In memory of my father, Arturo D. Tolentino, Jr.
March 15, 1932-October 10, 2004
He was still with us when I wrote this.
AS A BOY I was into the habit of comparing fathers.
It must have started during my early years in school, lasting up to my late teens or early twenties. From elementary school essays and grossly exaggerated schoolyard boasts, it led to the more critical comparisons of adolescence, a time when the hand of authority was somehow firmer, yet the basis of authority somehow flimsier, with the man himself dislodged from his pedestal in the eyes of a once adoring son.
In many instances it was discovering what he was not. From being the very symbol of authority, the last word, the person who was always, always right, he became the man who understood little, the magnitude of his seeming mistakes and inadequacies only underscored by his stature during earlier days.
“Why isn’t Daddy tall?” I asked my mother once, many years ago.
I was then bothered by my height. I just wasn’t as tall as I wished to be.”He just isn’t. No one in his family is.”
“Why didn’t you marry someone tall?” I then asked.
At that point my mother simply laughed.
Daddy simply isn’t.
That was something I learned when I was still very young, a realization that would time and again be reinforced in the years that followed—the fact that there were many things that my father never was and would probably never be.
The pattern is familiar, a story repeated across cultures from one generation to another. At first he was everything—father, protector, teacher, provider. Whatever he was, he was what his son wished to be—doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect, soldier. The years, however, erode the myth of infallibility, and the man becomes all too human. The comparisons, perhaps, come unavoidably.
Consciously or otherwise, the habit of comparing fathers was something most of us indulged in then, just as others probably do today. It was perhaps at its strongest during high school and college years when the thirst for independence and freedom brought either the hand of authority or the wave of tolerance upon a restless youth. In many instances, “Honor thy father” gave way to “Fear they father.” Disillusioned hearts sought greener pastures. Sons sought better fathers.
Fathers varied from one family to another, and from son to son. Some helped their sons with school projects; others played ball games or went camping, hiking, even hunting;
Some were always around somehow, spending time with their families; some gave their sons advice, taught them how to drive or ride a motorcycle, how to pick coconuts out of a tall tree, how to fight. The comparisons, at times, brought envy.
One day, however, way back in high school, I was jolted by the sight of a friend in tears. With his face all red as he sat by the staircase, we wept like a baby before everyone—for the failing marks he received, for fear of what his father, in his rage, might do.
Stunned by the sight, I could just look on, never really having known that kind of fear.
That day, perhaps, I should have simply been glad for all those things my father never was, things by father never did.
IT SEEMS SO MUCH SIMPLER with the girls, as fathers seem more protective aqnd yet more tolerant with their daughters than with their sons.
From friend to disciplinarian, a father’s role with his son isn’t always very clear. At times the problem lies in knowing where one role ends and another begins. The strange relationship between father and son almost seems to hover between unity and distance, swinging from one emotion to another, from pride to disappointment, and evolving from one stage to another amid the complexities that stretch the ties between the “men” of the family.
Different intentions and emotions make the relationship pass through certain difficulties, and the competition surfaces sometimes. Both father and son play a game of catch-up, with the son catching up to the measure of his father, the father catching up with what he believes his son believes him to be. In certain cases, it’s the father catching up with old dreams, old ambitions, his own quest for immortality through his son.
“It’s all in them now,” one father said to another in a conversation about their children.
Their dreams in their children now, yes, in their sons.
A few years back, a distant relative I had not seen for quite some time remarked on how much I resembled my father. It was like seeing a younger version of the man, a carbon copy.
Similar remarks are often passed in casual conversations on fathers and sons. Somewhere, a proud father points our how his grandson not only looks like his son, but has the same temperament, the same stubbornness and immovable poker face.
“Now you know what it’s like,” he tells his son.
From one carbon copy to another.
One father I knew had mostly sons for his children, seven or eight of them. Silent and unsociable, with sharp eyes and a stiff jaw, he was a man who seldom smiled. His own sons seemed very much the same, just younger versions of their father.
