carlespiemaryalice

Every few years “Father’s Day” falls on the day the man who claimed to be my father and the man I will forever loathe, murdered my mother. The year 2007 and now 2012 are such years. Imagine the irony. This year, as I do on every June 17^th, I mourned my mother’s death and as I usually do on “Father’s Day”, I did not even think of the man who was my biological father [someone I never met or knew anyway].

This year, however, I will not only mourn the death of my mother but I will ponder fatherhood — as I may or may not have demonstrated it. Three of my four children have denounced me because I have denounced the religion in which their mother and I had actually raised them. How twice ironic: Father’s Day is the day the “father” who raised me murdered my mother and I raised my children — as their father — in such a way that they do not honor me on Father’s Day or any day for that matter.

In either event, I accept the agony of this life as partly the consequences of my own doings as well as this is the nature of life on “God’s” planet, Prison Earth. I enjoyed being father to my children; I love them  and miss them. Nonetheless, fatherhood, like motherhood, is a phenomenon that receives too much credit and too much blame and as in other aspect of this life, we work with what we have at the time and do the best we can.