Who's Your Daddy?

"I saw your facebook link," I said.

"Yeah?" My sister answered.

"I loved it. I loved every minute of it. Especially that part in the middle." I sighed dreamily.

"I know! I've played it three times and every time I cry. I love him. I want him to be my father!" My sister rhapsodized.

What -- or should I say, who -- were we talking about? President Obama and his speech to school children. The one where zealot parents kept their children home from school terrified that the President of the United States was going to go all The Ring and zombie'fy their children into walking, talking health care Nazis. My sister is a teacher in the south Bronx. That speech summed up everything she has to say every day in a million little ways to children who don't believe that school has anything to offer them: While it can be hard and boring, and maybe doesn't make sense now, you must stick with it. Your very life and the future of this country depends on it. Stay in school. If this is a propagandist message, my sister is in lock-step right behind the POTUS.

As an adult watching the clip, I knew that President believed every word that was coming out of his mouth. As a person who benefited from education and a former teacher himself, he was trying to impress on the impoverished and the disenfranchised to stick with it. The message of the speech was "Hang in there." But this post isn't necessarily about the speech as much as it is about what my sister's response was to it. "I want him to be my father!"

Oh, Dad. My sister and I are a couple of those kids. Two of the twenty-five million kids in the United States that grow up without their biological father in the house...or anywhere we could reach without years of family therapy and a psychologist. I usually give my mom a lot of guff in this blog, but lay off my father because my Daddy Issues are much bigger than my Mommy Issues, and would require me to delve into some pretty personal stuff about my father's past, and -- believe it or not -- I believe in his privacy. So let's just say that my father has some pretty big Daddy Issues of his own that caused him to make some really bad decisions, including "leaving the home" which is just a really pretty euphemism for "selfishly running away from your responsibilities." The fallout of this decision -- almost thirty years ago now -- continues to reverberate with my sister and me in a million different ways even to this day. One of which is an active campaign to find a father in our personal spheres and in the media.

Do not misunderstand me. We had male influences in our home. First, my mother moved us back to her father's house where she was promptly put to work feeding and cleaning up after her father and brother (my grandfather and uncle) while they went to work and put food on the table for us. However, even when my mother got a job "outside the home," she still came back to the house each evening to the second shift. And while my grandfather used to harass me about helping my mother (as he sat reading the paper), my mother used to tell me to go play or do my homework (perhaps in the hopes of sparing me early indoctrination into "women's work"). During this time period, a little TV show called the Cosby Show came on the air, and every Thursday night, I figuratively moved to Brooklyn to go live with my preferred dad, Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable. A man who not only came home every night, but joked with his children, kissed his wife, and talked and modeled the importance of personal responsibility. (She says while sighing wistfully and fluttering her eyelashes.)

When my mother re-married and we moved into a new home, the search for a father did not end. My stepfather, a man who came home every night and kissed his wife, was a stand-up guy, but he didn't exactly treat me like his daughter. I don't mean that in a perv'y, weird way, just in that we were strangers thrown into a house together. Blended families don't always blend well. Like a smoothie made with real fruit; there's still going to be chunks of strawberry in there that block the straw causing immense frustration or shoot into the back of your throat to unexpectedly gag you. For years, I would hide in my bedroom or in the rec room with the hopes of being ignored. It worked well. During those years, I often found my father in movies. Steve Martin in Father of the Bride comes to mind. Numerous teen exploitation films where the oblivious dad finally "sees" his daughter, and apologizes for being a Bad Dad. (Project much? Ahem.)

I finally found two -- well, fathers would be wrong, but -- father figures in my twenties. At the police department, I had two sergeants, Spence and John, who took me under their wing in non-perv'y or weird ways. Spence convinced me to enroll in Creative Writing courses at the local community college. John brought me to cool crime scenes, sent me out with his credit card to buy his wife's Valentine's Day gifts, and invited me onto the cruises he organized. (Years later, I went to a police officer's wedding, and John and his wife Debbie were there. I asked Debbie if it would be OK if I asked John to dance. Said Debbie, "Oh, for God's sake, you're practically one of his kids! Why are you even asking?!") If you've ever heard the story of why I became a cop, these two figure prominently in it. They saw that I was directionless and thought I would make an excellent cop. So, I became a cop. This seemed to make everyone happy including my Bio Dad.

(My conversation with my father, which happened accidentally when I picked up the phone at my grandmother's house, went something like this:

"Hey, I just want to tell you, I'm really proud of you, honey."

"Umm, thanks, Dad. Actually, I quit the P.D. and I'm moving to New York to work at Woman's Day magazine."

"Oh."

This is when you know God has a perverse sense of humor.)

This, of course, brings me to the differences between a father and a father figure. The convenience of a father figure is that they are not your real dad. Real dads can be screws up, jackasses, or half-wits. Father figures are the people you seek out because they share a common psychology with you. The breach between a real dad and a father figure is filled with romantic ideals, longing, and -- most importantly -- choice. Should my real dad have stayed in the home, I would probably be a completely differently person psychologically. The same can be said if my grandfather or my stepfather took an active interest in parenting me. But all these men abdicated their authority to my mother. (Hence the drubbing my mother takes in the blogs.) However, because I formed my own ideas and expectations in life, I went out and found men who already embodied those qualities. And while real dads can be embarrassing or exasperating or disappointing, father figures can be abandoned if they no longer fit the fantasy. If tomorrow, Bill Cosby goes all Howard Hughes, I can politely distance myself and seek out a new daddy stand-in. Not so when you share DNA or a house with that guy in his boxers who can belch the alphabet.

As the years have progressed, I've been honest enough with myself to admit that I prefer the father figures I've collected along the way to the dads I've been given. My father figures have taken active interests in what I'm doing, where I'm going, and what I'm going to do next. They have been encouraging, engaging, and positive. While my dads have all told me to do as they say and not as they do, my father figures have said, do as I have done; here is the pathway. Kinda like the President in his speech to the school children of America.

After all this, then, it shouldn't be any wonder that Kate and I listened transfixed to that speech. When you think about it, it was one fatherless man speaking to twenty-five million(+) fatherless children in a language we understood. In language we would like to hear from our real dads. He was encouraging, engaging, and positive. Everything a father should be. And therefore, maybe, I'll begin to lock-step right next to Kate. Just do me a favor, don't ask Malia and Sasha for the real scoop, please. I couldn't bear it if Barrack hangs around the White House in his boxers belching the alphabet.