I also hope my children will see, not a man attempting to replace their childhood through the next generation, but a father still capable of learning. Grandfatherhood should not become an improved performance staged in front of adult children as evidence that I finally understood the part. It should include them rather than bypass them.
Whenever somebody asks me to name my favourite song, I usually answer Cat’s in the Cradle. I do not have to think about it for very long, although perhaps I should. There are songs I enjoy listening to more, songs that lift me more readily and songs that have accompanied happier memories, but Harry Chapin’s story has remained lodged somewhere deeper than preference. It is not merely a song I like. It is a song I recognise, and recognition is not always a comfortable experience.
Calling it my favourite song may be a little like naming the instrument with which one would prefer to be operated upon. There is admiration involved, certainly, but there is also pain. The song does not soothe me so much as locate something I would sometimes rather leave undisturbed. It reaches into the untidy space between the father I wanted, the father I tried to become and the father I now fear I might actually have been.
That is the danger of certain songs. They do not remain outside us as entertainment, politely waiting for us to press play. They move in, rearrange the furniture and begin opening cupboards we had intended to keep shut. Cat’s in the Cradle has been doing that to me for decades, and it has never once offered to pay rent.
The song is often described as being about a father who is too busy for his son and then discovers, too late, that the son has learned the same habits. That is true, but it is also too neat. Life rarely divides itself so conveniently between neglectful fathers and disappointed children, with a moral available before the final chorus. Most fathers who are absent are not sitting somewhere congratulating themselves on their absence. Many are working, worrying, recovering, failing, rebuilding, separating, providing, pretending or simply trying to survive the day without allowing anybody to see how frightened they are.
I knew something about wanting time with a father before I knew anything about being one. My own youth contained spaces where fatherhood might have been more present, although I did not always possess the language to describe the absence. Children do not usually conduct emotional audits of their parents. They simply notice who is there, who is not and whether it is safe to ask why.
The boy I was learned to occupy himself. He disappeared into rooms, books, radio programs, songs and the elaborate worlds that a mind can construct when the world immediately outside it feels less inviting. He did not necessarily call himself lonely because loneliness can become normal before a child knows it has another name. He simply became capable of being alone, which is not quite the same thing as choosing solitude.
There is a competence that grows from that sort of childhood, but it is a competence with sharp edges. A boy who learns not to expect attention can become a man who takes pride in not needing it. He can also become the sort of father who believes love is proved by making sure nobody else ever has to worry about the things he worried about. Food on the table, a roof overhead, school expenses met and some form of future being constructed can begin to look like the entire job description.
Provision is love, of course. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise, particularly when one has known the anxiety created by its absence. The difficulty comes when provision becomes the only dialect in which love feels respectable enough for a man to speak. A father may be saying, “I love you,” through every long hour at work, while the child hears only the sound of the car leaving again.
I became a father while still carrying the unexamined experiences of being a son. Nobody issued a warning that the unresolved parts of childhood would come with me. There was no inspection at the entrance to parenthood where an official checked the baggage and suggested that some of it might be dangerous. I arrived with my ambitions, my fears, my ideas about masculinity and my determination that my children would have things I had not had.
I wanted to be dependable. I wanted to be the person who could be relied upon when circumstances became difficult, because circumstances had an annoying habit of becoming difficult. I wanted my children to know that their father would find a way, even when I had no idea what the way might be. In becoming the man who could find solutions, however, I may also have become the man who was perpetually occupied by the next problem.
There were financial pressures, professional pressures and the ordinary stresses of trying to build something stable while life remained determined to move the foundations. There was divorce and the inflicted loss of time that comes with it, a loss that cannot be discussed honestly by pretending it was entirely voluntary. When a family separates, the calendar becomes an instrument of authority. Days that once belonged naturally to family life become allocated, negotiated, exchanged or simply missed.
