I've always wanted to have a lot of kids. My mom courageously bore six of us, eight if you count the two that miscarried. I always try to remember them, too. Growing up with so many of us was like having my own little group of friends. That's not to say we didn't have real friends over. Hardly. But we grew up so emotionally close to each other that the need for outside friends was dampened. I honestly can't imagine having any fewer than eight kids, be they my own or adopted as my own. Six would be the bare minimum. Eight might just do it.

For how much I want to have kids, I've not particularly felt the urge to hurry up and find somebody to marry so I can start a family. I've always felt that God knew the best timing, and while the desire grows stronger in me to find someone to share my life with, I know that now is not the best time. I haven't even started college yet, a prerequisite for me. I havn't been to half the places or done half the things I mean to before I marry. And I know that I'm not yet mature or gentle enough to be trusted with someone else's heart. Not yet.

Ever since dad left two years ago, though, the desire to have a son has burned even stronger in me. Sometimes, I feel as if the time cannot past fast enough. I want to get married. I want to be a good husband, a good father. Maybe the uncertainty of not knowing if I'll be a good husband and father or not spurns me to at least do it, for good or for ill, and stop my worrying. Loosing my dad drove home the importance of being a good father, not only of having kids but also of being there once I'd had them. I've always felt that children are a blessing from God, but they are also a responsibility unlike any other. My father never modeled to me what good fathering looked like. So, I have always reasoned, how am I to know what it's supposed to look like? Talking to adults whose father was negligent, abusive, or absent, however, has changed my mind, as they have all indicated otherwise. Apparently, it seems as if not having a father may actually open your eyes wider than everyone elses to a child's incredible need for a father. And paying closer attention, you can catch yourself falling into bad habits of neglect and commit yourself to change.

Part of the reason I want a son so badly is that my heart still hurts. I still yearn for a father. Though my days of childhood are drawing to a close, I feel as if loving my son as my father should have loved me would heal me in some way. While I can never have the father-son relationship I wanted as a boy, maybe as a father I can still have that meaningful relationship with my son. For my boy to say, "I love you, daddy," or smile up at me would mean the world. My life would be complete. I would have brought happiness and guidance to a young soul during the most critical part of his life. Tell me, if you can, what ranks in greater importance than that? And not only would that smile be heaven's sign of a job well done, it would also heal my heart like nothing else could. Hugging him, kissing him, crying over him, holding him--maybe I could feel some peace in giving what I never received.

In a poem I wrote a year or so ago, I talk about my dreams as being stars in the sky, and of two in particular: my beloved and our child. I write as if under my old baby blanket that, with its many holes, lets the bedroom light stream through. Married to each ray of light, I imagine there being a dream being "drempt once and whispered in a single moment | But living free, eternal—-wiser than the ancient strokes of time." I go on to say, in speaking of the dream of my boy:

Here--another figure, a babe beside her, sleeping.
He's so young, far younger than youth,
Tall-Stander of Beginnings,
Lingering yet among the lillies of Ellysium a moment more,
With a silence waiting to be broken. And I wish it broken,
     Firstborn Dream,
And that you'd wake to the world, take a first breath,
Then look with opened eyes and meet my loving gaze--
That in a father's tears that fall upon your face,
I might christen you with love and with a smile
That welcomes you, oh dear wanderer of the fields of inexistence,
Into a life that is your own, from now until your dying day.

And I promise you, the first thing I'm doing when I hold my baby boy is bursting into violent sobbing. My tears will be bittersweet, bitter with the memories of my childhood and of a father who would not love me, but sweet in the assurance that my boy has a brighter future than I ever had. I will throw a week-long party, and there will be wild, ecstatic dancing, loud music, food, and drink. All my friends will come and dance with me to celebrate "my pride, my joy," as celtic artist George Donaldson of Celtic Thunder sings of his son.

To ever reach the point where I am prepared to marry my beloved and have a child, I know I first have to deal with the issues between me and my father, at least continue working through the pain in my own heart. Part of me wants to call my dad and tell him I want to meet sometime. What if he or I were to die tomorrow? I don't want our relationship to end where it is now. Not that I have the power to change it into something better, but that I seek a level of reconciliation that is in my power to bring about if I am up to it. I haven't spoken to him or seen him in nearly two years. His shadow has started to hold me back from living my own life. I've let myself stay in grief-mode when I need to push myself out, get up, and challenge myself again like I used to. I've had a lot of time to process my childhood, to think about what happened, and grieve. It's time, I think, to talk to him and tell him I forgive the things he did. It's time to move on.

I feel ready. But first, I want to stand on my own two feet, so that when I do meet him, it is with my own strength, with my own tanates, that I come. I want to develop friendships with people, drive myself places I want to go. I want to go on trips to distant places. In a way, I want to start showing the signs of success. I want to break old bad habbits, I want to love my family more dearly, and live life more passionately. Then and only then can I have the inner strength to know that regardless of the outcome of our meeting, my future is secure. I'm going to be okay. Maybe then I can have the strength to calmly sit down to lunch with a father I have not seen in so very long and speak openly and unreservedly.

The truth is, I've started to pity him. He's lost everything--his family, his friends, the community we had, the old farm. What else is there to loose but your soul? None of us are speaking with him, besides my little brother who has visitation and therefore no say in the matter. From what I hear, he's living with his old, neurotic mother in her house, waiting for her to die so as to inherit what remains of her hoarded wealth. I pity his frailty. Since he left, he's become gaunt and lost a lot of weight. He looks weak and old, though he was a former wrestler and is only fifty-four. I pity his inability to get what he wants. He has this idea that money will solve all his problems, and yet in the pursuit of money, everything has fallen through his hands. His time's running out, and I'm not sure if he'll ever realize that he missed the greatest opportunity for happiness--and that he destroyed it. I pity him for not having a better childhood himself. His father led a similar life to my dad's--selfish, self-absorbed, egocentric, passive, distant, proud, and greedy. That is perhaps the greatest weakness of my father's side of the family--their greed, their totaliarian methods of obtaining it, and their self-justification. And look at where it has led them? What I do not pity about my father are the choices that he has made every step of the way not to change. He has had fifty years of wake-up calls and refused to listen to any of them. His present state of existence is of his own making--not anyone elses. He has no one but himself to blame.

Looking at my father's sad history of failures and tracing it back the family tree, I see in my father's bloodline characteristics I do not want to inherit. Greed. Pride. The inability to change. I don't want to be the third generation of this sick, withered family tree. I don't want to be my father's son. I want to be a different kind of man. I want to cherish my family. I want to follow my heart, wherever it leads. I want to make a difference in people's lives. If that means living simply, without a dumptruck load of money, then so be it. All I want is to live a simple life in communion with family and friends, in fellowship with nature and my Creator, and in humility, knowing that my days are numbered, my breaths few, and that the time I have on this earth has been given to me that I might better the lives of my fellow man, my wife, my daughters, my boy. For me there is no greater creed than this.