Behind a Shield: Seeing My Father for Who He Was
A Father's Day Reflection
As children, we give our fathers and mothers special status. For better or worse, they hold power over us. We’re vulnerable to and with them. We’re shaped by them, whether we conform to their expectations or actively diverge from them. Even if they’re been absent, they have an impact.
I didn’t have a close relationship with my father. We saw the world very differently. But in my younger years I enjoyed spending time with him. I remember the smell of his workshop, our garage: the scents of motor oil, dirt, dampness, and the distinct odor of metal. And the images of it: those banged-up trash cans to my right as I walked in, next to the big overhead door, open in warm weather, closed in cold; half of the two-car bay empty but for tools and stuff lying on the cement floor, the other half occupied by an old truck I’m sure he tinkered on for years, a truck I don't think I ever saw run. The room was lit by fluorescents and natural light filtered through dusty windows onto cracked pegboard walls holding tools over a workbench with its jars and coffee cans of unsorted screws, nails, and bolts, and my father’s breakfast beer, fizzing by the radio speaker. It was a bit like Sanford and Son, but without the catchy theme music.
One day in that garage, he told me about his work in a tone that made clear he had no love for it. “I crawl into a hole and stare a light all day. Then I come home.” He was a welder. And on weekends, he found ways to put his main vocational skill to use at home. He had a welding machine at home and would use it to patch up old cars and I’m not sure what else. The first time I saw him welding, he warned me, “Don’t look at the light—you’ll go blind.” He reached into a tool box. “You have to look through this,” he said, and gave me a piece of glass like the one in his face shield, so black I could see nothing through it at all. But when he started working again, I saw the glow, still intense but not painful, and a shower of sparks. This was the light he focused on for hours on end, mending ships and submarines at a job he disliked to support his family. All this time staring at a bright light surrounded by the absolute darkness.
I think Sunday mornings were one of my father’s favorite times. I would wake up in the room I shared with my older brother to the sound of hateful, self-righteous, angry sermons. Dad favored Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Vernon McGee, and their voices echoed down the hall from the kitchen into my room. My father turned the volume of the radio or TV up high so he could hear it wherever he went in the house. Many Sunday mornings he wasn’t even in the house when I woke up, but he had the sermon on so he could hear it if he stepped inside from the garage where a second radio or TV blared the same broadcast. I really hated that sound, but somehow it comforted him.
He had good reason to wear that shield when he was working, so he wouldn’t be blinded or burned. It offered real protection. And the sermons he studied also shielded him, severely restricting his view of the world. Both at work and at home, he saw world through a very dark lens.
Fatherhood is complicated. Labels and archetypes add layers and nuances of expectation that few of us can live up to fully. I was well into my thirties when I first understood—really understood—that my father was just a person. He judged himself harshly. He loved his children fiercely. He worked hard to support his family. And he tried to live up to the expectations he believed the world had of him. Shaped by his own upbringing—by parents who were themselves just people; by his limitations, real and perceived; and by his faith, rooted in 'fear of God'—he did the best he could.
