Our fathers, when they’ve seen all they care to see of this world, find solace in their doing better for their children than their fathers did for them, and the children are running laps inside a fence, figuring out how to hold them accountable for their wrongdoings and simultaneously forgive them because we know they’ve given their best.
My father told me another man, a man he respected, was my grandfather because, at 16, his father stopped being his dad. I was 16 when my grandmother corrected the narrative. Before my father was my father he was a kid who’d cry at the simplest things, my aunt says. My father says he became a man when he caught his father beating the woman who’d become my grandmother, and my father beat him. That man no longer had a son, according to my father.
So much of my dad pours out of me when I’m talking to my son and I’ve given up fighting those parts of him; those parts I hated when I was a kid but able to recognize emotional stunting and an inability to be vulnerable. I want to be a good father. I don’t want to be a good father just in relation to my mine. Just good for goodness sake.
The better parts of my father I’m mixing with the better parts of me. I’ve planted the broken parts of him in my empty spaces and giving him a second chance at growing with me. I feel whole, and maybe my wholeness makes him better.
You save the few things that didn’t burn in the fire, that didn’t get crushed under the force, that didn’t drown when he held them under, and you bring the rest to the ground. You always build it better the second time around.
-Darnell Lamont Walker
