Fathers' Day

And thoughts on nurturing people

And those of us who have need of them

Good Morning, and Happy Juneteenth, and Happy Fathers' Day. The two works wonderfully well together, I think, because Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation Proclamation officially reached Texas, is a day for rejoicing in one set of our fore-mothers and fore-fathers, one incredibly strong and brave and good people. The world has no stronger, finer set of people to boast of than the people who lived in slavery here in the American South. Their offspring show every day the strength, the generosity, and the humor, and the soul-music of those ancestors. This is a morning to give thanks for the people who were freed on January 1, 1863, and who finally got the news on June 19, 1865. Their tears and their anguish scar all of our souls, and their triumph shines on us all.

Erika asked me to talk about Fathers' Day, and I'll do it by following George Burns' advice as well as I can. He urged that a good sermon have a good beginning, a good ending and as little as possible in between.

Let's begin by looking around the room and spotting those who are fathers. This is, after all, a day for them. So hug a father, or two or three. For those of us descended from Northern European stock, shake the hand of a father and thump him on the back or shoulder. Now look around again, and find a mother or two to salute in similar fashion. Look around again, and hug or shake hands with a teacher, or two or three. Now find someone whose caring and kindness have lifted your own personal spirits, and again hug, or shake hands as you are able. Finally, find someone toward whom you feel the warmth of caring, someone you nurture. More hugs, more handshakes, for that person.

Good work! That was your good beginning, and you did it all yourselves.

I wrote a heck of a blurb for this talk, didn't I? Those of you who have spoken here know how that goes -- Erika sends an email asking for a quick newsletter blurb, and you dash off something for a talk you've given almost no thought to as yet. After all, it isn't the night before the talk, or even the week before, and there are other things on your mind. So you jot down something, send it, and get back to the matters at hand at that time. Then weeks later, when you're beginning to think that you might need to start work on that talk for your assigned Sunday, the newsletter arrives and you see what you wrote all those weeks ago. It's always a shocker, sometimes an incoherent and unpleasant shocker. At least once I found that I'd written real gibberish, stuff that didn't make sense even to me. But this time I nailed it, and if you've read the blurb, you may now nap out. I really said all I know in that little bit of verbiage. But Erika would be disappointed if I didn't fill a little more airtime. George Burns would approve, but it would worry Erika, so I'll keep talking a while.

I don't know very much yet, but like most folks, I have a collection of opinions based on my observations. One of my observations is that we are not blank slates at birth -- we come into the world with a large part of our behavioral and emotional selves already present. I liked the blank slate idea a lot when I was a young adult, back before I had children and when my children were very small. Until my children got old enough to make it clear to me who they were, I actually thought that I had the skill and knowledge to mold them into something finer than any product they might become without my wise and kindly help. What a surprise I was in for. They outstripped me ninety to nothing! They are such definite individuals and such wonderful people, that I stand in awe of them. There is no way that I could ever have dreamed of people so fine, let alone created them. As Kahlil Gibran wrote, "Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you." And if this is what's true of our children, is it not true of us as well? We are also "Sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself." Perhaps we've come into the world to be the people Life needed in our places. Some of us are musical, some of us are scholarly, some of us are funny, and some of us are nurturing. One or two of us could even be funny, scholarly musicians with a gift for nurturing, I suppose. All of this is the long way around to say that I think some people are born to nurture, and a good many people are not. They may have many lovely qualities, but still not have nurturing among their talents.

It's good to stop here and define our terms, or our term. We're going to talk about nurturing, and the dictionary is as good a place as any to begin. Webster's New World Dictionary begins with nurture as "Anything that nourishes, food, nutriment." Then we move on to something more to our purpose, "The act, or process of raising or promoting the development of." Finally we get to the dichotomy of nurture and nature, which is sort of where we began. I was opting for a strong input from nature in the determining of how much ability each of us has to nurture. Aren't words and ideas fun? We could play circle games with them all day.