It would appear that some fathers wish their sons to be better imitations of themselves. It’s the burden of the son to make the cut, the frustration of the father t see his son going a different way.
Disagreement bares the competition, the power struggle that at times exists between the two. It eventually comes to a point where father no longer knows what’s best.
A friend during my college days once spoke derisively of his father. Recounting how the man had offered some advice on relationships with women, the apparently disillusioned son scoffed.
“Don’t I already know those things?”
Fatherly advice that perhaps came too late.
Disillusioned sons and rebels are not all that uncommon, and at times the differences between father and son explode in the political arena, with conflicting sides pitting son against father, the liberal against the conservative.
The son finds his own direction. Spitting out the admonitions of the father, he goes ahead with his desires in pursuit of happiness and freedom, of his ideas and ideals. He questions the assumed wisdom of the generations, and he challenges authority. Conflict then erupts.
During such times, when the bitterest of words have been exchanged, as the son finds his independence trampled on, his wishes quashed, he turns against his father, this man who had fed him, sheltered him, educated him, this man who was once so great. He thinks of his friends and the fathers that they have. The good times vanish from memory, the feel of that special relations they had both felt at one time or another, as he bites his lip and swallows hard, in the silence taking in the message in his father’s eyes.
“Whatever I may be, whoever I may be, you’re stuck with me.”
The message leaves no room for doubt; there’s just no such thing as trading fathers.
WALKING IN ONE AFTERNOON on a young father and his three-year-old so, I heard an exchange that simply made me smile. After many futile attempts to get his son to eat, the young father unleashed what was supposed to be the clincher: a threat used successfully before—to hand the boy over to a new father.
“Would you like that?” he asked.
The boy shook his head but still wouldn’t eat.
“Would you like a new Papa?”
Again the shaking of the head. Still the boy wouldn’t eat.
“You’d like a new Papa then?” the young father asked, this time with a sense of finality.
“Yes,” the boy answered.
A moment later came the spanking.
At some point we all probably stop to ask ourselves just how our lives might have been, how we might have turned out had fate handed us a different father, had we been born into a different family.
As a child I hardly knew my father. He was then the busiest of persons, holding two jobs to support his family, going to law school in the evening later on. We would see him only late at night, perhaps have a glimpse of him as he relaxed in front of the portable television in his room. When he finally had the time to spare, the distance had already been established. For the most part he was simply the figure of authority.
I was already in my tees when I began to really know the man. Long conversations and weekend trips helped the process along. The complexities of the relationship began to surface, the competition, with one “man” trying to outdo the man of the family—trying to get his own way, trying to prove his independence.
The disagreements and the disappointments came, and as they did I looked around, still playing the game of comparing fathers.
One day I saw how a friend put his arm around his father before all of us, his friends.
“My father,” he said with apparent pride.
And beside him his father smiled, a short man, a stout man, dark and rather balding.
Another time I listened as someone talked his own friends out of some mischief for fear of his father’s wrath.
I noticed how the son of one military officer hardly spoke or smiled, how he never even cracked a joke in the presence of his father.
The comparisons went on and on, from childhood to my late teens and early twenties, then it must have simply died a natural and quiet death. Perhaps there was just not more use to it. There was no more point.
Along the course of comparisons I must have reached that stage where I came to accept my father for what he is and what he isn’t, for his good points and despite his shortcomings, bearing no resentment for his absence during my early years and for all those things I never got—which, I eventually realized, I never really needed.
Despite the difficulties and the disagreements, it had worked out after all.
Somehow I never got to try making out a list of all those qualities I’d look for in a father. Or of all those things I’d expect from one. I guess further thought would have only made me see that after eliminating all those qualities and acts I never actually needed or wanted, I would end up with the father that I’ve had all these years.
The same one, in fact, from the long lost days of comparing fathers, when we never even bothered to find out if fathers themselves were comparing sons—and feeling just as we were.
