Des Downunder On Sundays

By Desmond Rutherford | Adelaide, Australia -- A Father's Love

So, today it's Father's Day in many countries. Hmm. I might want to skip that thought, but I think that someone should say something kind about fathers. That's probably not me, or Freud, or anyone who has experienced the love of a Holy Father.

Let's not get too far involved in that. My own father was a terrific bloke (Aussie for “guy”).

He was never home, of course, as he was in the merchant navy, and loved the life of the seafarer. When he was sixteen and sailing a windjammer through a storm around the Cape of Good Hope, he wrote to my mother that, “a dry bed is just a wet dream.” His literary sense had great effect upon me. It wasn't until much later that I would learn that a wet dream was better than a dry bed, at least for a few moments.

My mother had been raised by her mother, with instructions from old Hollywood romantic movies in the 1930s, just in time for the talkies. She was Olivia de Havilland to my father's Errol Flynn, Vivian Leigh to my father's Rhett Butler, a Hollywood Princess to my father's heroic wet daydreams.

Like most Hollywood romances, it ended in divorce. My mother could not cope with dad's hobby, other women. So, at the ripe old age of two years, I was effectively fatherless except for my grandfather and my mother's suitors. The one she chose, to be my father figure, was an Eddie Fisher lookalike. Their marriage seemed fine until my grandfather died. That was when the Eddie imposter became a stand-in for 'the cruel step-father' and started to get physically violent with my mother, every night.

My mother, of course, divorced him; talk about living in a dysfunctional movie, I had it all, except for sexual abuse. In hindsight, that is somewhat inexplicable, because I was to learn some years later, when I was nearly 30, that my evil stepfather went to live in a relationship with my God-father. For some reason I began to mistrust gods and fathers.

Back in my teens, I was busy discovering that it was probably not a good idea to divulge my own sexual desires to my mother. Those were the dark days of homosexual persecution by the law which we can now see forced the majority of us into clandestine promiscuous encounters thereby avoiding suspicion. During my father's visits I never saw him long enough to talk to him about sex. In any case, I think he already knew all about it. It was patently obvious to me that I had inherited my father's desire to share the damp results of puberty. Only the objects of our affections were different, even if equally abundant.

I would see him every five years or so. He too, was happily getting himself divorced, nearly as often as his ships would berth. I think he was trying to over-populate the planet with as many women as he could marry. Eventually he would retire to his parents' house, and invite me to go searching for heterosexual encounters with him in the Australian outback, in his newly acquired trailer van. I declined. I never told him about my sexuality, but I suspect he would have accepted it.

When I was fourteen my mother was well on the way to fulfilling the Hollywood obligations to marry at least three times. She was always a beautiful bride, and adoring mother to me. This time she married the local butcher, a kindly gentle man who didn't like to stay up late. I told mum that she married him for his meat. We both burst out laughing.

They have all passed on now, but the guidance within me is not due to some replacement father figure from a bronze age superstition, or a Freudian psychosis, or a stepfather, or some teacher I found attractive. Nor was it a paedophile's lust, or a boyfriend who resembled a Hollywood hunk. No, it is none of these.

I had someone though, who was more valuable to me than any father figure I could imagine. When nearly sixteen, a man three times my age became my guide, my soul mate, eventually my lover and always my liberator. He loved me enough to patiently awaken my mind to the questions life poses, and then encouraged me to search for my own answers, to my awareness of being alive. Here was the essence of Greek love as Oscar Wilde described it from the dock and I was lucky enough to experience it. It was a heritage from generation to generation, a legacy as old as Mankind. As natural as the evolution of our species.

This is, of course, diametrically opposed to most religions' answers to life. In a sane world any god is not a replacement for a father, as is so commonly encountered. Religious fathers, whether a god or a priest, can never be more than an extension of human cultures' desires for conformity, our own immature longing for someone else to give us the answers, that we should be aware enough to seek for ourselves if we are truly to be who we are. We need more than just being inquisitive about life, if we are to realise our humanity.

My mentor opened the doors of my mind to a sensitivity for life's potential; to look for its myriad questions, without hindrances of irrational beliefs. No father can really do that whilst he is acting as his child's shield from harm. A father must provide protection for his child, teach him survival, and having given him life must then trust that his child will find the mentor who will free his individuality, and potential to unconditionally respect and love life. That mentoring is the way we discover our empathy for each other, and same sex love is the sane sexual expression of our compassion for each other. The Ancient Greeks knew this, nature knows this, and we in our era have yet to realise it, practice it, and praise it, instead of misconstruing it as that psychotic and most harmful of human lusts, paedophilia. The test is that lust forces itself upon, and imprisons the object of its desire, it wants to possess the other person, whereas true love seeks to liberate the beloved, whether the lovers remain together, married, or apart for life, divorced like my parents, who loved each other until the day they died.

Fathers who protect and love their children enough to grant them the freedom to learn, without indoctrinating them to conform to conventional traditions, deserve this day of thanks, respect, and love. They have accepted that their children are that part of themselves which becomes, and fulfils, unfettered life aware of itself, free to discover the wonder and grandeur of the variations in reality and love.

Happy Fathers' Day.