Today is Father’s Day, and of course, father’s and celebration of fatherhood is splashed everywhere. I cannot say I share the same rosy view of the instituion.
My own father is a dyed-in-the-wool-card-carrying-dues-paying reprobate and being pregnant for a man who has shown no interest whatsoever in his child, is not making for a good day for me.
I want to wax poetic about fatherhood, the way women all over and especially over at Blogging Baby and Pregnant Mommas over at Tribe.net (my online hang outs for months now), but I can’t.
I’m sure my hormones are involved, but you know, I just can’t help but feel let down. Disappointed.
I believed in my father as a girl, and the bitter reality of my father mirrors the relationship I had with the father of my child. I believed in him.
When he said he wanted to love me, marry me, make babies with me and raise a family; I believed him. I believed in him.
Now that I am here, alone and going through this, sometimes reading all these glowing praises that women are making about husbands and boyfriends and their adoration of fatherhood, just kind of twists the knife a little.
I go over to SingleRose.com and read those women’s stories, just so I can have someone to identify with, but you know, I wish I could write glowing, loving stories about my father and the father of my child. But I just can’t. They’re both bastards.
When I compare the two, I think you know I think it’s true to a large degree that women tend to choose men who mirror the relationship they have with their father.
I could give you a long list of their similarities, but why bother. The only one that is fundamental today is, that they’re both lousy fathers.
All I keep thinking, along with the slightly over-analytical musings about my own experiences, is that I have a man in my belly. I am making a man to send into the world. All I want for this man, is to be better man than his father and grandfather.
I want someone to write those loving stories about my son. I want my son to be the good man neither my father or his [my baby’s] father is.
How do you that? How do you as a woman alone teach a boy how to be a man? I wonder if it isn’t more important to show him how to be a good human being above and beyond our human conceptions of male and female.
The thing is, I feel entirely disillusioned. I’ve questioned my faith… my faith in man/woman love, my faith in the spiritual path I’ve been following, my faith in myself, my hopes for myself…. while trying to reshape in my mind what motherhood will mean for me. I’ve said before I never planned to do this alone, it’s why I waited until 32.
I guess today, I just wish that on a very personal level, that BE-LIE-F didn’t have a LIE in the middle of it.
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