Sins of the Father
The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son a thousand times. Of all the false echoes and random bits and pieces of broken verse and mangled axioms that were sunk into my head long ago by an Episcopal Sunday school teacher, this one was far and away the most ominous. I'm confident that some version of the line found its way into a Clint Eastwood movie or two, and was muttered grimly by Clint immediately after hawking out a black stream of tobacco juice, and just prior to putting a bullet between somebody's eyes. The sins of the father... good God. I have lain awake a few nights thinking about that one. My own father is a good and just man but he does have a dark side, not so dark as some but darker than others. I was never privy to all his misdeeds, but from the stories he told, his had been a wild and reckless youth. Maybe some payback was coming my way and I didn't even know it.
And since I became a father myself, it has certainly crossed my mind a few times that the karmic residue and spiritual echoes that pass from father to son are nicked and scarred by every wrong turn and error of judgment the father has made. Think of it. The average American male, if he is like me, has committed a long list of earthly sins by the time he passes thirty. He has suffered weaknesses of the flesh. He has coveted. He has experimented with chemicals. He has lost his way and dabbled in mayhem and debauchery, not to mention run the gamut of the big seven: Pride, Gluttony, Sloth, Envy... but full disclosure is not the point. What matters is the child's perception of sin, and how it's formed.
This seeped into my thoughts again the other day, when my eight-year-old son asked me what I wanted for Father's Day, a holiday that always smacked of bullshit to me, particularly the giving of neckties and aftershave. It struck me that maybe I ought to consider what I leave behind for my kid, other than a legacy of vice and transgression. I sat down to give the notion a sober mulling over and realized I could not rightly say from whence that line came, and in what context. Turns out it was Exodus 20:5, in sort of a preamble the Lord gave Moses before handing down the Ten Commandments. According to my King James edition, "...I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon their children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." And it was just nine chapters earlier that God essentially put out a contract on every first-born child in Egypt, and this after a nightmare plague of locusts. The Lord was wrathful in those days and made no bones about it.
Don't mistake me. I love the Bible, and never tire of reading it. There's fantastic and disturbing stuff in there and, as a writer, every time I flip through the good book I come away with a handful of nasty story ideas. And I feel like I have a pretty healthy relationship with God as I understand him, but I have trouble defending his actions in those early books, and it seems beyond crazy to me that video games are slapped with a parental advisory but the book of Exodus is taught in Sunday school to small, impressionable children who are still learning to untangle the images of Santa Claus and God and John Lennon and their own fathers in their heads.
And that's where the business gets sticky. Because in that hot Mississippi church classroom, where the teachings of the Bible echoed like hammers against the walls, the words God and Father were made interchangeable in my tiny little skull. God is the Father, and He made the world in his image...Father, why hast thou forsaken me? The thunderous quotes are endless. Boil it down to this- I remember being literally scared at church, while Bill Cosby, America's most loveable TV father, famously warned one of his misbehaving children, "I brought you into this world, and I'll take you out." The realization that you have the power of life and death over your child, literally and psychologically, will drop you in your tracks. Or anyway, it should.
My son is eight years old, named Elias, which is Greek for Elijah, who was fed by ravens in the wilderness. He is my favorite creation, and one of the few creatures on the planet able to shatter me with a sideways glance. I was divorced from his mother almost six years ago. She and I were married too young and poorly suited for each other, and had not been happy for a long time. Since then, his mother has remarried a nice guy and they seem happy, while I was lucky enough to find and marry an amazing woman who restored my belief in love. And now Elias has four parents to ferry him safely through childhood, which I have to believe is a good thing.
I wouldn't try to sugarcoat divorce. I had some brutal days as a lost father, especially in the early going. I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles up and down I-5 to visit Elias on weekends. I've spent countless Friday nights hunkered down in a sour-smelling motel room watching Nickelodeon with my senile German shepherd guarding the door while Elias jumped maniacally back and forth between the beds, and he and I have eaten way too many meals that came from menus with illustrations. But we have also had hundreds of conversations that we might not have had otherwise, because those conversations get lost sometimes in the domestic blur of so-called normal American life, and in the past five years I have watched the boy turn into an incredible little person, his own being. He is a happy and thoughtful child, scarily imaginative and whip smart and most amazing of all, brimming with confidence. He is a boy who is respectful and kind, and sometimes I think that's the best you hope for.
One stark memory, though, stands out bright as glass in the sun. On a cold Saturday morning, so early the sky was still purple, I arrived at my ex-wife's house to pick up Elias for his first league soccer game. His uniform was red and black and his hair was tangled from sleep. He was restless, nervous. He stomped around in the tall yellow grass in the front yard as I tossed his gear into the car. Then his mother came out with a camera and said she wanted to get a picture of the boy before his first game. She aimed the camera at him and he scowled, as if by instinct.
His mother sighed and said, "Can you please try not to look like your father, for just a minute?"
I look into the boy's eyes and I see myself. I wonder if he will be me. I wonder if he will share my pathological obsession with baseball, my passion for language. I wonder if he will be dodgy with numbers and irresponsible with money. I wonder if he will cool in a crisis. I wonder if he will be loyal, brave in a fight. I wonder if he will have a tendency to get into car and bike wrecks. I wonder if he will be tone deaf, if he will continue to break his left wrist every other summer. I wonder if he will have a weakness for sugar. I wonder if he will stink up the joint when faced with a standardized test. I wonder how old he will be when he first has his heart broken by a girl. I wonder if he will be a cynic, or a sucker for romantic comedies. I wonder if he will tell corny jokes. I wonder what as yet invisible genetic predispositions I may have cursed him with. I wonder if he will smoke cigarettes, if he will be prone to insomnia or headaches. I look at my son and wonder what sort of man he will be. I wonder if he will have to pay for my sins.
-will christopher baer, july 2003