AS A BOY I was into the habit of comparing fathers.
It must have started during my early years in school, lasting up to my late teens or early twenties. From elementary school essays and grossly exaggerated schoolyard boasts, it led to the more critical comparisons of adolescence, a time when the hand of authority was somehow firmer, yet the basis of authority somehow flimsier, with the man himself dislodged from his pedestal in the eyes of a once adoring son.
In many instances it was discovering what he was not. From being the very symbol of authority, the last word, the person who was always, always right, he became the man who understood little, the magnitude of his seeming mistakes and inadequacies only underscored by his stature during earlier days.
“Why isn’t Daddy tall?” I asked my mother once, many years ago.
I was then bothered by my height. I just wasn’t as tall as I wished to be.”He just isn’t. No one in his family is.”
“Why didn’t you marry someone tall?” I then asked.
At that point my mother simply laughed.
Daddy simply isn’t.
That was something I learned when I was still very young, a realization that would time and again be reinforced in the years that followed—the fact that there were many things that my father never was and would probably never be.
The pattern is familiar, a story repeated across cultures from one generation to another. At first he was everything—father, protector, teacher, provider. Whatever he was, he was what his son wished to be—doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect, soldier. The years, however, erode the myth of infallibility, and the man becomes all too human. The comparisons, perhaps, come unavoidably.
Consciously or otherwise, the habit of comparing fathers was something most of us indulged in then, just as others probably do today. It was perhaps at its strongest during high school and college years when the thirst for independence and freedom brought either the hand of authority or the wave of tolerance upon a restless youth. In many instances, “Honor thy father” gave way to “Fear they father.” Disillusioned hearts sought greener pastures. Sons sought better fathers.
Fathers varied from one family to another, and from son to son. Some helped their sons with school projects; others played ball games or went camping, hiking, even hunting;
Some were always around somehow, spending time with their families; some gave their sons advice, taught them how to drive or ride a motorcycle, how to pick coconuts out of a tall tree, how to fight. The comparisons, at times, brought envy.
One day, however, way back in high school, I was jolted by the sight of a friend in tears. With his face all red as he sat by the staircase, we wept like a baby before everyone—for the failing marks he received, for fear of what his father, in his rage, might do.
Stunned by the sight, I could just look on, never really having known that kind of fear.
That day, perhaps, I should have simply been glad for all those things my father never was, things by father never did.
IT SEEMS SO MUCH SIMPLER with the girls, as fathers seem more protective aqnd yet more tolerant with their daughters than with their sons.
From friend to disciplinarian, a father’s role with his son isn’t always very clear. At times the problem lies in knowing where one role ends and another begins. The strange relationship between father and son almost seems to hover between unity and distance, swinging from one emotion to another, from pride to disappointment, and evolving from one stage to another amid the complexities that stretch the ties between the “men” of the family.
Different intentions and emotions make the relationship pass through certain difficulties, and the competition surfaces sometimes. Both father and son play a game of catch-up, with the son catching up to the measure of his father, the father catching up with what he believes his son believes him to be. In certain cases, it’s the father catching up with old dreams, old ambitions, his own quest for immortality through his son.
“It’s all in them now,” one father said to another in a conversation about their children.
Their dreams in their children now, yes, in their sons.
A few years back, a distant relative I had not seen for quite some time remarked on how much I resembled my father. It was like seeing a younger version of the man, a carbon copy.
Similar remarks are often passed in casual conversations on fathers and sons. Somewhere, a proud father points our how his grandson not only looks like his son, but has the same temperament, the same stubbornness and immovable poker face.
“Now you know what it’s like,” he tells his son.
From one carbon copy to another.
One father I knew had mostly sons for his children, seven or eight of them. Silent and unsociable, with sharp eyes and a stiff jaw, he was a man who seldom smiled. His own sons seemed very much the same, just younger versions of their father.
