... read with me, play swords with me, draw with me, play legos with me, get me juice, hold me until I can fall asleep, .......pay attention to me!
These are a few of the regular requests that shape fatherhood in this season.
They are sometimes direct, and always with feeling.
The form these questions take is not always as direct. I often miss the request for attention, affection, comfort, consistency when it is concealed in some negative emotion. When it is veiled in anger, accusation, aggression I can lose my way. I can get lost in the tangles of some behavior, a behavior that is trying to magnify the urgency of their plea. And I don't make it through the brambles.
Wow, do I get irritated when a thorn jabs me! It can be as if the whole of my perceptive powers are reduced to yanking out and crushing that brier. In such moments I believe that if I can ensure that barb is snuffed out forever I have conquered the day and am making life better. I have done my fatherly duty with strength! My son or daughter will be better for it! Or will they?
Will I?
Will you ... see me through the brambles, will you reach me through the stickers, will you stay with me when you are pricked for the thousandth time by my aggression, sassiness, defiance, disrespect. Will you be patient as you pick the hundred stickers out of your socks? Will you see me?
It will take my will... and so much more! But I will! You are worth reaching through the brambles for! You are worth the scratch and infections, the irritations and working through the me that gets in the way.
Dad, I am not in the thicket... though I may have had something to do with it being there. I'm not in there! And that is why it is so hard to hear you when you speak to me from there. I'm beyond it. Come find me. I'm waiting. Come find me, will you dad?
- written in the spring of 2016
