My brothers and I were blessed with wonderful parents who loved us and tried their best to raise us to be good people. Our father was a rather reserved man, not cold or distant, just quiet. He didn’t have much to say, but when he said something we all knew we’d better listen. 
A professor of mine recently made a scornful comment about adults who still call their fathers Daddy after they are grown. I don’t know what his relationship with his father was like, but I do know that it never occurred to any of us to call our father anything but Daddy. We loved him and respected him unreservedly for our whole lives. I am sixty-six years old as I write this, he’s been gone for more than 25 years, and I still think of him as Daddy.
When my children were born, my greatest wish for them was to have a relationship with their fathers like the one I had with mine. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I don’t want to give the impression that either of my husbands were not good fathers. They did their best. However, they were hampered by the fathers they had to use as their examples. Somehow, they never achieved that combination of respect and affection that my father earned from us.
My children love their fathers and, as they have gotten older, their relationships with them have seemed to improve somewhat. But, the unfailing affection and support that I knew as a child becoming an adult, has come from other men. My brothers who never had children of their own have followed in my father’s footsteps and shown my children and grandchildren the trust and support that we got from our father.
Because they are uncles instead of fathers, they haven’t exerted the discipline that we got from Daddy, but all my children and grandchildren know that they can count on my brothers to be there whenever they are needed, whether it is simply attending their ball games or providing them with a place to live, they have a male figure in their lives that they can count on for support.
That is what fatherhood is truly all about. Someone posted a Father’s Day quote on Facebook yesterday that says it all: “Any idiot can make a baby, it takes a real man to be father.”
Being a good father is so much more than providing a home and food. It’s about tossing the ball, listening without lecturing, accepting the child as an individual person with dreams and needs of their own, but still managing to require honesty and reliability from them. So, to all those true fathers out there, whether they’ve ever actually made a baby or not, Happy Father’s Day. You’ve earned it.
