A father is a rumor of the world.
A father bears before his children’s eyes the whole weight of the responsibility of the silence of history.
A father is caught between the tenderness of children and the terror of the world.
It is not at all uncommon for a son or daughter to get to know his or her father in later years as a tender, frightened man who pretended to be neither.
The fathers who remove themselves from relationship with their children until their children are no longer infants or toddlers but already little separate people often do so out of fear of activating their own envy of what very little ones can claim by right of entitlement. These removals are a complex amalgam of abandonment and protection.
Fatherhood is many lifetimes, many commingled lifelines in the making.