Mark's Cafe Moi: Sometimes I feel like a fatherless child

I imagine one day I won’t pay any attention to father’s day, or mother’s day, although my mother’s been gone for twelve years and it still brings things up for me annually, especially while I have a birth mother still living. I was thinking recently about who taught me to be a man, and it was not my father. He also was one of two – the man who actually fathered me, my birth father, is buried in a small Mississippi cemetery and I never met him. I did visit the grave on my first trip there to reunite with my birth family. I was thirty-five years old. I’d known about them since the age of seventeen but wasn’t emotionally prepared to meet them until much later. I wanted mostly to assure myself, with the bitterness I had at the time, that he was indeed dead. Aside from fathering me, the man had given me nothing nor cared about my well being in any way. I can testify that he’s there, buried beneath a very modest headstone, along a rural road near a tiny chapel. The man who adopted me – Dad – passed away in November 2009. It was with him I had a lifelong love/hate relationship, the love being mostly obligatory both ways. I often had the feeling I was not the son he wanted, and he didn’t do much to counter that. When I think of who my role models were, they were the men I met in my early 20s, the gay men I came to know in Los Angeles, who really taught me how to be an adult. My father had given us alcohol when we were early teenagers. In my case, when I was twelve. It’s all well beyond judgment now, but it was not something a father does who is trying to instruct his son in the ways of either manhood or adulthood. He was hyper-critical, often cruel, and clearly aware of my differences: I think he sensed very early that I was gay, or at least not his idea of masculine, and he would taunt me and ridicule me in sometimes very subtle ways. I cannot honestly say he had any influence on me becoming the man I am today, other than to compel me to achieve and to pursue my own ideas of what constituted a life I wanted. To that end, he did make me more determined to be the things he so disdained: a writer, an open and happy gay man, a dreamer, a wayward child. So on this upcoming Father’s Day, I remember Mac, as he was called. I miss him for whatever reasons I miss him. He was not a bad man, just, like all of us, a limited human being. His limitations had consequences for him and for his family. I also remember on this Father’s Day the men, many of them long dead, who truly taught me to be a man.]]>