It is possible to accept responsibility for one’s failures without claiming responsibility for every consequence. That distinction matters, although guilt is rarely interested in distinctions. Guilt prefers a simpler story in which every missed afternoon, every separate Christmas, every conversation not held and every moment witnessed by somebody else can be entered beneath one name. It is an efficient accountant, but not a particularly fair one.
The time lost through divorce was real, regardless of who was at fault for which part of the collapse. A father does not recover those ordinary hours merely by explaining why they were taken from him. The children still grew on the days he was not there. Their lives continued in rooms he did not enter, and stories accumulated in which he was not always a participant.
There is a particular grief in knowing that the lost moments were not necessarily dramatic. They were not all birthdays, school presentations or major events whose importance was obvious at the time. Many were the apparently insignificant minutes from which family intimacy is actually built: the conversation in the car, the complaint about dinner, the question asked at the wrong moment and the silence that might have become something if a parent had waited long enough. History records the ceremonies, but relationships are usually made in the gaps between them.
Even during the time available to me, work had a way of entering the room. Building a practice was not a hobby pursued after the important things had been completed. It was the mechanism by which the bills were paid, the future was protected and a sense of identity was maintained. It was also a hungry mechanism, and hungry things rarely announce that they have had enough.
Banks Consultancy was not built merely to produce tax returns or financial statements. It was built around four pillars that became an expression of how I believed professional life should operate. We would speak in the client’s language, reduce tax legally, drag people kicking and screaming towards compliance when necessary and behave like a silent partner in their business. These were not marketing phrases pasted onto a wall and forgotten. They became obligations I carried into almost every client relationship.
The trouble with becoming a silent partner in other people’s businesses is that silent partners still worry. They wake at inconvenient hours considering problems for which they are not technically responsible. They see danger coming and feel compelled to shout, even when the client would prefer reassurance. They begin carrying the consequences of decisions made by people who may be sound asleep while the adviser remains awake.
There was always somebody who needed an answer. A client faced a cash-flow crisis, a tax deadline approached, an employee problem emerged or a business owner had ignored advice until the situation became urgent enough to transfer the panic elsewhere. The work was rarely malicious in its demands. It simply arrived one legitimate emergency at a time, and legitimate emergencies are difficult to refuse without feeling that one has failed.
I did not build the practice by treating people as transactions. I built it by caring, and caring is not easily switched off at five o’clock. A client’s business might represent their home, marriage, children’s schooling and entire sense of worth. It was never just a set of numbers to me, which made it difficult to place the file in a drawer and return calmly to whatever conversation had been interrupted.
The children could wait because they were safe. That may be one of the most dangerous sentences a loving parent can form. The client could not wait because the tax office had issued a notice, the bank was threatening action or payroll had to be processed. The child’s request seemed less urgent because childhood itself appeared to stretch indefinitely ahead.
Children do not generally arrive waving notices with payment deadlines. Their needs are less administratively efficient. They ask a question while you are reading something important, want to show you something when you are already late or begin speaking when your mind is still trapped in the meeting you have just left. Because the need is emotional rather than commercial, it can be postponed without an immediate penalty.
The penalty nevertheless arrives. It is simply charged later, often with compound interest. By the time the invoice becomes visible, the child may be an adult and the father may be sitting in retirement wondering why the account feels impossible to reconcile. There is no deduction available for good intentions.
I told myself that I was doing it for the family, and much of the time that was true. Families require money, especially when the structures around them have been broken and rebuilt. Children benefit from having a father who can contribute financially, solve practical problems and create opportunities that might otherwise be unavailable. It would be sentimental nonsense to suggest that presence alone pays school fees or keeps the electricity connected.
Yet “doing it for the family” can become a phrase capable of excusing almost anything. It can explain the late arrival, the cancelled outing, the distracted conversation and the promise that the next season will be different. It can also protect a man from examining whether work has become more than duty. Work may provide a place where he feels competent, respected and necessary in ways that family life, with all its emotional uncertainty, does not.
