Back to Kindergarten

My Dad is the kind of guy who is constantly ripping and cutting articles out of newspapers and magazines and mailing them to people he thinks will appreciate what he has found.  It drives my Mom crazy that he does this before she has even had a chance to read the paper or the magazine.  But after 60 years of marriage, my father continues to clip away in his own little world.

 

 

When I saw my Dad this past weekend for Father's Day, he had a column that he had recently cut from a newsletter and he handed it to me and said, "I know you think you're too old to be told anything, but I thought you would enjoy this column.  You've probably already read it but it's the kind of thing that everyone needs to be reminded about.  Just think about it."

I did think about it and my Dad was right.  This column below is a good basic reminder about how to navigate the ups and downs of that magical ride we call life.  For anyone who is sad, confused or frustrated about what is going on in their life right now, this column, which was written almost 25 years ago, may help you reset yourself and start again with a fresh outlook: 

 

All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten

By Robert Fulghum

 

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten.  Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School.  These are the things I learned:

 

-- Share everything.

-- Play fair.

-- Don't hit people.

-- Clean up your own mess.

-- Don't take things that aren't yours.

-- Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

-- Wash your hands before you eat.

-- Flush.

-- Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

-- Live a balanced life -- learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some

-- Take a nap every afternoon.

-- When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.

-- Be aware of wonder.  Remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why but we are all like that.

-- Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even little seeds in the styrofoam cup--they all die.  So do we.

-- And remember the Dick-and-Jane boks and the first word you learned -- the biggest word of all -- LOOK.

 

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.  The Golden Rule and the love and basic sanitation.  Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

 

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it inoto sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm.  Think what a better world it would be if we all -- the whole world -- had cookies and milk bout three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

 

And it is still true -- no matter how old you are -- when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

 

 

 

Your Dad Is Here

I see my husband in my son in small ways:  the way he rolls up his long sleeved shirts, the set of his jaw when he is annoyed or determined to do something he really wants to accomplish and the way he plays chicken with his car's gas tank and won't fill it up until it is almost empty.

When I see those traits it is bittersweet: they make me laugh and but they also make me feel a little sad and wistful.    "He is still with us," I think to myself.  My husband had a very strong personality so I am not surprised that I see some of him in our son.  It's just when those quirky things appear, they always have a way of taking me by surprise.

 

 

 

My thoughts today are with fathers and the important role they play in their children's lives.  While my son's father died nine years ago, I appreciate the important role he played in our young son's life and how his influence can still be felt today.

 

Please read the timely story below which I found on the insightful website, Hello Grief (www.hellogrief.org).  The author, Abigail Carter, sweetly reminds us of the importance of Dads everywhere; the ones who are with us today and the ones that we forever hold in our hearts.

 

Happy Father's Day!

 

 

 

Every Day is Father’s Day

By Abigail Carter
June 8, 2010 

Father’s Day never held much importance for our family until the death of my husband, Arron, father of our two young children.

 

The day usually began with a childish command for him to stay in bed so he could be the lucky recipient of a sticky tray of burnt pancakes and watery coffee, and be handed a construction paper card with “I lov you dady,” in bright red crayon, or a popsicle stick picture frame with a blurry Polaroid of a proud pre-schooler.

 

Later in the day, as he jiggled the kids around on the heavy metal lumber cart at Home Depot, I refrained from my usual “step away from the power tools,” and allowed him to run amuck, our list of supplies forgotten in his pocket. For dinner I would make one of his favorites – chicken stew, or if the weather was nice, a steak grilled on the BBQ and a glass of wine after the kids were in bed.

 

Our first Father’s Day after his death was spent in the company of several other widows on a deserted New Jersey Shore beach watching our children romp around in the waves or play in the sand, wishing we had the ability to play so freely, wishing we could have our old lives back. The male volunteers who grilled hot dogs for lunch just seemed to add salt to our wounds.

 

The days and weeks afterward were spent in a heightened state of agitation to which we were oblivious – fighting, frustrated, exhausted – until someone pointed out how difficult Father’s Day must have been. Finally able to connect the dots between the day and the aggression that had settled upon my family, the black moods eventually dissipated, at least until the next event that needed to braced for, like one of the kid’s birthdays, or another wedding anniversary. Year two was a repeat of year one, the bracing, the beach, the fatherless kids, the male volunteers, the loneliness, the anger, the exhaustion.

 

Friends and family, while well-meaning often added to the stress, building the potential heart-break of the day by calling to offer sad Happy Father’s Day wishes, or to offer to take the kids away, thinking that what they needed was to spend time with a man, one that was usually someone else’s father.

