Being a dad is the best thing that ever happened to me. I adopted my stepdaughters (now daughters) after they were adults. Their biological dad ended contact when his marriage to my wife (now ex-wife) ended, and I filled the position of role model in their lives.
Adopting them allowed me to be a grandpa and father-in-law. All of us work in the same family business. I can?t imagine life without them.
Adopting adult children seems complicated, but it is an increasingly complex world. My odd relationship with my father may be more typical than untypical.
A line in Richard Wolffe?s book, Renegade, quoted from Obama?s Dreams of My Father hits me every Father?s Day.
Obama said, ?every man is trying to live up to his father?s expectation or make up for his father?s mistakes.?
Obama went on to say, ?I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.?
Obama didn?t have many real interactions with his father to build from. As Wolffe noted, the book is about Obama?s own quest, self reflection and ability for storytelling.
Skills that made Obama President of the United States.
When I read the Obama quote, it made me wonder what side of the equation I fell on. Was I living up to my father?s expectations or making up for his mistakes?
In my case, it?s a little of both.
Anyone who read my second book, Son of a Son of a Gambler, recognizes that I worshiped my father. He convinced me that I can do anything I set my mind to doing.
What doesn?t come out in the book is that I actually had two fathers. A pre-Playboy bunny and a post-Playboy bunny dad.
That is where it gets complicated.
For the first nine years of my life, my father worked two jobs, seven days a week. He worked every holiday.
I saw him for the two hours that he was home for dinner and after church on Sundays. (He skipped church during football season to book bets, but otherwise was at mass every Sunday.)
He rose from extreme poverty to make some money. Bought us a big house in a nice neighborhood and then ran off to live with a Playboy bunny.
The Playboy bunny hated dad?s children, and me in particular.
During my early teen years, dad was not really part of my life. I rarely had any private interactions. He didn?t really know who I was or what I did.
When I was in high school, dad had a serious stroke. It should have killed him and he spent nearly a year in the hospital.
Through focus and hard work, he defied the original prognosis and came back to health. He also came back a changed man. He wasn?t ?born again? in the religious sense (he was still a professional gambler with hard-living friends) but everything else about him changed.
He stopped living with the Playboy bunny and married a wonderful, well-grounded woman.
read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com
Source: http://www.allword-news.co.uk/2011/06/19/fathers-day-in-an-absent-father-society/
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