Father’s Day by the Baloonatic

*Yes, I know this is late. Look, we’ve been driving all over creation — again — in a repeat of 2020, in fact. So I lost track of time. Though we did manage a deranged enough feat of driving to ALMOST have Father’s Day with both boys. (Though not together, because that would take a teleporter.) Anyway, it’s still good. – SAH.*

Father’s Day by the Baloonatic

My father is 87. He grew up on a small farm on an island in the Great Lakes. While all of his siblings went to university, he ended up dropping out of high school and helping his parents on the farm for several years until he was able to get a job in the nearest big city, working as an instrumentation technician for one of the big nickel mines. While his spelling may be atrocious, my Dad never lost his love for learning. He loved to learn how things worked, taught himself to do so many things, and has been an avid reader all of his life. When I had read all of the children’s books we owned and wasn’t able to get to the library, I would grab books from my Dad’s bookcases – anything from Zane Grey to Frederick Forsyth to classics like For Whom the Bell Tolls or All Quiet on the Western Front.

My Dad is still a hard worker. He did a lot of overtime at work, so he wasn’t home much, and when he was home, he was working on the garden, learning beekeeping or converting our former schoolhouse into a beautiful home – lowering the ceilings, creating a second floor, making it unrecognizable from when he purchased it. At 75, he was given an acre of the former family farmlands from his eldest brother and he built a two bedroom camp. Into his 80s he did the majority of the work himself, from shingling the roof, installing drywall to turning a pile of old ash logs into tongue and groove wood flooring that he finished and installed himself. He still has bees and a garden that is bigger than he needs so that he can share his bounty with others. And when he’s not working on his own projects, he is still out helping other people whenever he can.

And yet, as hard as he worked and still works, my Dad also taught me that work wasn’t everything in life. He has many hobbies, and loves picking up new ones. He is a wonderful amateur photographer, and took the wedding photos for many of my cousins. He still has a darkroom, even if it hasn’t seen much recent use with the onset of digital photography as he moved from film cameras to digital cameras, phones and tablets. He was an early adopter with computers, getting us a Vic 20 in 1983, followed by a Commodore 64 and on to newer computers and all of the gadgets that go with them. When he had a back injury in the mid 80s that led to a long period of bed rest, he finished a bunch of latch hook rug kits that had been bought for my siblings and I, because he couldn’t just lie there doing nothing. In later years, I taught him to cross-stitch, and he delighted in making pictures for each of his grandchildren. Now he makes wooden toys – cranes and trucks and trailers, hand made with exquisite details.

He also spent time with us children whenever he could. He instilled in us a love of cards and board games. He took us on road trips, visiting family and friends, and camping almost every summer. He made sure we grew up with pets – dogs, and cats and chickens, and instilled in us a love of nature and growing things and the outdoors. He taught us about being a good neighbor and a good friend with the way he is always willing to give a helping hand. In a community where the mines provided the majority of work, he helped many families even from the rival mine by providing fresh vegetables and berries when people were laid off work or during strikes by the union. He took us to church every Sunday and taught us the difference between right and wrong, often with the palm of his hand applied to our backsides. He taught me so many things, I don’t know that he will ever understand how much.

The impact that my father made on me hit home tonight because of an issue with someone who is probably now a former colleague. She lost her father at a very young age. She didn’t have someone to look up to as a role model the way I did, to show her not only how to work hard, which she has done, but also to find the balance between work and home. To literally stop and smell the roses, to find passions outside of the workplace and to know that your job should not be your whole life. That’s a hard lesson to learn when you are on a small team that has too much work and not enough people, long hours of overtime and making sure everything gets done, while helping your colleagues, being constantly asked questions and having people reach out to you for help. Learning to set that aside and make time for yourself is something I struggle with at times myself, but as much as I love my job, I have learned from watching my Dad that it is just a job, and I need to have a life outside work. I need to have hobbies and to travel and to spend time with people and to continue learning new things, and to read and dream and appreciate the beauty that is around me every day.

My colleague, who would declare that she is independent when it comes to politics, also suffers horribly from TDS. Shortly after the election she started talking about the need to stock up on years worth of food and was refusing to leave her house to the point of having groceries delivered because she was scared to leave.

It makes me wonder how much of that, too, is the impact of not having a father? How much is lost when you grow up without that steady presence, that protector? When there isn’t someone who picks you up from the car and carries you to bed even when you are faking being asleep? When there isn’t someone to discipline you when you need it, or to make you spend what feels like hours picking dandelions for wine and taking you out for ice cream or doughnuts? Who shares his secret stash of chocolate bars when you stay awake during the long road trips and keep him company? Is this why there are so many women who have become so unbalanced?

Does that explain the difference between our two sons? Her son who also grew up without a father barely leaves his bedroom and his computer. My son grew up with an alcoholic father who, while living with him for most of his childhood, was also mostly absent. Yet my son has managed to graduate from high school, get a job, and finds time to balance his time in front of a computer with going out and joining people on activities, traveling with friends for events, spending time helping my husband-less friends and myself with manual labor.

Fathers don’t just have an impact on their children. It is generational. This explains so much that is wrong in society today, with the loss of the nuclear family, with generations of “baby mamas” who have kids by many fathers. Those kids are growing up without Dads. My Dad made so many sacrifices for us children, to help us have lives better than his or better than those he saw around him. He taught us to work hard, encouraged us to keep learning and growing. His values helped us as we grew up, got jobs and had families of our own. He learned this from his father, who did the same thing.

What happens when that chain is broken and never repaired? It isn’t just breaking families, it is breaking people and it has lead to a broken society.