On Fatherlessness

Today is father's day and our daughter is going to celebrate with her father by taking the family to dinner.

I got to thinking about the existence of fathers in my family. My mother's father died at 33 years old in 1919 just a couple of months before my mother's birth. She was the fourth child in the family. So my mother grew up without her own father although she had a stepfather who turned out to be a renegade(to be kind). My mother married at 18 and was separated from her husband after having given birth to her first child (and that was me). She was divorced after giving birth to my brother. I guess patterns do mean something in families. Maybe we became a certain kind of mother and wife because neither she nor I had a father figure that we admired. I think that not having a father was the tragedy of my mother's life. She became very self-sufficient and independent which are not qualities that some husbands admire. My mother married two more times so I had one that was a stepfather (a very unhappy situation) and the other a distant figure that was not fatherly to me at all.

I have often wondered in how many ways our being fatherless contributed to the negative qualities of our lives.