Histories, Futures, and Fathers
Before the grays started coming in, there was a good bit of red in my beard. I can only assume it’s from my mother’s side, people of Scottish heritage. This ancestry was only revealed to me whilst investigating for some kind of essay in middle school. I found an associated coat of arms and tartan. Naturally, all of this fascinated me to a large degree. As a young adult I even considered a tattoo, but it ultimately didn’t feel right, and I ended up with a different, indelible mark of tradition: a marine corps tattoo on the arm with which I shoot a rifle. Our kin even have a small castle, although I’m not sure what current ownership looks like. My ancient and verifiable heredity gets me a free visitor’s pass through its halls and across its grounds. I will probably never capitalize on it. Not many pictures of it exists, and it seems to be rather in disrepair. No more wars to fight, nothing left to defend. No more honorable history worth preserving.
As is American tradition, I do not carry this name, but my father’s, one which seems to originate from Holland. While my wife’s family is enthusiastic about familial history, neither of my sides have much cared for it. To speak of dead relatives, and most of the living ones, was something that simply didn’t happen. I do not know if this is an iteration of a larger trend, or if my family is an outlier. To be wholly ahistorical feels like being unmoored in the fog. I know absolutely nothing about my father’s family outside of a single aunt and uncle. No Ellis Island dates, no pictures of homelands. I couldn’t even tell you when they first came to our home state.
Names, I believe, still carry meaning so long as the son inherits the burden of his father’s sins or accomplishments. For all of my adult life, I have ran from the specter, wary of the same pits and misdeeds my father was prone to. I spent fifteen years attempting to define my life in direct opposition, which is still a shackling. What what a thing or person entails is also, in part, defined what what it is not.
Before the possibilities of forgiveness and reinvention became apparent to me, my idea of fatherhood was, primarily, to be the man my father was not. Again, tying myself to something despite wanting to be rid of it. It took many years of life and of experience and of good marriage to see that there’s no need to stand in shade when the sun is shining brightly. That I could take a name given to me and make it my own, that I could build a foundation of remembrance that was worthy of building upon.
Now, as I delight in the prospect of fatherhood growing closer, my wife and I discuss baby names. At the top of both (rather short) lists are family names. Names which have seen wars and sharecropping and turns of the centuries. Good and bad times alike. Honorific and hardy names. The thought of naming a son after myself was surreal when my wife first suggested it. Will I have built something worth standing on? Or, more deeply, could I raise a son proudly in my own image?
Forgiveness finally found its way to my father, though he insisted he needed none, having done no wrong. I left whatever remained between he and God and thus rid myself of further thought regarding it. His name is now mine. I have scraped its rust and greased the joints, and will bring to it new life.