Clients usually wanted my knowledge. They came because I could see connections, anticipate problems and translate complexity into something useful. A child does not care how clever his father may be in a meeting. A child may want him to sit through a story whose ending is already obvious, watch something that holds no adult interest or remain present when there is nothing specific to fix.
That kind of presence can be more demanding than work because it offers no performance measure. There is no invoice at the end of it and no client thanking you for a brilliant strategy. You simply sit, listen and allow another person’s world to be important because it is theirs. For a man trained to justify his existence through usefulness, that can be unexpectedly difficult.
I had also absorbed the lessons of being a man’s man, although nobody ever presented them as a formal curriculum. A man worked, provided, endured and did not complain. He dealt with what was in front of him, kept private fears private and avoided turning his emotions into somebody else’s problem. If he was struggling, he worked harder because hard work was the approved medication.
That model of masculinity can produce admirable men. It can create endurance, loyalty, courage and a willingness to stand between a family and whatever threatens it. It can also produce men who do not know how to enter the emotional life of their own children because they have spent years treating their own emotional life as an unauthorised visitor. They are physically present but internally stationed somewhere else, guarding a border nobody asked them to defend.
I did not consciously choose work over my children in the cartoonish manner the accusation might suggest. I did not wake each morning and decide that spreadsheets mattered more than people. The choices were smaller, more reasonable and therefore more dangerous. I chose to finish one task, make one call, solve one problem and clear one more urgent matter before turning towards the thing that appeared able to wait.
The important things could wait because they were important. That sounds absurd, but it contains a truth I understood only later. We assume the most secure relationships will survive our postponement because love has already been established. We attend first to the unstable client, the angry creditor and the approaching deadline because those things may disappear or explode if ignored.
A child’s love seems permanent. The relationship appears to have no closing date, and the parent assumes there will be another weekend, another school holiday, another drive or another evening in which the conversation can occur. The years do not object to this assumption. They simply continue passing.
The song hurts because it removes the excuses without denying that they existed. The father in it is not presented as a monster. He is busy, life is demanding and the next opportunity always appears plausible. That ordinariness is what makes the story dangerous, because most damage in families does not arrive announcing itself as damage.
I hear the song from both directions. I hear it as the boy waiting for a father who may not have possessed either the time or the emotional tools I wanted from him. I also hear it as the father who now wonders whether his own children waited in ways he did not see. The song does not allow me to remain comfortably in one role.
There is an irony in spending a childhood craving something and then failing to provide it perfectly when your turn comes. We imagine deprivation will make us experts in generosity, but sometimes it makes us experts only in deprivation. A person denied attention may promise to be different while having no practical model for what different looks like. He knows the ache but not necessarily the cure.
I wanted to give my children security because insecurity had shaped me. I wanted them to see a father capable of building, recovering and continuing after things went wrong. I wanted them to understand that a person could begin again, even after financial disaster, professional disappointment or the collapse of plans that had seemed permanent. These were not small gifts, and I should not pretend they had no value merely because other gifts were imperfectly delivered.
My children saw effort. They saw a father who continued, sometimes when continuing was not particularly graceful. They saw the long construction of a practice built around relationships rather than extraction, and they saw that responsibility did not end when it became inconvenient. They may also have seen the cost of that construction more clearly than I did.
The practice itself became another child of sorts, although businesses are less grateful and considerably more likely to generate stationery. It required feeding, protection, discipline and constant attention. Whenever it reached a stage where I imagined it might become self-sufficient, another crisis arrived to demonstrate that I had misunderstood the arrangement. The business matured without ever leaving home.
I was proud of what I built because it represented more than income. It represented survival after bankruptcy, the restoration of professional identity and the proof that failure need not be final. It allowed me to help people, employ people and create a way of practising that reflected what I believed an accountant should be. To dismiss all that as misplaced ambition would be both inaccurate and unfair.
