Fathered Five

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I come from a long line of amateur writers, apparently. I have written narratives from four grandfathers, the oldest five generations back: my great, great, great grandfather, George Whitaker. He emigrated from England in the 1840s to join members of the new American religion he had just joined, then helped blaze a trail through the wilderness to what became the state where I now live. He got married and fathered his first child somewhere between Council Bluffs, Iowa and Fort Laramie, Wyoming.

His grandson, William Henry, scraped a living out of the dry ground in central Utah and raised a gaggle of children. He was a writer, too, leaving many pages of handwritten text about his life experiences. He was given to visions and other spiritual manifestations. He herded sheep and had a special hatred for them. From him I learned if you’re out in the bush among a scattered herd of sheep and want to bring them together, make a loud noise. The dim creatures will look up, realize they’re alone, and will rush together in a panic. I’ve tried it. It works. I also learned from him that turkeys are so stupid, they’ll gaze up into the sky during a rainstorm and drown. I haven’t been able to try that one. He was right about the sheep, but I’m a little more skeptical about the drowning turkeys.

I know their narratives—they worked hard at preserving those. But what did they think about? When they pondered their children, if they did, what did they dwell on? Curiously, they did not write about their children or about the experience of being fathers. Why is that, I wonder? William Henry mentioned his grandchildren occasionally with some affection, but that’s it.

I would be willing to wager that neither of these men wondered what it meant to be a good father, nor worried about whether they were succeeding. Survival was a full-time job, and it probably never occurred to them that their children might need more of their time and attention.

I suppose being a good father meant making sure there was food on the table and a roof over their heads. That’s true today, too, but the role has expanded considerably. To be a good father today, men have to provide those things but also fulfill the emotional needs of their children. When George Crane (another great x2 grandfather) came home at night after negotiating tension between Indians and Mormon settlers, I doubt very much that his young children children looked to him as a playmate and demanded his attention.

George Whitaker and William Henry had an entirely different set of concerns than I have today. Just think about some of the things that weren’t even part of their vocabularies, much less their daily stress:

• Meth
• Credit cards
• School shootings
• Barney
• Terrorism
• Pornography
• STDs
• ADD / ADHD
• College tuition
• Teletubbies

They struggled against nature: a drought or early frost were very dangerous threats, not just to their lifestyles but to their very lives. My struggles are against culture: how to protect kids against Madison Avenue and the message of Fergie and the Pussycat Dolls. The chances that we’ll starve or die of exposure or in an Indian uprising are small to none. About the same chance that George Crane’s children would go to a party and become addicted to Meth. He ran no risk of losing a child to a kid gone Halo in school. On the other hand, I have no fear that I’ll lose a child to a mountain lion. He was more likely to lose his home in a fire than in a sub-prime mortgage crisis. These are fair trades, I suppose.

Unfortunately, the writing habit ended with my grandfather. I know nothing about what he thought, and little about his life. My father wrote long letters, but few of them survive and he didn’t write anything else. When I die and go to wherever dads hang out in the afterlife, I’m going to ask them all what they thought about fatherhood. And I’m going to get in my dad’s face for not writing.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.