The gift: A father’s tale in two parts
by Steven Lee Mankle
A father's blessing.
With Father’s Day upon us, I want to speak about fatherhood in two voices. One voice is the subjective observer. The other voice tells a personal story.
In this endeavor, I am deeply prompted to seek clarity within, and perhaps there will be some small nugget for you to mine as well.
The Gift of Human Birth
A Buddhist precept asks us to be mindful of how rare it is to find ourselves in human form on Earth. This beautiful view of life offers us the chance to feel enormous appreciation for being here as individual spirits filled with consciousness – drinking water and chopping wood.
That I rise from some depth of awareness to express this to you, that you can receive me in this instant, is part of our precious human birth. We are blessed – in this time, in this place – to be human beings, alive in rare ways we often take for granted.
Our precious human birth is unrepeatable. So, what will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? What will you ask and of whom?
Tomorrow you could die, but today you are precious and rare and awake. Wakefulness ushers us into grateful living. It makes hesitation useless. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to ask now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.
My story of Fatherhood: Part 1
As the eldest child, I left my home at 17 (eviction verses choice) and set upon a journey to see the world. Behind me was the parenting model of two people who had obviously been passionate about each other when they first met, yet it had digressed into a spiral of avoidance, denial, drugs, alcohol, and debt.
While in the Navy, I met a virginal Redhead who immediately became pregnant on our one night together. Being all of 20 years old, cocky and sure of myself, I knew “the right thing to do” was to get married. I moved her to Connecticut and promptly shipped out to sea for three months.
The miracle.
Returning home, still in the process of getting to know each other, we tried to weather the heartache and pain of our daughter, Kecia, dying at birth. We both were so young, so alone, even while together through this traumatic time. The loss truly was beyond our maturity, awareness and capabilities for finding a healthy way to heal our wound. As so many of my generation found, drugs were an easy and available way to soothe the pain, hoping it would eventually go away. It does not.
Through nine years of trying to “be married,” neither of us wanted to risk the pain of having children again. When our marriage finally ended, I once again set out on a journey in the world to see what adventures, excitement and stimulation might help cover over my pain.
Alaska, Oregon, Washington, California – fighting fires, smoke-jumping, college, professional musician, radio DJ, pot farming, helicopter construction in the Grand Canyon… The list goes on and for all the ways I tried to move beyond the unhealed wound buried so many years deep.
The closest I ever came to getting to my shadowy pain was talking about everything around it while never feeling the wound itself – retelling the circumstances of the pain, but not feeling it. Anticipating reactions from others, I never let myself feel what was mine to feel. Swimming in the anger of injustice, I never dove through the wound.
Nearly thirty years passed before I was able to see and understand what I was doing. Although I feared it, feeling my feelings was the only clear and direct way to free my heart from pain. When I finally did, the wound opened, the tears finally released, and I inhaled a breath of freedom between sobs.
My story of Fatherhood: Part 2
Set the “Way Back Machine” for those years earlier described as my “professional musician” and “pot farmer” phases (1979 to be exact). I spent a night with a waitress and friend who worked at the club where we had a gig. A couple months later, she came up to me in the park at the Pioneer Pancake Breakfast to gave me a letter, which said she was extremely happy about the fact she was pregnant. (Her previous three husbands had been unable to do this for her.) She wrote that she was not looking to have a relationship, but just “thought you should know”.
I read her letter and showed it to my brother, who was with me in this epic era of my sordid life. I wadded up the letter and tossed it in the trash. I remember saying out loud, “Just because there’s a pregnancy doesn’t necessarily mean there’s going to be a child.”
(Long pause.)
I have to take a break from even telling this story. Just recalling that moment, those words, the pain I carried. My hidden memories of loss swept in like an owl in the night, talons around my heart. Even today, I want to rush into shame and blame for myself, yet I know deeply that I can let go of what I am not.
Facing myself now, uncovering the meaning in these hard experiences, I can sculpt away the excess of all that I am not. Perhaps the many ways we suffer, both inwardly and outwardly, are the chisels of God freeing the thing of beauty that we have carried within since birth.
(Deep breath.)
Fast forward to the year 2000. Almost a year to the day after I had finally found release from the pain of Kecia’s death, I was called by a young man wanting to know if it was all right for a girl named Christy to contact me. He said that she “wanted to get to know her biological father.”
Stunned, stuttering murmurs fell from my lips as I questioned him, only to find that the dates, names and circumstance all fit a foggy memory of that letter in the park. I said “yes” to meeting the young woman, and a new chapter in my life unfolded – full of questions, fears and joy.
My daughter
We exchanged E-mails at first. She finally sent me a picture of her high school graduation. Here is the first sight I had of her:
Finally, when she was ready, I went to a face-to-face dinner meeting with her, her mom, her mom’s best friend, and scrapbooks filled with years of memories I was not there to share.
Nearly nine years have passed since that phone call. We have been close, and we have been distant. When we first met, it was as intense as falling in love. We’ve been enamored and angry, inseparable and isolating. Every human emotion has surfaced between us. We’ve worked on all the things one could imagine would come up from a child being without a father, a father who paid no heed to her existence.
I have been blessed in my life I to enjoy the gift from at least a small taste of fatherhood through the step-daughters of my ex-wife. Three lovely young women shared their lives and cares with me. Who have brought six wonderful grand children into this world, which again let me savor a faint sweet taste of fatherhood as I held the newborns in my arms. As I watched their wonder in discovering the world around them. As I kissed their boo-boo’s and tuck them in at night. I love them all dearly, eternally and completely.
Yet there will remain an empty space inside this bag of bones and skin and water that moves about this earth that I call my body, for I can never get back the chance to be the father that Christy deserved and wanted as a little girl. Just to be able to hold her small hand and let her know I would be there for her, that wish is as far from this moment as yesterday is from tomorrow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
Though I cannot change what has been, I have come to understand that in some moments we are as pure and ageless as light, and with the next breath, we may drop things or bruise the treasures of a lifetime. We need to soothe ourselves, not blame ourselves. We are rare, not perfect.
If you are a father, do not miss this moment, for it will never be again. If you are a son or a daughter, please give a nod or a wink of appreciation to your father for doing the best he knew how.
To each and every one or you – Happy Father’s Day !
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Steven Lee Mankle: Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Steven joined the Navy after high school to “see the world.” After being a submariner, musician, radio show host, smokejumper, helicopter construction worker, production engineer, songwriter, poet, consultant, he’s now a repair tech for a large cabinet company. |
– is a deeply personal issue that everyone decides for himself. Sometimes the price is high, sometimes low. But this is not very important for life. Life is an interesting thing. And the price on Viagra – too.