The harder question is not whether the work mattered. It did. The harder question is whether everything that mattered at work mattered as much as I allowed it to matter, particularly when measured against the conversations and ordinary hours that could never be repeated.
Time is the only account in which every person begins spending before they understand the balance. We do not receive regular statements. There is no warning that a particular Saturday represents the final opportunity for a certain kind of conversation. The year closes without asking whether the entries were coded correctly.
As an accountant, I should perhaps have been better at recognising the difference between an expense and an investment. Time with children can appear unproductive because nothing measurable is achieved. A whole afternoon might disappear without a decision being made, a problem solved or an outcome recorded. Only later does one realise that the afternoon itself was the asset.
I have tried at times to calculate what was lost, although the exercise is impossible. How much was taken by divorce, how much surrendered to work and how much lost because I was physically present but mentally elsewhere? Which absences were unavoidable, which were justified and which were merely habits disguised as responsibility? The figures do not balance because memory is an unreliable ledger and regret tends to overstate liabilities.
Regret can become another form of self-importance if allowed to grow unchecked. It places the grieving parent at the centre again, turning the children’s experience into a stage for his remorse. There is a temptation to confess so dramatically that the children are required to comfort the father for the pain of having disappointed them. That would be one more burden they did not request.
I do not want this chapter to become a plea for acquittal. Nor do I want it to become a prosecution conducted by an older man who now possesses information unavailable to the younger one. The man building the practice did not know he would one day sit in retirement and feel the years collapse into a Harry Chapin song. He was not careless with time because he believed time had no value. He was careless because he believed there would be more of it.
Perhaps that is the central human error. We treat the future as a storage room in which every postponed intention will remain safely waiting. We will rest later, talk later, visit later, apologise later and become more emotionally available once the current pressure passes. The storage room does not exist.
The pressure never truly passed because life generated new reasons for urgency. One financial threshold was reached and immediately replaced by another. One client crisis was resolved and another person appeared carrying a folder, a worried expression and a problem that should have been addressed six months earlier. Even success created additional responsibilities because there was now more to protect.
The children, meanwhile, became adults. They developed lives, responsibilities, relationships and pressures of their own. They were no longer waiting in the same way because children cannot remain suspended while a parent becomes ready. They learned to move through the world using whatever combination of what I gave them and what I failed to give.
There is a frightening moment when a parent begins to see elements of himself in his adult children. Some of those elements bring pride. Others raise the question at the heart of the song: did they learn to postpone their own important things by watching me postpone mine?
I hope they learned resilience without believing pain must always be carried privately. I hope they learned responsibility without concluding that usefulness is the price of love. I hope they learned that work can be meaningful without being allowed to consume every available part of a person. Hope, however, is not evidence.
My children are not replicas of me, and it would be insulting to reduce their adulthood to the consequences of my parenting. They have made choices, built relationships and become people through experiences I could neither control nor fully understand. The influence of a father is real, but it is not absolute. Children are not blank pages upon which parents write the entire story, no matter how enthusiastically parents later claim either credit or blame.
Still, I wonder what version of me lives in their memories. Is it the father solving problems, providing advice and appearing when something practical had to be done? Is it the man whose attention could be interrupted by work, whose mind was often running ahead and whose affection was more readily demonstrated through action than spoken aloud? The answer is probably all of those things, because people are rarely remembered in a single colour.
Kirsten, Julian and Justin each knew a different father because no child grows up in precisely the same family. Birth order, circumstance, separation, financial pressure and the changing age of the parent alter the experience. Even siblings raised under one roof inherit different weather. A father may believe he provided one childhood while discovering that three children each lived through their own.
There are memories I would like to revisit, not because they were necessarily bad but because I was not fully aware of their value while they were occurring. I would listen more carefully to what was being said beneath the words. I would worry less about whether I was teaching the correct lesson and more about whether I understood the person in front of me. I would try to enter their world without immediately attempting to reorganise it.
