c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ Father’s Day sneaked up on me this year.

Maybe I was still fuming over the Southern Baptists’ latest foray into anointing their prejudices about family as the revealed Word of God.

Or maybe, as parents often say,”I was busy.” In any event, on the Saturday before Fathers’ Day, I found myself walking through the park with my 6-year-old son. We carried deli sandwiches and soft drinks as we looked for a picnic spot. Another father pushed his toddlers on swings. Was he a dad enjoying the awkward rituals of weekend custody? Or, like me, giving his wife some child-free space?

I have that thought whenever my son and I go out on Saturday. I see lots of dads out with kids. Who are we? What family drama is in progress?

Here are some thoughts about the mystery of fatherhood:

_ My 19-year-old son says he and I are in”competition.”Over what? I know boys pull away from their mothers in order to be free. I think we pull away from our dads in order to shed expectations _ which feel like pressure when we’re 19 but more like admiration when we’re 40.

_ Dads play strange roles in literature, mythical and epic. I think of Pat Conroy’s tortured search for his father in”The Great Santini,”and Chaim Potok’s depiction in”The Chosen”of a father’s impenetrable logic in choosing to raise his son in cold silence.

_ Many dads do stupid things. They yell, they ignore, they push, they taunt. (Mothers do the same, but we don’t remember them for that.) Maybe dads are simply men who”don’t have a clue,”as some women say. More likely, they’re acting out a complex role whose boundaries have signposts like”Spare the rod …”and”Winning is everything”and”Be a good provider”and”Don’t be a sissy.” _ I reject the notion fathers don’t nurture. They do nurture. Not all, but more than get credit. Fathers rock babies to sleep, bandage bruises, kiss wounded egos, sit in emergency rooms, and wait up for midnight coming-home noises.

_ I’m sure some divorced dads relish their freedom from child-rearing. Some fathers have no participation beyond a stolen moment of passion. But for most, being separated from one’s children must be a never-ending agony, to which weekend custody is small comfort.

_ Yes, dads work too hard. Most people work too hard. We’re chasing something _ money, success, acceptance, toys, an easing of some inner ache. Dads get slammed for putting careers ahead of kids. But that’s just a convenient way for a culture to express its general self-loathing. It’s the flip-side, I suppose, of the way we idolize and then blame women.

_ Fatherhood takes many forms. Some dads stay home and care for the kids. Some commute to work and are home only on weekends. Some share domestic duties with working wives. Some are distant and authoritarian. Some dads abandon their families. Some are shoved out. Some are victimized by a legal system that assumes mother knows best. Some dads try to perpetuate a 1950s ideal that probably never existed.

Yet I suspect that reasonably healthy families are more common than we think. The extremes dominate public discourse and make better theater. But I see parents trying hard to do the right things.

Parenting, like life, has a large component of plodding, of sitting with a child long after the moment feels rewarding, of lying awake in worry long after kids are asleep. Parenting is lonely duty.

Mostly, I think our culture is confused about the issues that parents represent: power, authority, responsibility, love, self-sacrifice. We tend to externalize, as if parenting had to do with the square footage of the house, rather than the quality of life in the home. We tend to commercialize, as if parenting, like life itself, were a matter of assembling the right accouterments. (The guilty parent makes a great customer.) We tend to simplify, as if power were about violence and love about sex. We treat each other as icons, rather than take the trouble to look and listen deeply.

DEA END EHRICH