This Sunday we celebrate Father’s Day. For me it will be a somewhat bittersweet day. My father passed away nearly 27 years ago, but I am blessed to be a father to two exceptional sons and a grandfather to three wonderful grandchildren. As the patriarch of our family unit, on Sunday I’ll spend some time reflecting on my father’s impact on my life and how the role he played as my father influenced how I would subsequently play mine.
Like many men of my generation, my relationship with my father was complex. After he died, primarily through a number of conversations with my mother, I began to learn and understand that, in many ways, his relationship with his father was similar in its complexity to mine with him.
His father was a man of notable proportions. In 1904 he was one of the first graduates of Southwestern Louisiana Technical College, the forebearer of our University of Louisiana – Lafayette. For a time he was the principal of the high school in Carencro. He served in the U.S. Army in France during World War I. In the late 1920’s, he was the County Agent for Lafayette Parish and was the person responsible for escorting Hebert Hoover, then U.S. Interior Secretary, throughout the parish in the aftermath of the Great Flood of 1927. He owned a feed and seed store in downtown Lafayette. He also served one term in the Louisiana Legislature in the 1940’s. He was also a successful farmer who amassed considerable property holdings during and after the Great Depression. He was a very learned man who read all of the great works of literature many in their original languages of Latin, Greek and French. Undoubtedly, he cast a large shadow when viewed from the eyes of his only son, my Dad.
My father had confided to my mother his admiration and awe of his father, but also that he always felt burdened with the feeling that he could never measure up to his father’s stature and expectations. My Dad’s father was a great provider. He was a well-respected and accomplished man, but he was not one who openly displayed affection or was complimentary or encouraging to his son either as a child or as an adult. That just wasn’t done in those days.
My Dad learned plentifully from his father as do all sons and daughters. Much of what he learned provided him with the aspiration and motivation that drove him to succeed in his later adult years. But, he was also left burdened with some heavy baggage.
Similar to his father’s legacy, my Dad cast a large shadow in my life. He was born in 1917 and, I’m sure, influenced by his father, he grew into a very erudite man. He served in the Army during World War II seeing action in both the Pacific and European theaters. He was also stationed for a time in Puerto Rico where he met and courted my mother. After the war, he worked as a salesman, a sales manager and, after his father passed away in 1964, he assumed the role of manager of our family’s farming operations. In my early years, I remember him not being home a lot due to the travel demands of his job, but some of my earliest memories were of our glorious weekends. Dad would be home and he would play classical music on our Hi-Fi. I would often sit on our living room floor at his feet as he read aloud the plays of Shakespeare or would recite passages from the works of Aristotle, Plato, Kipling, Walt Whitman, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, Dumas, Byron and T.E. Lawrence to name a few. Those weekends opened my eyes to the treasures of literature and poetry as well as the wisdom of the great sages of human history. As his father had passed onto him, my father gave me great and lasting gifts that have served me well throughout my life, but also, as his father had, my Dad also passed on to me some of that familial baggage.
Though not openly demeaning, my Dad had a way of making you feel like you were never quite measuring up to his expectations. It was the baggage that he carried from his father and he couldn’t quite let it go once he became one. He was not a nurturer. From my childhood through my adulthood, he seldom, if ever, complemented me or my siblings on our accomplishments yet was quick to point out our failings. The three most cherished words a child can hear spoken by a parent, “I love you” never emanated from his lips. Some years after his death, I heard from a number of his old friends that he had often told them of how proud he was of all of his now grown children, but he couldn’t share those feelings with us. His baggage wouldn’t let him.
When I became a father, like all other first-timers, I had no idea what I was supposed to do or be. There was no instruction book or on-the-job coaching available. I didn’t know for certain what influences, positive or negative, I would have on my children’s lives and I had no idea what or who they would ultimately grow into as adults. What I did know was that all parents deeply touch the lives of their children and pass onto them things that will affect them and their children. In contemplating my role as a father, I didn’t dwell so much on how big a shadow I might cast on my boys. I worried about what baggage I might leave for them to carry .
From the first moment God anointed me with fatherhood, I vowed in solemn prayer that none of my children would ever thirst for the words “I love you!” They would be showered upon them. To this day, every time we speak or see each other there is an exchange that includes a hug, a kiss, and those three treasured and empowering words, “I love you.”
I make no claim to the moniker of Ideal Dad–far from it. My early years of career obsession and my inherited baggage of having difficulty in revealing my deepest feelings or emotions negatively impacted my performance as both a husband and a father, but I did succeed in losing at least some of our family’s generational baggage. I discarded forever the absence of the ability to speak often and with true feeling those three powerful words that are needed in all families and, dare I say, today especially, are so needed to be spoken throughout our troubled world. “I love you!”
So, this Father’s Day as I think of my Dad, I’ll remember the many wonderful things that he imparted to me and how they have helped to shape the man I have become. In reflecting on his inability to express those three words I so desperately craved, I will not blame him. He was a product of both his and his father’s generation. They were burdened by that baggage.
Now, as I near the end of my road and look back on my life, in retrospect, perhaps the greatest gift my father gave me was the awareness of that baggage. For I believe it was that awareness that allowed me early on to commit to losing that baggage; to abandoning and leaving it behind somewhere along my path of life. As such, today it is lost to any further generational attachment.
My two sons are grown today. They are men of integrity and good character. I consider them my greatest asset and achievement. I am proud that they will carry our family name into the future. My shadow only casts up to them and not over them.
This Sunday, as it has always been and will always be, my lips will convey what abounds in my heart – those three simple yet beautiful and powerful words, “I love you.” While that won’t much different from any other day, what will be different is that, on Father’s Day, I’ll not only be speaking them as an expression of how I feel , but, in a sense, for my Dad and for his father who burdened by the now lost baggage, could not say what they truly felt.
If there is any immortality to be had among us human beings, it is certainly only in the love that we leave behind. – Leo Buscaglia
Have an AWE-full Father’s Day Weekend!
William “Bill” Bacque