Dear Harry: Letters to My Father

Our relationships with our fathers are problematic, according to Peter Clothier, author of Dear Harry: Letters to My Father. I have to agree. As close as I was to my dad, there was friction and discomfort just below the surface, and sometimes out in the open. A conversation just after Peter’s talk revealed that my friend got sucker-punched by his biological dad, when he abandoned the family for his bottle and another woman. Step-dad wasn’t any better, a domineering bully. The room was full of such stories, spoken in hushed tones amongst friends nodding in agreement. Fathers are problematic. Peter’s dad, the local vicar, sent him off to boarding school when he was just six years old. It was during The War, and that’s what upper middle class parents did back then. Bombs were dropping nearby. You sent your kids off to boarding school, and they came back damaged goods. You didn’t ever see each other all that much, maybe a couple of times a year. Peter showed us old black and white photos of pigs and geese and caravan that he loved as a boy, though not so much as a teenager. He strayed from his Christian faith over the years and felt guilty about it. Didn’t feel close to his daddy, or father, as he referred to him later, though it sounds better written than spoken. And his relationship to his own kids is problematic. He left when they were five and seven, and the kids ended up in Ireland with their mum. They’re friends now, but his kids don’t ever want to talk about things below the surface. Problematic. Daddy and mummy, say the Brits. My folks, born in Shanghai when it was British, had us call them daddy and mummy. I outgrew “mummy” for “mom” when I was about ten, but “daddy” always stuck for me, in spite of my sense of embarrassment. I always felt like a kid around him, even when he was old and our roles reversed. I was lucky, though. I never felt the need to write letters he’d never read, hoping to bridge a gap. But now I wonder. How good a dad am I? How accessible? Peter discovered many letters his father wrote to him, and it proved his father loved him. Where did the perception or reality of distance come in? As fathers, how do we end up problematic? Is fatherhood just that way?