But let's not. Let's get to the point, which is that all of us came into the world through the bodies of two other humans. Every person has a mother and a father, at least initially and at least biologically. "Life's longing for itself" must be fed through two biological parents. This was a source of great anguish for me for several years of my life, the years when I wanted those afore-mentioned children and wasn't having any luck producing them. Through all those fertility tests and treatments, I felt like a horrendous moral failure. And then the information I needed came to me in the morning newspaper. The Albuquerque Journal carried a front-page article about a woman who had given birth to her third child in the county jail. She was incarcerated there on charges of criminal neglect of her other two children! I'll never know what difficulties she had been up against, of course, but it came to me that morning that if that woman could bear children and I could not, the act of procreation probably was not a mark of moral superiority, or even of fitness for the job of parenting. It said something about physical aptitude, but nothing about the content of character, hers, or mine.

I've been reading E. J. Graff's book, What Is Marriage For?, and I've been reminded of how new our vision of parenting is. The notion of parents as nurturers and of children as people to be nurtured is something we didn't begin to develop until about the middle of the nineteenth century. Children have been for thousands of years the possessions of their fathers, economic units. We mothers were economically helpless through all those years, so we were not considered much at all, except as the possessions that gave birth to the children of the fathers. Not until the Industrial Revolution did women begin to find ways to their own incomes, and gradually, with economic independence has come personhood. As we became people, our children began to shift their position too, and in the last 150 years we've developed our picture of the family as a loving unit, not just a boot camp for producing the next generation of strong sons and obedient and marketable daughters. Graff shows again and again how quickly we adapt to change and begin to think of it as the way things have always been.

If we consider our present ideal of loving and nurturing parents to be only a very new pattern, we can do a better job of accepting those whose talents don't include nurturing. We can begin with Father Abraham, driving Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness, holding his sword at the ready to sacrifice his son Isaac. Now we can cut a lot more slack for a guy who could do such things. A son was a prized possession, but a concubine and her son didn't rank with a wife and her son, so you kept the wife happy by throwing the concubine and her child out to wander in the wilderness. Then if God asked for your other son, you didn't think of him as a person but as your most prized possession. Doesn't that make it easier to imagine Abraham's obedience? I've always before looked at Father Abraham as a very flawed character, knowing that he drove Hagar and Ishmael out, presumably to die in the wilderness, and that he would have killed Isaac and that he did routinely pimp Sarah out for political gain. Seeing that Hagar, Ishmael, Sarah, and Isaac were truly chattel in Abraham's mind, I somehow have a little kinder view of him and of those who told the story with admiration. If we shift mindset, if we accept thousands of years of men as people and women and children as possessions, that story and others are much easier to accept. Context, my friends, context makes a real difference.

So what do we do with our notion of the nurturing parent in our time? It's wonderful to think that we're all kind and good and self-sacrificing, that all of us modern-day humans would stand up to God and say, "No way, not my kid. Do anything you want to do to me, but spare my child." But it ain't necessarily so. In my years of watching people, I've learned that not everybody is nurturing.

Case in point: When I worked in Special Education, I learned that only about 15% of fathers stayed with the wives who had given them children with handicaps. Eighty-five percent of children in Special Education were being reared by single mothers.

Second case: Before the Absent Dad legislation, only about 15% of divorced fathers continued their child support payments until the children were grown. I have to admit that I don't know whether the Absent Daddy legislation has improved this figure or not.

Third case: Susan Smith was not an anomaly. Mothers have always killed their children when it benefited them. This is a time-honored primate behavior. The female kills the children of the former mate in order to be more attractive to a new, and possibly more prestigious, mate. I haven't managed to document it, but I'm sure I've read that children are more apt to be murdered by their mothers than by anyone else. This sheds new light on my father's maternal grandmother, who gave away her two little girls, my Grandmama and my great-aunt Mattie, so that she could marry Mr. Owens. I always thought it was pretty shabby that the first two little girls were put to work in the fields at age eight while all the subsequent offspring were reared in luxury and had college degrees, an unusual accomplishment for their generation. Not so -- Grandma Owens was being kind to give the children away rather than killing them! It's humbling, isn't it, to be reminded that we are primates, and that we follow the behaviors of the primates.

And the fourth case, the one I've listened to any number of times as a PFLAG mom: 10% of fathers and 20% of mothers accept their homosexual offspring once they know that their children are homosexual. I keep thinking this can't be so every time I hear it again, an it's really so. Parents who have seemed loving and caring as long as their children fit the prevailing norm do a 180 when they learn one more fact about a child, if that fact doesn't square with their notion of what will make them proud. I talked with a lovely college girl yesterday about being terribly cautious about coming out to her family while she's still financially dependent on them, and the other people at the PFLAG meeting agreed. She must listen to the clues her family drops in order to know whether they will welcome the news that their beautiful child is a beautiful Lesbian.

