I had never given much thought to the experience of not knowing one of my parents. Nor had I really given a great deal of thought to the myriad ways and expressions of not being a part of one’s child’s life.
I spent the holidays with individuals (half-siblings) who share the same mother but different fathers – and neither of them had much contact with or knowledge of their fathers. They met them only when they were older, and for whatever reason have never expressed much curiosity about who these fathers were. During childhood and adolescence, the not knowing appeared to be more tantalizing than knowing for sure. They could imagine that their fathers were anything they wanted them to be – important, busy, wealthy, foreign – any kind of character and lifestyle. Any kind of fantasy life that kept them away.
In reality, meeting these absent fathers made whatever illusions they may have had disappear. But it was not as though they had held onto or truly believed in the many other possibilities they had concocted. It was better to live the lives they had and ignore the reality, even after being confronted by it.
Pop culture is full of these parentless (many fatherless, in fact) stories, in which the father figure’s absence is treated as important but not central. In stories like Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo, the main characters are depicted as living with a ne’er-do-well alcoholic mother and no mention is made of the father. The working class Glaswegian experience is peppered with these kinds of stories – struggling, often strong, single mothers and absent (and barely mentioned) fathers. It’s not clear from the stoic ways characters front whether they miss their fathers or the experience of having known a father.
“They say you can’t miss something you never had,” a little girl, Mad, states, in the story Lessons in Chemistry (which is, incidentally a subtle advertisement for the power of the public library and librarians), referring to her deceased father. She goes on to say that this cannot be true. She never knew her father at all – he was killed before her mother even knew she was pregnant. It is an entirely different kind of absence… but does the way of absence matter? What prompts the longing, the curiosity in some… while others live as though the presence of a father has never mattered?
In the now-ended Reservation Dogs, most of the main characters have absent fathers, and some are without parents at all. Throughout the series, the character Bear pins his hopes on his shiftless, absent father and eventually comes to terms with the nature of the relationship (or lack thereof). As the series ends, a poignant episode follows the character Elora as she seeks out her father for the first time. She had never given his existence much thought until she decides to go to college and needs to complete financial aid forms using the information of her parents. The meeting between father and daughter is perfunctory at first, yet filled with a tense awkwardness. Elora plays tough and indifferent, and her biological father (Ethan Hawke) grasps for the right words to say. Eventually Elora softens and agrees to meet her half-siblings. The shift in their dynamic is small and incremental and depicted delicately through light-touch dialogue, silences, and subtle facial expressions.
For those of us who never experienced such an absence, it would be hard to understand what someone who never had a father at all might feel. One imagines emptiness, a longing or even an idle curiosity, but frequently it seems as though whatever is felt, it’s buried – or out of sight, out of mind – until something triggers the questions. Even if you don’t miss someone or something you never had, surely you would be curious about it?
