The Limits to Being a Dad (Again)

See also Absent Fathers

The endless round of re-organisation that accompanies a house move is, well, endless. Post needs re-directing, milk people cancelled and new ones hired, utilities cancelled and new ones started, address changing, the acquisition of endless rounds of goods that fit the new house rendering boxes of curtains ill-fitting, painting, cleaning, settling the kids, finding the nearest chippie (I speak of restaurants not trades-people - though please don't disregard the latter either), and so on. The Tinternet is a great boon in these days as we can do much from the sofa in the new lounge. The world is, we have discovered, almost entirely remote controlled.

But not all of it.

As responsible parents to gawjuss kids it is requisite and necessary as well for the mind as for the soul to register the little darlings with a doctor's surgery. I am not worried for myself as I am never ever ill, ever - but needs must when sprogs go splat! To the doctors we all toddled. Of course we had to find proof that we have been actual humans for all of the months that we have breathed air, proved our address, proved our last address and the eight prior to that, offered DNA samples, retina scans, fingerprints and psychometric profiling. With all this information lovingly gathered, we went about our business. 

Me - I was registered in a trice. Excellent. Not Mrs Acular though - she has nothing with her name on it at the same time as our new address. We can sort of understand that. We might be international terrorists (and she looks pretty dodgy it has to be said), but we pleaded our case. Nope. She may not register (but a letter from the bank would help our cause). 

Well, let's do the kids. We have all we need for them, and we are here all together. 

This is where I learned much about our world in 2011, and especially those bits I do not understand or like. The (very nice, incredibly helpful, and a little awkward about what she was about to say) receptionist told us that they couldn't register the kids until the mother was registered ... "in case there are any problems". Let me repeat the scenario: I was there in person, with my wife, already known to be the 'vicar' (not that that makes any substantial difference save perhaps for the fact that I carry a CRB and am professionally nice), with my children and as a member of a family clearly and manifestly working as a unit to do a job together. Mrs Acular and I appeared to be on civil terms, the kids on my lap illustrated that I wasn't a fruit-loop (in their eyes).

But no - they may not receive the care of a doctor until mum was registered. Didn't I feel like the child-beating village pervert all of a sudden! I can only guess that because a small handful of male deviants abuse children that all men are relegated to the place of designated driver in the legal lives of their children. Aren't mothers also found guilty of mistreating their children? Perhaps I just dreamed that. 

Lesson #1: Being a loving Dad to two adoring children is not sufficient any more. 

Not happy. Not happy one little bit.

To Dad the Spook from Junior

Meet my dad.

This post is going out ahead of time for several reasons - first because I am away all weekend; secondly because I have been given acute grounds for thinking about m'yole dad, and thirdly because Father's Day and Trinity Sunday land like the Perfect Liturgical Storm (and I am thinking that I am glad that I don't have to preach on Sunday).

Anyway, meet my dad. He has been dead a few years now, but I relish opportunities to think about him, more especially in the context that I now find myself, being a dad and Father myself. I love this picture because this represents my enduring memory of the old sod - a jolly, smiling eejit with a plate of food. He wouldn't argue with me if he were here to read this.

Following my post yesterday about the tree, a friend from Twitter suggested that I say a little about dad. I ought to point out, to those of you wondering why I might be calling a man old enough to me my granddad 'dad', that this wonderful chap was my step-dad and also to my brother and sister. He was a child of the nineteen-teens and saw active avoidance tactics in the Second World War. Endlessly and pathologically 'delicate', he cursed Hitler from afar, but all that said, he was a soldier, man and boy - Royal Engineers. He was a Colour Sergeant so despite being only eleven inches high could break rock with his yelling-voice. He raised his own family, though lost his own son to cancer in 1960 when the lad was 18. He lost his wife a few years later, at about the time that my father lost his life - I was about 4 years old. A shared work and church habit meant that he and my mum got to know one another and so it was that they married sometime in the 1970s when Noel Edmonds haircuts on kids my age didn't result in bullying. Dad's other daughter is still alive and kicking - but the charges have been dropped. And so it was that dad took on another family as he turned sixty - three kids of 8, 6, and 4.

Despite his age, he was never an old fart like you might imagine. To be honest, he knew more about the music in the charts than I did. He was just coming to the end of his civil-servant employed days and also laid aside his sideline as a cheap-as-chips electrician - and so took upon the mantle of daddy day-care while mum peddled her trade for the NHS. Dad baked remarkable cakes - pink ones for my sister, green for my brother and blue for me - and why he would ever think of dying a Victoria sponge I shall never know, but he did and we loved him for it. A heart attack turned him into 'grumpy' man for a while until the pills were better balanced - then he chilled in a way that would have made Barry White seem neurotic. He helped to raise three teenagers well into his seventies - trying to reconcile his approach to parenting (born of the fifties and sixties) to the needs and moods of modern nineties grunts like us.

I could go on, and part of me wants to - but space and your patience have to be born in mind. To us all, dad was nothing less than a hero, a saint - and as a dad, I pray I do half as well and am at least half the man (though I am a little taller, if that counts). He never saw me ordained and he never met my children - but I know he would have delighted in them all. He was already an impressive granddad, so at least I can imagine how my girls would have doted on him.

In my relationship with my dad I can have an educated guess at the energy that existed between the Son and the Father. If Augustine's model of the Spirit being the love that passes between them is true, then I know a little of that too. As it is with children and their mothers, so it is with dads and fathers - that there is a unique and necessary relationship. I revere my mother in many ways, but there are things that she did not do that dad did, and that I am formed in part because of that relationship. She would not disagree. In many way it seems to be the perfect time to have a Father's Day. In my love and shared life with the little round fellow in the picture, I know so much more of the God of the Trinity. It wasn't a relationship that floated in the realms of happy-happy either, because Lord knows, me and dad fought - but we always loved and it always mended. The love that we characterise as the Spirit is eternally elastic, always present, and to be trusted. I can say the same for the love I shared (and still share) with my Old Man.