That is easy to write now. Retirement grants a person the moral clarity that often appears once the practical burden has been carried by somebody younger. It would be hypocritical to stand at the edge of paid work and lecture the man in the middle of it for failing to behave as though he were already retired. The bills were real, the risks were real and the consequences of financial collapse were not theoretical.
I had already experienced what happened when the structure failed. Bankruptcy was not an abstract economic term discussed in a newspaper. It was a personal demolition, carrying humiliation, fear and the knowledge that the people closest to me would also live among the debris. A man who has survived that may reasonably become determined never to expose his family to it again.
Reasonable determination can nevertheless harden into fear. Fear can wear a suit, carry a briefcase and describe itself as prudence. It can work twelve-hour days, answer calls at dinner and remain convinced that every sacrifice is necessary because the alternative has already been experienced once. The family may be protected from financial insecurity while living beside a man still governed by it.
Perhaps I was not merely building a practice. Perhaps I was building walls against the possibility of becoming powerless again. Each client relationship, each professional achievement and each solved problem added another brick. The walls may have protected us, but walls have the unfortunate habit of standing between people as well as around them.
The man’s man does not describe any of this as fear. He calls it duty because duty sounds cleaner. He does not admit that work provides a controlled environment in which effort often leads to a recognisable outcome, while fatherhood offers no such guarantee. At work, he can know the rules. At home, the rules change as the children grow and emotional intelligence cannot be outsourced to a checklist.
A tax problem can be researched. A financial statement can be corrected and a business strategy can be adjusted when the numbers demonstrate that the original assumption was wrong. A child may be hurt without explaining the hurt, withdraw without issuing a report and remember a moment the father has entirely forgotten. There is no reconciliation process capable of identifying every discrepancy.
I sometimes wonder whether my love was too often expressed in the future tense. I was working so that things would be better later. I was building so that security would exist later, planning so that choices would become available later and enduring so that the family might eventually reach a place where endurance was no longer required. Later became the promised land towards which every present sacrifice was directed.
The tragedy is that children live in the present tense. They do not experience the future security while waiting for the father to finish building it. They experience Tuesday night, Saturday morning and the conversation interrupted by the telephone. A child may benefit from the eventual result without ever having agreed to the price.
This does not mean parents should abandon responsibility and spend every afternoon constructing blanket forts. Children also need models of effort, discipline and commitment. They need to see that love sometimes performs unglamorous work and that a family survives because adults do things they would not otherwise choose to do. The question is not whether work should have been done, but whether I allowed it to become the unquestioned winner whenever two important things competed.
The inevitable tearing was between what I should do, what I needed to do and what I wanted to do. Those categories were rarely as distinct as they now appear. What I should do might be remain at home, what I needed to do might be attend to the client crisis and what I wanted to do might be disappear somewhere nobody required anything from me. Some days the choice was not between good and bad but between three forms of guilt.
Depression complicates the arithmetic further. It removes energy without removing obligation, then criticises the person for not giving more. There were times when the work consumed what capacity I had, leaving little emotional reserve for the people closest to me. The outside world may have seen competence while the family received the exhausted remainder.
That remainder was still me. It was not an impostor sent home after the useful version had completed the day. Yet the contrast between the professional self and the depleted private self could be cruel. Clients received concentration, solutions and the capacity to remain calm in crisis, while those at home sometimes encountered a man whose internal resources had already been spent.
The Black Dog does not respect family schedules. It does not wait until the children are elsewhere before occupying the room. It can sit beside a father who appears distracted, irritable or simply absent inside himself, while the child assumes the distance must somehow be connected to them. A parent may believe he is protecting the family by not speaking about his darkness, yet silence permits children to invent explanations of their own.
