of miles. The fathers made a sacrifice for the
financial security of their families, while living in a place that, more than
anywhere else in the world, is inhospitable to single men.
I felt their pain. “I can’t parent on Skype,” I told
my Dean. Separated from his own Arab American children, he quoted this often. I
left a lot of tax-free money on the table to return to my daughter. However, I
could no longer bear living without social access to women and children.
But there was something else to my own “Father’s Day
blues.” I read no tributes to my own fatherhood. The separation in Saudi Arabia
was just the latest rupture in a Humpty Dumpty relationship with my two eldest
children. In the wake of an ugly divorce, I had gained custody in 2002, but they
had both chosen to leave my house when they turned twelve. Their mother had
poisoned the well, and it has proven impossible to repair the damage.
The years when I was a single father in Oklahoma and
Jamaica were perhaps the happiest in my life. Losing my first two children at
age 12 scarred me. My children had been coached to see our single-father family
as a confinement. I came to feel that the social world in which I lived conspired
to make fathers irrelevant. Those of us who attempt to write new scripts often
come to feel that we are swimming upstream. In the children’s stories I read
with my first two children, the father was almost never present. Was I fated to
fulfil the book?
In my own wider family, fathers are still treated as
honoured patriarchs. Amongst my scattered circle of liberal friends, there is
at least lip service to the importance of fathers. But I came from a very
different world, close-knit Christian families who stick to their communities
of faith. Having given up that gold standard, then attempting to carve out a
non-traditional role of hands-on father-nurturer, I somehow ended up written
out of the script as a practicing father to my own children. How did I get
here?
Looking at fatherhood through my FB contacts, I could
group my friends by decade. There were friends from the 1980s, when I was in
the music business in Austin, Texas. There were friends from the 1990s in the San
Francisco Bay Area, when I was a grad student. There were friends and
colleagues from the first decade of the 21st century, split between
Oklahoma City and Jamaica. And then there were recent friends and colleagues
from time in Tampa, St Petersburg, and Riyadh.
Then there are family members, conservative Christians
in West Texas, or my birth state of Oklahoma. Now the children of my sisters
are getting married. I have watched family and cultural dynamics long enough to
know that these marriages will last for life. My liberal friends would see them
as political enemies, but this conservative Christian culture—the part I see
through my extended family--keeps producing straight A students, and “til death
do us part” marriages in which the “father knows best” worldview is seldom if
ever questioned.
I never fit in that culture. I became a rebel long
before I had any clue of what words like rebellion or counterculture meant,
long before I had any conscious understanding of why I was wired to push beyond
the confinements of a patriarchal culture. As he observed my growing proclivity
to question authority in our West Texas cocoon, my father once told me: if you
reject your father, you will reject your country, and if you turn against your
country, you will turn against God.
At that time I had no thought of being “against God
and country.” At age 19, I asked myself this simple question: did God give me
my mind to use? When I answered yes, then I walked through a door that did lead
me to question all sorts of dogma and conventional wisdom about the fathers of
politics and religion. My father’s words came to seem like yet another
self-fulfilling prophecy, or an airtight script.
Leaving my father’s house, and soon, his faith, and
then his unquestioning patriotism, led to many freedoms. I had successful
careers in journalism, song writing, political activism, teaching, and
scholarship. But while acquiring a comparative perspective in California, I
came to re-evaluate my own Christian family--in particular my father. Although
my leftist friends talked a good talk, it was arguably people like my family
back in the red states that I would want to have beside me in the trenches.
I gave my children the kinds of cultural literacy I
would like to have had. They flourished, while living in my house. But in time,
they in turn sought the greater stability of their mother’s house. Neither of
my oldest children are religious, or particularly patriotic. Yet I am certain
that they see their grandfather as a better man than their father. I myself
express this freely: my parents have a giving, loving spirit which is greater
than I seem capable of.
All my creative expression and critical thinking is
well and good. But critical thinking has a price. Having a father or a husband
who routinely thinks outside the box—who lives outside of traditional
boxes--may be stimulating at times, but it can also be wearisome. So when I say
matter-of-factly that my father is a better man than I, neither wife nor
children disagree.
On Father’s Day 2014, my son Samuel at one moment got
frustrated and told me that I had never been on his side. This has been his
refrain: as a “gifted child” who was at least a year younger than his
classmates, he had social problems. But when I simply listened to the reports of his teachers or other parents, he
concluded that I did not have his back.
Yet I would hear indirectly through his teachers that
he quoted my opinions frequently, and that he clearly admired me.
My oldest daughter Sela seldom talks to me, but seems
to see her father, from a great distance, as a mythologized creative and
rebellious spirit—a writer—that she now aspires to be.
Writers get to re-write their stories. For fathers,
there may not be a second chance. That seems to be a part of the script.
Once when I was trying to rewrite my own script of
repeated social conflict, this vision came to voice my aspiration: “The speaker
calls attention to the one, and is thereby forgiven for his defects.”
By the one I
mean a “greater story” in which we all participate, however defined. As a
teacher, or writer, I try to re-direct attention to the “moral of the story,”
as it were. I hope that by making meaning come alive, my students and readers
will forgive my own limitations. This has usually been the case.
My first two children have proven unforgiving. This is
an inheritance I struggle to come to terms with every day. But in my second
marriage, I have earned a second chance. I have committed myself to a second
incarnation of fatherhood with my second daughter, Safiya. As for the first
time around, I want to believe that “time heals all wounds.” But I have left
the land of the believers. Rather than putting my faith in miracles, or even
redemption, I have settled for indirection. “We’ll understand it all by and
by.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bio and
contact info:
Gregory Stephens is Assistant Professor of
English at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, where his courses include
Creative Writing, Post-Apocalyptic Literature and Film, and the “Romance of
Revolution in Literature and Film.” Stephens has taught film, literature, and
media/cultural studies at the University of South Florida (2010-12) the University of West Indies (2004-08), and the
University of California. He is the author of On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, RalphEllison, and BobMarley (Cambridge UP, 1999). From 2013-2014 Stephens was an Assistant
Professor of English at Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Publications
drawing on experience in/study of the Middle East include “Recording the Rhythm of Change: A Rhetoric of Revolution in TheSquare,” Bright
Lights Film Journal (May 2014), and “Rites of Passage in an English Class: Auto-ethnography and Coming-of-Age storiesin Cross-Cultural Contexts.” Currently, Stephens is finishing a book project: Real Revolutionaries: Revisioning the
Romance of Revolution in Literature and Film. Much of his scholarship, and
select journalism, is available at: https://uprm.academia.edu/GregorioStephens