 

There was another year, the year I picked my son up from Pre-K after his class had been busy making presents for their fathers, and when we got into the car, he threw the present at me, something square wrapped in emerald green tissue paper. “Who am I going to give this to?” He yelled. “All the other kids have dads and I don’t!” In one day, with the realization that he was not like all the other kids, he had gone from a sad child to an angry one – anger that eight years later is only beginning to dissipate.

 

For many widows with children, Father’s Day creeps up and pounces on us. Sometimes we just anticipate it with dread – more glaring evidence of what we have lost. Everyone (not just widows) tries to celebrate the day in some meaningful way, trying to honor that special Dad. Newspapers and television ads are filled with things we are meant to buy, sentiments we are meant to feel. There is so much pressure to ‘honor” our loved one properly, even when they are alive, but no one seems quite sure how to go about doing so.

 

We have tried a variety of different activities on Father’s Day. Things my husband would have enjoyed: bike rides in the park, planting a shrub in the garden, an IMAX movie downtown, a steak on the BBQ. The day has become less sad, held less meaning as the kids grow and have adapted to their life with only one parent. But with each passing year, Father’s Day becomes less and less volatile.

 

The kids have almost passed the period in elementary school where presents are being made in class. And if they are, the kids have adapted. Presents have been awarded to grandfathers or other men of importance in their lives at the time. I considered last year a kind of breakthrough when my son, still in elementary school decided to participate in his class’s annual Father’s Day craft project. When the day arrived, he presented his gift to me saying, “since you are pretty much like our dad as well as our mom, this is for you.” It was the compliment of a lifetime, and reminded me how far we had all come.

 

This year will be our eighth Father’s Day without a father to honor, and again, it will likely be passed with very little fanfare. In other years I have felt guilt for wanting to ignore these events, making up for it by forcing a celebration with trips to the beach, riding bikes, making Mickey Mouse pancakes – pretending that our family was still whole, pretending that my husband could still appreciate these efforts. It was my son who finally reminded me of the pressures I was putting on all of us when he asked, “Why do we always do all this stuff on Father’s Day when we don’t even have a dad?” I thought we had been doing it to remember him, but I realized that really I was doing it because I felt like I had to. My efforts were stressing me out and doing nothing to help us remember Arron, let alone honor him.

 

Instead of pancakes and bike rides and beach trips one day every June, I realized that all it takes to celebrate Father’s Day is for me to recognize one of my husband’s goofy expressions in our daughter, or his familiar glint of mischief in the eye of our son and laugh saying, “you look just like your father when you do that!”

 

That way every day is Father’s Day.
 

* * * *
By guest writer, Abigail Carter. View more of her essays at www.alchemyofloss.com ^[2] and learn more about her at www.abigailcarter.com ^[3].

Fathers & Sons

Today I'm going to visit my Dad and celebrate Father's Day a day early.

My son won't be joining me because he is out of town visiting his girlfriend.  Even if my son were here in town, I would still be emotionally torn on Father's Day.

My Dad is still alive and our family is lucky and blessed to have him. But my son's father, who was also my husband, died nine years ago and the celebration of Father's Day makes me feel guilty and conflicted. Guilty because my father is alive and his isn't.  Conflicted because I want to make my son and my Dad happy about this day but I can't.  I know, I know, life is never fair but I wish my son could have had more time with his father when his father was in better health.

 

The memories that hold true for my son of his father involves hospitals, doctor's offices, medicine, and constant badgering from me to get his father to do the things he needed to do to stay healthy.  My son was too young at the time of his father's good health to truly remember the Halloween outings, Christmases, beach vacations and other fun times we did have as a family.  There are lots of pictures to remind him, but that's not the same.

 

 

I can't change that for my son but I still wish for it.

I've asked him about his feelings when Father's Day arrives and he just quietly says he doesn't like to watch other people with their fathers. That's probably the understatement of the century. He also says that he forgot that this weekend was Father's Day. Right. When he does see fathers and sons together, I know his mind starts to wander and he thinks about how it might have been different for him if his Dad hadn't gotten sick and died when he was 13-years old.

And that makes me feel bad even though I have no way to change the situation.

So full of guilt, I go visit my Dad and hang out with him for awhile and wish I could make things different for my wonderful son who deserves to have his healthy Dad with him today.
 

Widowed Fathers Reaching Out

I know a few widowed mothers and have great respect for how they handle the role of single parent.

I don't know any widowed fathers so I have always been curious about how they juggle the demands of raising children and handling their work careers. 

 

I imagine that a family member helps them; maybe a mother, a sister or even a brother.  Or maybe the fathers had already hired someone to help them when their wives sadly became too ill or were weakened by treatments.

 

But after reading the insightful New York Times story below, I found that widowed fathers and widowed mothers essentially struggle and try to deal with the same issues: school, bed time, personal responsibilities and housekeeping.

 

 

At the end of the day, it is not possible for one person to physically and mentally juggle it all.  It takes a lot of support to parent your children and take care of your broken heart all at the same time.  And it's okay to admit that.

