Father’s Day

We just had Father’s Day here in Germany. For reasons I’ve never researched, Father’s Day here involves men heading out with wagons full of booze and getting blind drunk. Apparently, being a father is completely optional to whether you participate or not. The only requirement seems to be drinking all day and spending at least part of your time in a wooded area shouting at the other members of your group.

I’ve never engaged in this particular ritual though, I have to admit, there have been years it has been tempting. It always coincides with the Ascension of Christ, which is a public holiday here in Germany. It was last Thursday and, since I was down to work that day, we marked it yesterday in this household. I got Schwarzwalder Kirsch muffins, pizza with anchovies (these were two separate meals) and a T-shirt with the Legion of Super Heroes logo which I’m told I must never wash if I want the logo not to fade away.

The main thing I wanted out of the day – aside from the anchovy pizza – was to get the kids to sit down and play a mega version of this superhero game we have. A normal game requires you to play with about two-thirds of the cards and takes an hour or so. I wanted to combine all the cards from two different games and see what happens. Neither Emma nor Noah was very enthused by the plan from the start. And then Ricardo joined us for the game and proceeded to pretty much take the rest of us apart, so their interest evaporated pretty quickly.

After an hour and a lot of whining I could tell I wasn’t going to have any fun with the game because it was rapidly deteriorating into a hostage situation, so I sent the kids away and, I won’t lie, was in a bit of a huff about the whole thing. You want some extra credit when the only thing you want for Father’s Day is time with your kids, and instead I became the bad guy for first holding them against their will and then for being grouchy when they didn’t want to stay and play. As parenting failures go, it’s not even going to crack my top 100.

And yet … there is something about failing as a parent (however minorly) and then failing as a parent on the first Father’s Day after the death of another child that leaves you thinking. And I hate to use the word, but there’s no other word for it than failure. Your job as a parent is to get your child to adulthood so he or she can be a functioning member of society. We failed in that. It wasn’t our fault. There was nothing we could do. But we got blown out of the water by that tumor. There’s no shame in failing if you never had a chance. But it is a failure nonetheless.

I don’t think we are failures. If nothing else, I keep remembering how everyone told us we were doing so good at surviving the experience, though being the best at that is hard to frame as a ‘yay’ kind of moment. It almost feels like yet another failure.

I can feel myself meandering. I don’t start every one of these entries with a direction in mind and I’ve rarely felt I had as little of a point as I did today as I started this, but I couldn’t let Father’s Day go without a comment.

I don’t write this blog to let everyone know I’m sad. I think anyone reading this more or less gets that. I don’t write it to give you hints on how to deal with the grieving, because the best advice I can give is “Every day is different.” I write it to get things out of my head. And this time I’ve got in my head that yesterday was Father’s Day, and I wasn’t quite the best father I could ever be, but there was room for a ton more failure, so I don’t feel all that bad about it. And maybe that’s where I’m going with this after all. Because I obviously think a lot about Colin and there I failed, but when I think of all the ways I could have failed him worse … well, it doesn’t make me feel better, but I suppose there is some comfort in knowing that I could possibly feel worse than I do. And I don’t. So there. I pulled a point out of my hat in the last paragraph after all. I’ve got a therapy session in about 40 minutes and then after that I’ll see what the kids are up to. The threat today is to play poker.