One Man’s Search for Home Across the Oceans

 

Immediately upon finishing National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty’s new book (available for pre-order and due for release next week) I did three things: I got up and kissed my husband, and thanked him for being an amazing father. He knew what I was reading, he read it too, and he thanked me for acknowledging it; as I often do. I then went to the bathroom, because my bladder is getting more smushed by the day, and I applied lotion on my dry, growing belly.

It feels, in a way, like Dougherty wrote the book for me; we have a painful amount in common. We are both only children, raised in broken homes by superhuman (yet, admittedly imperfect) single mothers. Not content to raise our children in a home resembling the ones we grew up with, we took very different routes. Despite being raised in non-religious homes, we took upon ourselves the strictures of orthodox religions, myself Judaism, and Dougherty, Catholicism. It hasn’t always been easy, and the path to faith not always clear, but we’ve forged it nonetheless. We prioritized our children, plural, because we wanted them to have what we didn’t: siblings. family. But perhaps most importantly: a father.

What does it mean to grow up in a home where only one or perhaps two other people share the same memories? And what happens when they disappear? Writing of his mother’s early death, Dougherty explains,

Everyone from my childhood home was now dead. I was at the end of history, yes, marooned there. I had no siblings to ive me the consolation that comes through retold memories that are shared only in the intimacy of a family home. I had no grieving widower father who needed support more than I did. And yet, I had no children in whom I could find a mission, or at least, a living sign of that hope.

I took a picture of this page and sent it to Dougherty, explaining “this is why I will have my fourth child in five years in a few weeks.” This is an experience I had upon the early deaths of both of my parents, and it’s not one I wish for my children. This is why I married the man I did, and why I had as many children as I did, and in such short order. It’s why I wanted to raise them with a grounding in faith. I want them to have God, their father and each other. With all due respect to my mother, the last thing I want for my children is for them to repeat my own childhood. And with all respect to his mother, I’m sure Dougherty would say the same.

While it felt like Dougherty wrote the book just for me, that is sadly far from reality. He wrote a book about an experience a lot of our generation had, and an experience many more of today’s children will have as they age. There are, unfortunately, millions of American children growing up without a dad in their homes, and that singular fact often spells the difference in the haves and the have-nots as they move into adulthood; kids who grow up with dads in their homes turn out better in every measurable way; academically, emotionally, financially. What does it mean to grow up without a father? What does it mean for a child, and what does it mean for the father watching their son(s) and daughter(s) grow up from afar? Dougherty gives them both a voice when, more often than not, our culture has wrongly decided that mothers can wear both hats in a household; that of both a mother and a father.

Our generation is the first where broken homes went from rare to ubiquitous, and as we age, these stories and experiences of children growing up in broken homes, and trying to repair that brokenness, need to be told. Dougherty expresses nothing but respect and awe for the mother who raised him single-handedly, but he doesn’t pull any punches about what saying goodbye to his father looked like for a child not knowing the next time he would see him. He writes in the memoir’s opening pages, “Then came the day you were supposed to leave. Already, the pattern of these partings was established. You leave; I cry. Then my mother tries to pick up the pieces.” Dougherty writes later of experiencing firsts twenty-five years too late; his first glove gifted by and first game of catch were both with a brother-in-law in adulthood, not in his front yard with his father, who remained in Ireland with his wife and three children.

Having children is a profoundly transformative experience, and one of the most surprising is the new light shed on your own childhood and on your own parents. Dougherty could not have written this book without first becoming a father himself, and reflecting upon the whole of the experience of his childhood; first as a fatherless child, and later, as a man raising children with a new understanding of what it means to be a father, of how important he is in his children’s lives. His voice is an important one in a society that minimizes fatherhood and faith, and one that treats children as a sacrifice instead of a gift. His debut book, one so easily digested it can be devoured in a sitting or two, is a beautiful tribute to the search for identity we all feel at one point in our lives, but especially when one-half of your parentage is absent during one’s transformative years.

Published in Literature
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  1. Dr. Strangelove Thatcher
    Dr. Strangelove
    @JohnHendrix

    What a lovely, and loving, post.

    Thank you, Bethany

    • #1
  2. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Beautiful tribute, Bethany. Thank you.

    • #2
  3. Spin Inactive
    Spin
    @Spin

    Bethany Mandel: and I applied lotion on my dry, growing belly.

    We don’t need to know that.  

    • #3
  4. Isaiah's Job Inactive
    Isaiah's Job
    @IsaiahsJob

    This was a very lovely post. Thank you.

    • #4
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