I did not always understand the condition well enough to explain it. Even now, language can make depression sound more orderly than the lived experience. There were periods of functioning, striving and apparent success, accompanied by an internal heaviness that no professional achievement could dislodge. A man can love his children and still be unable to reach the emotional place from which that love is most clearly felt.
None of this erases responsibility, but it changes the shape of it. Responsibility is not the same as blame. Blame seeks a guilty party and imagines that punishment will restore the missing time. Responsibility asks what can still be done now.
The temptation in hearing Cat’s in the Cradle is to accept its ending as inevitable. The pattern has been established, the child has grown and the father discovers the inheritance only after it is too late. It is a beautifully constructed conclusion because songs require an ending. Life, provided one is fortunate enough to remain alive, is not obliged to stop at the final line.
My children are adults, but fatherhood did not expire when childhood ended. The form changed. I could no longer provide the missing afternoon from twenty years ago, but I could answer the phone today without making the person feel they had interrupted something more important. I could listen before solving, remain available without controlling and offer advice without demanding that it be followed.
That sounds simple until one remembers that advice has been my professional language for most of my life. Advisers are trained to identify the issue and recommend action. Fathers of adult children sometimes have to recognise that the most useful advice is the advice not yet given. The child may not be presenting a problem for correction but a life for witnessing.
Retirement offers time, although it does not automatically supply wisdom. A person can retire from employment and remain emotionally unavailable with remarkable efficiency. He can replace client files with writing projects, committees, community obligations or elaborate systems for organising the leisure he never quite permits himself to experience. Busyness is adaptable.
My challenge is not merely to have fewer appointments. It is to become less governed by the belief that my worth depends upon being needed. Mentoring my children, or anyone else, cannot be another method of proving I remain useful after the practice recedes. It must allow them to decide what usefulness means.
I want to be a better retired father than I was sometimes able to be as a working one. That does not mean arriving uninvited with a catalogue of corrections accumulated across forty years of experience. It means possessing enough time that a conversation does not feel like an item squeezed between obligations. It means being present even when nothing needs fixing.
There is also the hope of grandchildren, although at the time of writing they have not yet arrived. I sometimes imagine grandfatherhood as an opportunity to give time more freely, to sit within the apparently unimportant moment and recognise it as the important one. The idea is comforting, but it carries dangers of its own.
A grandchild should not be born owing me redemption. They should not be assigned the task of repairing the father I believe I failed to be. To place that burden upon an unborn person would be another version of making family life serve my needs. Grandfatherhood, should it come, must be a relationship rather than a sentence served in penitence.
Even so, I cannot deny the sense of hoped-for atonement. Perhaps there will be a child who wants to show me the same thing seven times, and perhaps I will possess the patience to respond as though the seventh showing matters because it matters to them. Perhaps I will attend without glancing at a phone, without measuring productivity and without wondering what else I should be doing.
I may discover that grandfathers are not naturally more patient at all. They may simply be fathers who finally understand how quickly the child will cease asking. Age does not necessarily make a person wiser, but it does provide evidence. I now know that the years are capable of disappearing while everybody is busy making reasonable decisions.
The imagined grandchild also returns me to the boy I once was. There is a circular quality to it, as though I might offer another child some of the time I craved in my own youth. Yet I cannot travel backwards through generations, repairing every absence by behaving differently with the next. I can only allow what I learned from one relationship to improve another.
The more immediate task is to practise with the children I already have. They do not need to produce children of their own before I become more available. They do not need to wait for me to adopt the gentler identity of grandfather while remaining the familiar father who still defaults to advice, administration and the next practical task. Atonement begins in the present or it is merely another promise about later.
There are conversations I may never have because the other person does not need them. There are apologies that may be offered but cannot demand a particular response. The children are entitled to their own interpretation of the past, even when it differs from mine and even when parts of it hurt. Love does not confer the right to edit another person’s memory.
I can say that I was trying. I can explain the divorce, the financial pressure, the practice, the depression and the masculine rules within which I attempted to operate. Those explanations belong in the story because they are true. They must not be used as a bulldozer to flatten whatever truth the children carry.
