I spent Father’s Day with the youngest of my three post teen-age sons. It was a warm, lazy, quiet afternoon spent trying to decipher which musical note was exactly right, for a song I have been trying to compose most of my adult life.

It was a beautiful day, spent in an artistic endeavor with one of my up-and-coming young men. Babies birthed as boys, which I have spent two decades perfecting into men.

My son played his piano and the notes wailed melodically in the heavy afternoon air, gently stirring thoughts about fatherhood and men. I thought about long ago males who spent their time, languishing in the arts; honing their senses, placating their feelings, suffering through anguish, only to one day produce a labor of pure love.

I thought about the similarities between the devoted single mothers, the masters and their masterpieces.

Had I really turned my boys into men? Men like those of long ago, replete with human hearts and angelic, sometimes sinful souls? Did I truly know what to do and say, in all the right places, where a father should have been? Will any of my son’s own children be able to spend Father’s Day with them? Will my sons be anything like the father that I had longed for them to have?

I spent Father’s Day motherly fathering the music of my parental soul.


By Julie Ann Richter

Labels: Julie Anne Richter

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