 

You are not SuperParent.  You need help.

 

Asking for help doesn't mean you are weak.

 

Asking for help is a sign of good mental health.  It means you recognize that your efforts are not changing your situation the way you thought it would and something different needs to be tried.

 

Asking for help is a sign of strength.

 

It doesn't feel that way when it is happening but it's true.

 

I am always in need of help.  Many times I would call my grief counselor and my voice would be shaking and my hands would be shaking and I would try my best to keep it together but it wasn't happening.  Sometimes I couldn't even put together a simple declarative sentence.  All my words would come out in a jumble.

 

It's hard to put yourself out there when you are most vulnerable and in need of kindness and support.  And as a single parent, you feel you have to be strong for your children and show them the way to go.  I'm always asking other parents what's going on with their children and then telling them something that is going on with my child to see if a particular thing is common to them. 

 

"Well how did you get them to eat that?"

 

"What time does your child go to bed?"

 

"Have they asked about blankety-blank yet?"

 

Please read this great New York Times story below focusing on widowed fathers and the wonderful way these guys handled their unexpected situations:

A Lifeline for Widowed Fathers

By JANE E. BRODY

April 22, 2013/The New York Times

Three springs ago, Joe Ciriano was living in a fog. He had just lost his wife of 21 years to breast cancer. He was now the sole parent of a son and three daughters, one with Down syndrome. The children, ages 6 through 19, all had different needs and levels of understanding.

Mr. Ciriano, 51, an accounts manager in Burlington, N.C., was riddled with doubts about his ability to carry on as a single parent and was struggling to keep his head above water. While deeply mourning his wife, he was unsure of how good a parent he could be.

“What is normal?” he wondered. What should he say to the kids about their mother? How should he treat them? Could he handle his family and do his job?

With no one to share day-to-day family responsibilities and decisions, and to help fill both his and his children’s emotional and physical needs, life felt “overwhelming,” Mr. Ciriano said in an interview.

Then something wonderful happened. He and Karl Owen, a 49-year-old software engineer from Chapel Hill whose wife had died, of lung cancer, three weeks after Mr. Ciriano’s, were asked to form a support group for fathers widowed by cancer who had children at home.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Donald Lee Rosenstein, a psychiatrist, and Justin Michael Yopp, a psychologist, weren’t sure how openly these men would talk about their feelings and struggles. But the researchers saw a pressing need to help them and their children through this trying life experience.

Too often, they’d found, widowed fathers contend with social and emotional isolation — a profound aloneness — and suffer in silence.

“I’m not a support-group kind of guy who wants to talk about touchy-feely kinds of things,” Mr. Ciriano said. But finding himself “lost at sea,” he was willing to give it a try.

The result has exceeded all expectations. The eight widowed fathers who formed the core group, led by a professional facilitator, quickly learned that their feelings, doubts and concerns were shared by all and offered one another insights and suggestions on how to cope.

“All the men were exhausted and suffering a crisis in confidence, fearful of screwing things up,” Dr. Rosenstein said. “They faced countless daily issues — school problems, struggles with discipline, bed times, expectations and a tendency to let things slide a little, which really doesn’t work well for kids.”

Mr. Owen said in an interview: “A lot of things that seemed abnormal in our lives were common to the other guys in the group. Someone would bring up a situation, and the rest of us would nod, ‘Yeah, me too.’ These issues were very difficult to discuss with friends who hadn’t been through a similar experience,” said the father of two children, who were 9 and 12 when their mother died.

 

“We were all in a place in our lives we hadn’t prepared for,” he said, “and collectively we could share experiences and help each other navigate.”

Participants in the group developed a remarkable bond, a level of friendship and sharing that is rare among men, who even now are expected to be strong and resilient, and many of whom still avoid talking about deep feelings and doubts.

Three years later, four of the men continue to meet monthly and have benefited so much from the experience that they are reaching out to help other fathers newly widowed by cancer.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rosenstein and Dr. Yopp, who said they could find no similar support groups for widowed fathers, are trying to get others started at cancer centers around the country. They would like to conduct a formal study to determine “what is most helpful and what isn’t to these men,” Dr. Yopp said in an interview.

Ideally, he said, every major cancer center would have a support group for widowed fathers, whose experiences and needs are different from those of widowed women and older men. (More information about how the group works can be found at singlefathersduetocancer.org.)

Cancer is responsible for more widowed fathers than any other cause of death, Dr. Rosenstein and Dr. Yopp noted in an article in the journal Psycho-Oncology. An estimated 100,000 children are living with widowed fathers in the United States, and the trauma of losing a mother at a young age can seriously disrupt a family’s structure and the children’s development, sometimes with lifelong consequences, they wrote.