Perhaps they remember more presence than I fear. Regret can obscure the good moments because the mind becomes preoccupied with what cannot be recovered. There were shared times, conversations, laughter, lessons, journeys and occasions when fatherhood was not postponed. The fact that I wish there had been more does not mean there was nothing.
The song intensifies the missing because that is its purpose. It compresses a lifetime into a series of opportunities declined until the pattern becomes visible. Real families contain more variation, more second chances and more contradictory evidence. A father can be absent and present, loving and distracted, generous and emotionally awkward, sometimes within the same afternoon.
My fear is not that my children became exactly like me. My fear is that they learned the same equation in which being responsible means placing themselves last until resentment, exhaustion or illness forces a correction. I built much of my identity around carrying the load because carrying it made me feel necessary. The load did not always ask whether it was mine.
The four pillars of the practice were admirable principles, but a family cannot live entirely inside a professional philosophy. Speaking in the client’s language was valuable, yet I also needed to learn the language in which each child communicated. Acting as a silent partner in a business was useful, yet remaining silent about love, fear or regret was less so. Dragging clients towards compliance may have saved them from consequences, but children cannot be dragged towards closeness.
Family relationships do not respond well to efficiency measures. They resist standardisation, refuse to remain inside scope and frequently require time at the precise moment the schedule says none is available. They are not unprofessional for doing so. They are reminding us that people are not projects.
I spent much of my life advising others not to confuse turnover with profit, activity with progress or urgency with importance. I could see the error in business because the numbers eventually exposed it. In my own life, I was less consistent. Activity often felt like proof that I was moving forward, even when the people I loved may simply have wanted me to stop moving.
The phrase “quality time” may have done parents a disservice. It suggests that presence can be concentrated, as though a few carefully organised hours might compensate for repeated absence. Children do not always reveal the important thing during the scheduled outing. They reveal it while you are washing dishes, driving nowhere significant or sitting beside them after the planned activity has ended.
Quantity creates the conditions in which quality can occur. The father cannot demand emotional disclosure at two o’clock because he has reserved the afternoon. He must remain long enough for the conversation to find its own entrance. That was not always compatible with the life I had constructed.
There were times when I wanted to be with the children but was unable to arrange the competing demands. There were also times when I may have used those demands as protection from my own uncertainty. Both can be true. Human beings are capable of sincere sacrifice and unconscious avoidance at the same time.
The hardest judgement is often the one that refuses to be absolute. It would be easier either to declare myself a devoted father unfairly separated from his children or to accept the role of the man who chose work and lost what mattered. Neither is accurate enough. I was a father who loved his children, lost time through circumstances, surrendered other time to duty and failed at times to recognise that duty had become a habit.
The song remains my favourite because it continues to ask the question. It does not permit me to settle permanently into self-forgiveness, but neither does it require me to live forever in condemnation. It reminds me that love delayed can become love misunderstood. It also reminds me, precisely because I am still able to hear it, that some time remains.
The important things cannot always come first. That is another truth sentimental accounts of family life sometimes avoid. A child may have to wait while a parent works, cares for somebody else, deals with illness or attempts to keep the structure standing. The problem begins when waiting becomes the permanent arrangement and urgency becomes the unquestioned ruler of the household.
I cannot promise that nothing will ever again feel urgent. Retirement has already demonstrated that obligations reproduce without requiring employment. There will be family problems, community responsibilities, health concerns and the irresistible temptation to turn writing into another profession with impossible deadlines. The old habits will not disappear merely because the office has become quieter.
What I can do is become suspicious whenever I hear myself saying, “After I finish this.” That sentence has stolen enough. There will always be another chapter, file, task, message or problem willing to occupy the space created when the current one ends. Completion is not coming to grant permission for life.
