Father's Day Weekend Thoughts

It's Father's Day weekend. I stretch it bigger by getting up earlier.

I'm thinking of my dad and what a great father he was. In today's language that would mean he did a lot of things with me, told me he loved me and was involved in my life.

If I wanted to paint a bad picture of my dad I could complain that I never remember him doing those things, at least when I was little. The only thing I remember him and I doing alone was me going to work with him. That was mostly because I was a huge troublemaker at home and it gave my mom a break when I was gone.

Until I was way into adulthood and a father myself I never remember him telling me that he loved me.

And I don't remember him being involved in MY life.

I use the word remember a lot because I know things may have happened that I don't remember. I am accused of not doing things by my own kids sometimes and I could counter by saying, "You just don't remember."

Perception is huge. The glasses we look through color everything we see.

I could never stop speaking well of my dad. Not that he was perfect or won father of the year. He had his problems like the rest of us. Some of them from his past were pretty big. He did better as he got older - like the rest of us, at least as we should.

My dad was good as a father and as a man because he did the important things. He did love his kids, just not in the way kids sometimes measure it. He went to work and kept a roof over our head. He stayed with my mom even with her chronic health problems. He became a struggling father when my mom died while my brother, sister and I were in our teens. He kept on, day after day.

Thankfully when I was a kid, society didn't enforce the egocentric nature of kids. We weren’t taught that it was all about us. Not that we didn't think that, we just didn't get reinforcement from the "experts".

So anyway, that's a little about my dad. Tomorrow I will post my official tribute, the one I gave at his funeral.

I am a dad too. I love my kids and try to be a good dad - whatever that means. I'm sure their perception is different. There is probably a lot of what I have done that they don't remember and a lot they would like to forget.

I have eight children: six boys and two girls from 29 years old to 10 and all from the same mother who I have been married to for 32 years.

Oh by the way, I hear that some people want to do away with Father's Day. They say it is discriminatory and makes kids without fathers feel bad. More idiocy from the experts.

Well, it's Father's Day weekend. I will ride bikes and eat food with my two youngest today. Hopefully it will be fun for them. Hopefully something in this day will convey my love for them and hopefully they will pick up a little of the good that is in me.

Here is an old picture of the kids I have been blessed to be a father to.

Philip