“There is a pressing need to understand the experiences of these widowed fathers and to develop supportive interventions for them and their children,” they said.

I can attest to the value of such support. I was 16 and my brother was 12 when our mother died of cancer in 1958, leaving my father emotionally, physically and financially drained by her yearlong illness.

To stay afloat, he worked two jobs and had little time to enforce routines and discipline at home. I soon departed for college, and my brother was left to cope on his own with the devastating loss of our mother at so vulnerable an age.

“Men traditionally do not play the role of the more nurturing parent; therefore, as widowed parents, fathers may be less likely to employ child-centric or nurturing parenting styles and more likely to feel unprepared than widowed mothers,” Dr. Yopp and Dr. Rosenstein wrote.

They said various studies had found a clear “link between the mental health of the surviving parent and the adjustment of the parentally bereaved child.”

A major issue for widowed fathers, Dr. Rosenstein said, is providing parental consistency with love and understanding. Good parenting requires structure, clear expectations, well-defined limits and reasonable consequences.

“What I’ve seen happen a lot is the former family order melts away and no new order is put in place,” the psychiatrist said. “This can be tough for kids, who feel cared for when there are limits and consistent discipline.”

The trauma of a young mother’s protracted death from cancer can be exacerbated by the patient’s understandable wish to live as long as possible for her family, Dr. Rosenstein added. These women often choose aggressive therapy until the bitter end, missing the comforts of hospice care and the opportunity to express their love, wisdom and wishes for the family.

In an online survey conducted by the two researchers, nearly half of 144 widowed fathers said their wives had had no chance to say goodbye to their children.

Daddies Day





Here's a big shout out to all of the wonderful men out there who love and provide for their beautiful children.  If your Dad is no longer alive, I hope you tell funny and sentimental stories about him today or think about the special things you did together.  I'd also like to give some recognition to the fantastic men who continually reach out to the children who need a Dad in their lives.

Father's Day is a celebration of all Dads and all of the important emotional and material contributions they make for the good of their families but it is a day full of contradictions for me.  My wonderful father is still alive but sadly my son's is not.

I think my son handles this incredibly well and I think his father would be very proud of the young man he is today and is still becoming.  It has been a journey of ups and downs but on the whole he deals with his emotions in this area better than I would if I were in his shoes.  I don't know what it feels like to be a guy so it's hard to know exactly what boys need.  Yes, all children need love but I remember reading in a book about boys that at a certain age their fathers need to help them cross that emotional bridge over into the male world because listening to your Mom just doesn't cut it with the guys.  I guess if your Dad isn't there to do that for you then your male friends do it for you.

Talking about what Father's Day means to my son is a mixed bag.  He says he remembers his Dad but sadly a lot of his memories are filled with hospitals and uncertainty.  My son has a photo album filled with pictures from happier times but he was very young and remembers only bits and pieces.  We know that his Dad could have made smarter health decisions but at a certain point you can only do so much.  It is hard to watch other fathers and sons interact because it makes me wonder what it would be like today if my husband was still alive and healthy.  I often wonder what it would be like if my husband were alive, but Father's Day seems to really drive home the point.

My husband subscribed to the idea of working hard and playing hard and eventually the effects of that lifestyle caught up with him.  He had been in and out of the hospital for two and half years before his death and when he died our son was thirteen, a vulnerable age in the best of times.  My son and I talk honestly about this subject because I believe it is better to talk about your thoughts than to keep them to yourself.  Ignoring the anger, frustration or anxiety only makes it worse.

Today also reminds me how much my husband loved being a father, not only to my son but to his four other children who are all so very special.  I think he tried to make sure that all of his children felt his love for them and that they knew how precious each of them was to him.  He did have a silly side that he was not afraid to share with them, playing word games and making up funny nicknames for them.  But there was also another side of him that he showed only if you didn't do something you were supposed to, such as work hard in school.  It was then that you entered the "no bullshit zone" and he used something they all call "The Voice." You can imagine what that sounded like.  My father's version of the "The Voice" was pursing his lips and giving you "The Look." 

Today I see glimpses of their father in all of them and it's a beautiful gift that always makes me smile.  He was definitely a father from the old school and that meant that work got in the way of spending time at home many more times than the children liked.  But that happens to many fathers, including my own, and I understand why.  Men define themselves through their work; it is what keeps a roof over their families' heads and it is what bonds them to other men.  In the case of my father, he held down three jobs to generously provide for his six children and I still can't figure out how he did it.

To my Dad, I say thanks for showing me the value and rewards of hard work and living life passionately.  Also a big thanks for being the kind of Dad who let me and my siblings drink our cereal from a glass, sleep on top of the bedspreads, spend summers at the beach, pay for our parking tickets and make us feel totally loved and cherished.  You're the best!!!!!

Happy Father's Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!