Perhaps the better sentence is, “This can wait.” The client crisis once seemed unable to wait, and sometimes it genuinely could not. The spreadsheet, the email and the self-imposed deadline may be less deserving of such status. Wisdom might consist not in eliminating urgency but in becoming more selective about what is allowed to claim it.
When one of my children calls, I want the internal hierarchy to change. I do not mean that every call requires an emergency response or that healthy boundaries cease to exist. I mean that the conversation should not begin beneath the shadow of whatever supposedly important thing I have agreed to interrupt. The person should not have to earn my attention by presenting a sufficiently serious problem.
I want to know them beyond the parts of their lives in which I can be useful. I want to hear the stories whose only outcome is that I understand them a little better. I want to recognise that mentoring is not the transfer of answers from the experienced to the inexperienced. Sometimes it is the discipline of standing nearby without seizing the steering wheel.
There may also be a need to forgive the father I had. That forgiveness cannot depend upon pretending I received everything I needed. It may involve recognising that he, too, was shaped by expectations, limitations and an emotional language inherited from men who had even fewer words. The pattern did not begin with either of us.
Fathers often give what they know how to give. Sons then spend years noticing what was missing, only to discover that knowledge of the absence does not automatically create the ability to fill it. Compassion travels backwards and forwards at once. I can grieve what I lacked while understanding the man who could not provide it.
The same compassion must eventually include me, although I resist it. Self-forgiveness can feel like an attempt to escape the consequences, particularly when the injured time belonged to children. Yet endless self-punishment does not return a single hour to them. It simply consumes more of the time still available.
Atonement is not achieved by feeling worse. It is achieved, insofar as it can be achieved at all, by becoming more present, more honest and less defended. It is shown through the next conversation rather than announced through a dramatic confession. It may be so ordinary that nobody identifies it as atonement.
Perhaps that is appropriate. Much of what was lost was ordinary time, so perhaps ordinary time is also where repair must occur. A phone call answered properly, a visit not hurried, a question asked without preparing the response and an afternoon allowed to remain unproductive may carry more meaning than any formal declaration. Relationships are rebuilt from the same small material from which they were originally formed.
Should grandchildren arrive, I hope I will greet them without appointing them to a role in my emotional history. I hope I will enjoy them for who they are rather than who they allow me to imagine I might have been. I hope I will give them time because their lives are worthy of it, not because mine requires correction.
There may be toys on the floor, stories repeated, questions for which I do not have answers and entire hours producing nothing that can be entered into an accounting system. I may be asked to attend events whose significance is visible only to a child. I hope I will understand that this is precisely why they matter.
I also hope my children will see, not a man attempting to replace their childhood through the next generation, but a father still capable of learning. Grandfatherhood should not become an improved performance staged in front of adult children as evidence that I finally understood the part. It should include them rather than bypass them.
The older I become, the less interested I am in deciding whether I was a good father or a bad one. The categories are too blunt to contain a lifetime. I was their father, with all the devotion, fear, error, effort and incompleteness that the title carried. The useful question is what sort of father I can be now.
Cat’s in the Cradle will probably remain my favourite song. It will continue to hurt because the wound it touches cannot be entirely closed without denying that something was lost. The pain is not necessarily punishment. It may be a form of attention.
Each time the song returns, it asks whether I am listening only to the past or also to the warning contained within it. It asks whether today’s apparently important task is another entry in the same old pattern. It asks whether the person in front of me is being postponed in favour of a future in which I imagine I will finally have time.
I cannot give the boy I was the father he wanted. I cannot give my children every hour that divorce, work, fear or depression removed from our lives. I cannot know whether grandfatherhood will come or whether I would perform it with the grace I now imagine.
I can stop assuming that the important things will wait.
They have waited long enough.
Music acknowledgement: “Cat’s in the Cradle,” performed by Harry Chapin. The song is discussed here as a personal influence and emotional reference; no lyrics have been reproduced.
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