Father's

I have the worlds best father...well in my eyes anyway. I am so lucky to have had the unconditional love that I grew up with. In both becoming a parent and working as a social worker with children who rarely even know who their own father is, I have learned to appreciate mine in a whole new way. 

My husband's  relationship with his father is much more complex. A product of a divorce and a father who seemingly disappeared and started over with a new family, my husband has had both a hard time learning to parent and a hard time defining his own relationship with the man who never really parented him.

In the past few years my husbands father has started to try, in his own way, to be a bigger part of his life. My father in law has always struggled with some sort of addiction but mostly hid his demons from his kids and as selfish as he is/was,  has made sure to let my husband know he loves him. 

On Friday we got a call that my father in law is in a coma. He fell down the stairs thursday night in his home and was so drunk when the ambulance arrived with him at the ER that they had to put him in a medically induced coma to detox him from all the pain meds he has been taking. My husband, being the oldest and "next of kin" has had to sign off on this, making the decision to keep his father in a coma to rid him from the demons that probably prevented him from being a good father in the first place. When he "wakes up" it's on him whether or not he wants to go to rehab and for now we can only hope for once he will make the appropriate choice. 

Yesterday while visiting him in the ICU I asked my husband if all of this made him sad. I couldn't imagine looking at my own father in that state, hooked up to a ventilator with tubes every which way. My husband answered, not really. This surprised me. He stated that if he was in a coma for a different reason or if he was not expected to live, than yes, it would sadden him deeply. But for now, looking down at the absentee father with a prescription pain killer addiction and a life filled with selfish choices- no, he wasn't really that upset. What a complex bag of emotions to carry, huh?

This got me thinking about how my husband parents Noah, how he is loves him so purely but doesn't seem to ever know what to do with him. Thinking about the lack of fatherhood in his early years puts a lot of it into perspective as does looking down at my helpless father in law whom no one is really shedding a tear over. 

Today I am thankful for my own dad and for the father I know my husband is capable of being. He may not be "mr. wonderful" all the time but he loves his son and I know he would never be absent from his life. 

Happy Father's Day.