And so I leave you with the song whose words I used in the tribute that I delivered at his funeral. It means little out of context, but I think you will like the song anyway.

Happy Father's Day, and a Blessed Trinity to you all. 

Silly Little Things That Hurt The Most

Today has seen an event that demonstrates how the smallest thing can cause the greatest pain. I am writing this post in part to exorcise some very negative feelings in the style of Blog Self-Counselling. Don't read on if you don't fancy it. 

The thing is, I lost my beautiful and beloved Dad a few years ago. It wasn't a tragic death in the sense that he sort of went when it was time, and he went peacefully - but he was my dad. I cannot adequately find words to express my love for that funny little man, a person who gave up so much to take my mum and her young family into his life a while after my birth-father had died. He would have told you that he gained much more from being our dad than he lost by sacrificing his retirement peace and quiet (he was appreciably older than mum, but they still enjoyed over twenty years of marriage). Daft old bugger died on mum's birthday too - silly old sod. 

Due to many factors, chief among them being good old procrastination probably, only recently did we inter his ashes and in his memory plant a young tree. It would have been just what he would have chosen too, so we felt proud. 

The thing is with such 'shrines' (and we see them in abundance at roadsides these days), is that while they are in themselves simple and not of the living, they become the place where we pour so much of our latent grief. That little tree became important not just it was a little tree, but because it was dad's little tree. If I had courage to say or believe it, that tree became the next nearest thing that we had to dad. 

Until that little tree was vandalized and snapped. Killed, murdered, defiled, desecrated. To me, my mum and probably to my brother and sister, it isn't the murder of a tree that would have grown strong and proud over decades, but of my dad and his memory. 

I am left unable to get breath. Yes, it was only a bloody tree, but it was my daddy's tree. I live my life to help others and love them into the Kingdom, but there are bits of me that would commit a crime at the moment. Of course, the vandals did nothing to my dad, and probably didn't even know the tree meant anything - but it doesn't feel that way, not a little bit. I am now languishing in the darkest mood I have known for some times, and better for those vandals that I live two hours away. Perhaps it is my job to forgive, like good Christians should, and maybe I will.

But I can't do it now. Not yet. 

Trust a Man to Get it Wrong

Today is a day of mixed emotion for me. On one hand, me ma is enjoying a 'Birthday of Note' (I can't tell you which one, of course, but it starts with a '6' and ends in a '0'). On the other hand, it is the anniversary of the old man's untimely demise. So it is a funny day ... funny peculiar, not funny 'ha ha'.

The thing about having a Blogette such as this, is that in the Early Days (sounding like a pension plan all of a sudden - 'pension', get it?) I am coming up against hitherto untapped events - family stuff, good or ill, things that I have not reflected on in this way - beware dear Reader, I am about to set off on another.

I wrote a little something about the Old Gal a while ago on Mother's Day and declared my admiration for Mrs Brady Old Lady. Well, today is her birthday, and she too of course, has to ally the pleasure of that with the pain of the fact that Dad cocked up big time, and fell off his twig on that day of all days. 'Silly old sod' I said then, and 'Silly old sod' I say now. Only a bloke could could die on his wife's birthday ... silly old sod.

The thing about my old man is that he was a most excellent fella. Built in the image of none less that Humpty Dumpty, he did the rather brave thing and married my freshly be-widowed mother when she had three ankle-biters and he was fast approached his retirement. Yes, that's right - there was a spectacular age gap between mum and dad, thirty-one whole British years. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from his own family (dad was freshly be-widowed at the same time as mum - it gets complicated, but his daughter was of a similar age to mum, and her son was my age - keep up). Still, despite all, they remained married for well over 25 years, mostly happily - and dad helped raise a young family when he should have been having late-life crises and fits of the dribbles. He was a grumpy bastard, a red socialist who made Scargill look like a LibDem. He was a Colour Sargeant formerly of the Royal Engineers, so had a very very very loud shouting voice (which, from one who looked like a wheeble, was at times amusing).

But he was kind, insightful, funny, wise and in his own way, beautiful. He was conspicuously proud of us even when we made a mess of things. But he had a wonderful sense of how to be silly - an art lost to so many people. There is nothing better at times than just to be silly. Even into my late twenties and until he died, I could walk up to him, given him a big kiss and hug, and reverse his hair on his head so the ones that covered his baldy-slap fell forward - then I would walk away laughing. He didn't mind. We would then argue simply for the pleasure of arguing. 

I didn't see him for a whole fortnight before he died so suddenly that night. I was still a retailer and was based in Swindon at that time, so visits were less frequent. That hurts, that still winds me, and that still makes me feel ashamed. I could not have asked for a better Dad, and I can't believe my luck that I had the dad I had. The old bastard has, however, let me down. He promised that when I got nice furniture of my own that he would come to my house and jump on it like I did to his. Well, mate, it's here and ready. If you came back just one more time, I'd let you smash it to firewood. Then I'd mess your hair up again, just because I could.

May you rest in the peace that you so richly deserve and with the God that you kept so close to you. If you had met my girls they would have loved you too, and had you lived long enough to see me ordained, you'd have known that so much of my joy was down to you and your prayers for me. Take care, mate, God Bless.

But dying on mum's birthday ....... silly old sod.