1922
Owen, my paternal grandfather, proposed and his wife to be accepted. They went to a portrait studio and sat for their engagement photo. Of four proofs, this is the one they chose.
They got married and began to scrape a hard life out of the sage brush of central Utah. She bore 12 children and became angrier as she worked harder every year and as her husband’s deafness became more profound. We call it depression today, but they called it contrariness back then.
I know little about what either one of them thought about parenting, or if they thought about it at all amid the sheer exhaustion. His view of himself and his role as a father was defined by his religious tradition, which designated him as the patriarch, the family revelator, the spiritual leader of numberless progeny.
1965
The eighth child of the couple above became my father. He married mom in 1965. The two unhappy looking children in the photo are the children she brought with her from a previous marriage, which ended badly, and none too soon.
Here they are standing outside the building where they had just been bound together in holy matrimony for time and all eternity. Of course, on that day, they thought they could do it—could love each other for that long. She might have known better than he did some bit of the truth about how hard it was going to be.
Nine months later, to the day, their twins were born and the man became the father of four when he was younger than I am now. About his perception of fatherhood and himself as dad, I know only that he felt inadequate to the task despite the certainty with which he embarked on that journey in 1965. You can see the confidence in his stance
He was unreasonably severe with those first two. Not abusive, but utterly dictatorial. I don’t know how to account for this as I don’t think that was the parenting style that was practiced on him. By the time I came along, in 1967 when the twins were not quite two (!), he had mellowed considerably. I don’t know why he changed or how his thinking adjusted, but he “cut his teeth” on my older siblings. They remind me of it regularly.
It was not a happy marriage. They endured it and one another for our sakes. To this day I’m glad they did, but if I could go visit the couple in 1965, I couldn’t bring myself to ask them to do it.
1989
The fifth child of that hopeful couple, thirty four years later, set out upon the same journey that countless others had made before. Like everyone does at the beginning, he thought he could do it better than those who ran before.
See the boy. See the girl. See the optimism and certainty untempered by experience. I look at him with a mixture of pity and embarrassment. Pity because he’s just beginning to make choices he will carry for the rest of his life at a time when he is least qualified to make them. Embarrassment because he’s too dumb to know that he doesn’t know. If I could go back and talk to him…nothing I say could would make any difference. She expected—and deserved—better. That’s one thing I know for certain.
As a father, he sees himself as somewhere in the middle. Not as great as many men he knows, but not as bad as some others. He wonders whether he had any business siring five as a mere mortal. He’s beginning to suspect that he doesn’t know much at all and that maybe he never will. He has not yet come to terms with that truth.
Maybe I’m just in a funk, but to my mind the three photos and the three dates are united by a common thread: a belief certainty in the faces. It’s an expectation, almost as though they believe that they are entitled to marital happiness since each was marrying someone they presumably loved, that life owed them that much at least, if nothing more. It’s mildly tragic, really: that we start on that yellow brick road with such optimism that feelings of disappointment and of having failed in some way are inevitable.
When Girl 16 gets married (in 10 years or so), and I sit them down to tell them, “Marriage is damn hard and you won’t always be happy,” they’ll look at me like I’m prematurely senile because the words will not convey the lessons that they can only learn through their own experience. She’ll pat my head and say, “Thanks, dad,” and they’ll leave, rolling their eyes.
Only many years later will she realize that I and William Wordsworth had it right, with apologies to the bard for the modification:
For I have learned
To look on marriage, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.
Share This
This is him last July 4th when he was Boy 3. After watching everyone else to make sure they didn’t go up in flames, he got up the nerve to try a sparkler for himself. I approached the candle. His hands moved toward his ears and hovered there, his feet tapping out his anxiety. I lit it. His hands slammed over his ears. I held it out to him. His feet bobbed up and down in place and he found the courage to pull one hand from its ear. He took the sparkler and realized, “I can do scary things and not die!” The camera caught him at that moment of insight. 
