Googling myself, finding Father's Day 2006

I don't think I posted this here last year, but for those who didn't know, last Father's Day I served as Worship Associate and delivered 1/3rd of the sermon. Here's the text of what I said, in tribute to Garvin (since I was in a bit of a nesting snit and kinda blew off Father's Day this year).

Fathers of the Future
A Homily by Ahmie Yeung
Sunday, June 18, 2006

West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church
Rocky River, Ohio

In counting my blessings, which I try to do on a fairly regular basis, the constant presence of a strong male role model in my childhood is, unfortunately, absent from that list. I, like too many of my generation, was raised by a single mother struggling to do her best with little societal support. My father left us for another woman when I was two years old, the same age my own child is now, which is why there wasn’t a picture of my father in that slide show – while searching for an appropriate one of the two of us to use, I found plenty of my cats but none of myself with my dad.

The realities of growing up without much involvement from my biological father have had many varied effects on the person I’ve grown to be, not the least of which is an irresistible urge to growl and snarl when I hear self-righteous politicians talk about “defending marriage” and “strengthening families” by denying the status of “marriage” and “family” to people based on the genders of those involved. Nothing they’re proposing would have stopped my dad from walking out on us. Nothing they’re proposing makes my own husband a better father than he already is.

With the decisive lack of positive male role models in my gene pool, I was left to seek elsewhere for the kind of guidance that I felt an inner need to obtain. I was not raised as a regular church-goer, so I don’t have any wonderful stories of someone like Wayne here stepping into that role and guiding me through the rough patches that I weathered. I did, however, have some absolutely wonderful male public school teachers. In a typically female-dominated job of elementary teacher, I was blessed with the presence of three men who, for the years I knew them, filled a whole in my life during the daytime hours that went far beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. Mr. Koester, my 6 th grade teacher, has the honor of a spot in the slide show tribute during our offering today, for being a positive role model of not just a male caring for and teaching children, but also as a spouse. Mr. Koester was the husband of the school’s physical education teacher. Watching the two of them interact - in their joking manner somewhat reminiscent of our own Bill Pearson’s humor – as he’d pop in to say “hi” during PE classes throughout my 6 years at North Star Elementary in Colorado, and then in my final year when she would occasionally be waiting for him in the hallway at the start of lunchtime, showed me a way of families working together that has shaped my own relationship with my husband nearly 2 decades later. I also honor and remember Mr. King, to whom I wasn’t assigned, who took me into his class’s embrace when one of his students, a friend of mine, was killed by a drunk driver in 5 th grade. His kindness started to heal my torn young soul, though it didn’t stop me from pouring every drop of alcohol down the drain when I got home. He listened when I spoke of the pain and fear I had that something like what happened to my friend’s family could happen to my household, where I only had my mother in the surrounding hundreds of miles. I see similarities of spirit between Mr. King and Jeffrey Lee, in the way he always leaves anyone he speaks to feel heard.

So, where has this lead me? Well, for a long time it lead me to really ignore the third Sunday in June as just another date on the calendar, sometimes in the last decade of couplehood remembering to send off cards to Garvin’s father and my own. Father’s Day really didn’t become a solid concept for me until two years ago, when Garvin got to celebrate his first Father’s Day as a dad before I got to celebrate my first Mother’s Day as a mom, since Liam was born between the two marks on the calendar. When I was young, I worried that I would follow the usual trend and marry someone like my opposite-gendered parent, but looking at my husband the similarities between the two men, my own father and my son’s father, are extremely limited – they’re both English-speaking men who married in their twenties and had their first child at the age of 27, and both of them are fond of science fiction and modern technology gizmos. But the similarities pretty much end there. Believe it or not, it actually wasn’t until I started thinking about what could I, someone who grew up with an absentee father, have to say in front of a church on Father’s Day, that it dawned on me. I did marry my surrogate opposite-sex parent. I married a teacher. May he go on to teach his own students, and our son, much more than just the information covered in their textbooks. Our own children, and his students at school, couldn’t ask for a better role model.