It would appear that some fathers wish their sons to be better imitations of themselves. It’s the burden of the son to make the cut, the frustration of the father t see his son going a different way.
Disagreement bares the competition, the power struggle that at times exists between the two. It eventually comes to a point where father no longer knows what’s best.
A friend during my college days once spoke derisively of his father. Recounting how the man had offered some advice on relationships with women, the apparently disillusioned son scoffed.
“Don’t I already know those things?”
Fatherly advice that perhaps came too late.
Disillusioned sons and rebels are not all that uncommon, and at times the differences between father and son explode in the political arena, with conflicting sides pitting son against father, the liberal against the conservative.
The son finds his own direction. Spitting out the admonitions of the father, he goes ahead with his desires in pursuit of happiness and freedom, of his ideas and ideals. He questions the assumed wisdom of the generations, and he challenges authority. Conflict then erupts.
During such times, when the bitterest of words have been exchanged, as the son finds his independence trampled on, his wishes quashed, he turns against his father, this man who had fed him, sheltered him, educated him, this man who was once so great. He thinks of his friends and the fathers that they have. The good times vanish from memory, the feel of that special relations they had both felt at one time or another, as he bites his lip and swallows hard, in the silence taking in the message in his father’s eyes.
“Whatever I may be, whoever I may be, you’re stuck with me.”
The message leaves no room for doubt; there’s just no such thing as trading fathers.
WALKING IN ONE AFTERNOON on a young father and his three-year-old so, I heard an exchange that simply made me smile. After many futile attempts to get his son to eat, the young father unleashed what was supposed to be the clincher: a threat used successfully before—to hand the boy over to a new father.
“Would you like that?” he asked.
The boy shook his head but still wouldn’t eat.
“Would you like a new Papa?”
Again the shaking of the head. Still the boy wouldn’t eat.
“You’d like a new Papa then?” the young father asked, this time with a sense of finality.
“Yes,” the boy answered.
A moment later came the spanking.
At some point we all probably stop to ask ourselves just how our lives might have been, how we might have turned out had fate handed us a different father, had we been born into a different family.
As a child I hardly knew my father. He was then the busiest of persons, holding two jobs to support his family, going to law school in the evening later on. We would see him only late at night, perhaps have a glimpse of him as he relaxed in front of the portable television in his room. When he finally had the time to spare, the distance had already been established. For the most part he was simply the figure of authority.
I was already in my tees when I began to really know the man. Long conversations and weekend trips helped the process along. The complexities of the relationship began to surface, the competition, with one “man” trying to outdo the man of the family—trying to get his own way, trying to prove his independence.
The disagreements and the disappointments came, and as they did I looked around, still playing the game of comparing fathers.
One day I saw how a friend put his arm around his father before all of us, his friends.
“My father,” he said with apparent pride.
And beside him his father smiled, a short man, a stout man, dark and rather balding.
Another time I listened as someone talked his own friends out of some mischief for fear of his father’s wrath.
I noticed how the son of one military officer hardly spoke or smiled, how he never even cracked a joke in the presence of his father.
The comparisons went on and on, from childhood to my late teens and early twenties, then it must have simply died a natural and quiet death. Perhaps there was just not more use to it. There was no more point.
Along the course of comparisons I must have reached that stage where I came to accept my father for what he is and what he isn’t, for his good points and despite his shortcomings, bearing no resentment for his absence during my early years and for all those things I never got—which, I eventually realized, I never really needed.
Despite the difficulties and the disagreements, it had worked out after all.
Somehow I never got to try making out a list of all those qualities I’d look for in a father. Or of all those things I’d expect from one. I guess further thought would have only made me see that after eliminating all those qualities and acts I never actually needed or wanted, I would end up with the father that I’ve had all these years.
The same one, in fact, from the long lost days of comparing fathers, when we never even bothered to find out if fathers themselves were comparing sons—and feeling just as we were.
