Tomorrow is Father’s Day. One of my favorite days and a day I will take off to enjoy with my grown son, (my daughter lives in Australia), reflect in gratitude on the absolute gift that being a father has provided me and to spend time remembering my father. Patrick Hannon passed 16 years ago and I think of him often and seriously wish he were around today. He was the example of what being a man looked like.
As one leg of the early sixties typical “Nuclear Family”:
· He was the absolute epitome of honor and integrity and every day I watched through young developing eyes, listened with a keen innocence and learned so much just from how he showed up.
· His commitment to himself, his family, his church and his community was unquestioned. He never had to say a word. Everybody just got it.
· When times were tough, he just dug in deeper and with increasing determination until his obstacle was either overrun, gone around or gone underneath.
· I never heard him whine about how he deserved this or that and how he wasn’t getting it handed to him. There was nothing he felt entitled to and he worked for everything he had.
· I never heard him raise his voice or saw him raise his hands to my mother. They were married some 36 years before my mother passed in 1982.
I strive to honor him every day with my own actions in how I show up for both my children and for my woman.
“Thank you Dad for showing me what it takes to be a man so I could raise strong and wonderful children.”
Here’s something you can do: (do not make the mistake of underestimating its value ) It is called the “Thank you Dad” exercise, as introduced to me by Justin Sterling:
· Think back on something your father taught you. It could be as simple as when he taught you how to use a rat tail file to widen a hole in a table top, or how to tune up your car or anything else that made an impact on you. So for example: Thank you Dad for showing me how to use tools because today I have a garage full of them and you awakened the fun and excitement of crafting something from nothing.
· You may not be able to come up with anything good to say. Maybe your father was abusive or he left you when you were young. The “Thank You Dad” exercise would look like this: Thank you Dad for leaving when I was a little boy. It taught me that I do not have the right to leave my own children and so they will never have to experience the pain I felt when you left.
· So this can be done either way, or both. As fathers do, they always leave some kind of impression on us that is a learning opportunity for how we navigate our own world today.
I would love your feedback!! I thoroughly enjoy and read all emails. Even the few that are critical…there is value in all of them. menstantracircle@gmail.com .