All of this hurts, doesn't it? Even when we know and accept that our view of family, of parenting, is a new invention, we don't want to think that children are ill-treated. We don't like to think that perhaps we ourselves were not given all the love and acceptance we would have liked.

When I was first thinking about this talk, I asked my son what he thought I should say. He said that we all need one person who cares about us, that we need an ally, a cheerleader. I hope these things came to his mind because I managed to be that person for him. Now as I'm thinking and writing in earnest, now that the deadline is here, I'm thinking that I need to give his father more credit for the things he gave our children too. He gave them a strong work ethic, he gave them the example of how to rise from humble beginnings, and he gave them each four years in a prestigious college. He also made it possible for their mother to stay home with them until they went to school. If I worked at it, I could probably come up with more good things to credit to his account. He isn't a nurturer, but he has other fine qualities.

There are two points I want to make here. First, that parents who come up short on the nurturing scale but who give other gifts to their children are good people too, people of inherent worth and dignity. And second, for those of us who wish we'd had more nurturing parents, there's a way to make up for the lack.

That make-up experience is one we can provide for our adult selves. It may not be perfect, but it's fun, and it's definitely better than nothing. The first part of it is something that we're all doing this morning. We're here, in a place where we're surrounded by kindness and caring. I'm here, where I feel warmly accepted as I talk to you. You can't ever know how much this means to me. I've been a painfully shy person, and with the love of this community, I rise from my shyness and leave it behind. You are the cheerleaders I've always needed and wished for. I don't have enough words ever to thank you adequately.

The second way to give yourself what you may have missed growing up is called Inner Child Work. The theory behind this work is that we all carry with us, within us, the children we once were. My shyness is the shyness I felt as a small girl, and I feel it because that little girl still lives in me. She's part of the person I am today. I used to be aware of this only enough to use her as my excuse, knowing that the damage she had sustained was a reason for my adult limitations. In the last 20 years, I've learned though that she can have a much happier part in my adult life. I can be her cheerleader, her ally. I can nurture the little girl I was, and I can say to her, "It's all right now, because I'm here. I'm a grown-up, and I can take care of both of us. We're both safe, and we're both wonderful, and we can be happy and have fun together." And do you know what? Loving and caring for that little girl feels good! I've been growing into a happier and more effective woman ever since I learned to take care of my Inner Child. I've found it helpful to keep pictures of her, and to talk to her, and to admire her. She's a neat little kid, someone I can admire and love.

If this idea just turns you off, erase it. Not everybody wants the same stuff. But if it appeals to you, there are a number of books on Inner Child work. I've brought with me Charles Whitfield's Healing the Child Within. Check the bookstore.

Now for George Burns, we need to find the good ending. First a recap -- we are a bunch of nurturing people, fathers, mothers, teachers, friends, all of us strong people eager to share our strength, our love, and our sense of fun to help one another. People with other assets are valuable too, people of worth and dignity. A little knowledge of older cultural patterns can let us accept those who differ from us. And we can heal our hurts and give ourselves the nurturing we have missed in the past. It's never too late.

Now for the whippy ending George Burns would have me offer to you, I'll give you Robert Fulghum's Recommendations. He says they fall somewhere between God's Ten Commandments and Murphy's Law.

[. Buy lemonade from any kid who is selling.

2. Anytime you can vote on anything, vote.

3. Attend the twenty-fifth reunion of your high school class.

4. Choose having time over having money.

5. Always take the scenic route.

6. Give at least something to any beggar who asks.

7. And give money to all street musicians.

8. Always be someone's valentine.

9. When the circus comes to town, be there.

And Sherry's Recommendation Number 10,

10. When you go to that circus, hold hands with your Inner Child, eat cotton candy, and laugh a lot.

So Happy Juneteenth, Happy Fathers' Day, happy day for rejoicing in the person you are and in the people you love.

Blessed be.

References

Fulghum, R. (1988). It was on fire when I lay down on it. New York: Ballentine Books.

Gibran, K. (1964). The prophet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Graff, E. (1999). What is marriage for? Boston: Beacon Press.

Whitfield, C. (1987). Healing the child within. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc.