With Great Power...
etcetera etcetera
I was five years old when I fell out of my trundle bed and landed on the cold, hard floor of my bedroom. We were living in base housing at the time. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz-Carlton. I don’t remember precisely, but I think I got back up and climbed into bed. The next morning, I got up as normal and there was some amount of soreness in my shoulder. My five year old brain didn’t think much of it.
I knew we were going to the Zoo that day and I was about as excited as you can imagine. I’ve always loved animals, the more exotic the better. It was time to get dressed for the day, so I picked out my bright yellow Shazam tee shirt.
There was just one problem. I couldn’t lift my arm above my head without extreme pain. Mom assumed I had slept wrong and had a kink in my neck. We worked out getting my shirt on, so we could go to the zoo.
I don’t remember much about being there. I just remember my Dad constantly telling me to stand up straight. He was a Technical Sergeant in the Air Force and every inch an authoritarian. Discipline and proper behavior were very important to him. I would try to comply, but to ease the pain I was in, I needed to shift and slouch. Eventually, he laid down an ultimatum. Either I was to stand up straight and stay that way or we would leave the zoo and not come back, '
Now, I’m a father of three kids. It’s never been important that my kids sit a certain way or stand a certain way period. And I hope I’ve never ignored obvious pain signals from them. But my Dad did. At some point that day, it became obvious even to him that I was in some serious discomfort. We go to the pediatrician and come to find out I’d fractured my collar bone, by falling out of bed.
Kids’ bones break more easily than adults’. That’s a matter of fact. I don’t remember if he apologized, I don’t remember if we ever went back to the zoo (I don’t think we did.) All I carry with me into adulthood is that my Dad, seeing me not performing to his precise specifications, decided to lay down the law and didn’t have the empathy to show a little kid that he was wrong for bring a domineering, overbearing jerk.
I don’t tell this story for sympathy or for someone to tell me how awful my Dad was. He’s long dead now and he and my Mom got a divorce seven or eight years later. I tell this story because we all have power over someone. My Dad misused his power. Frequently. I could tell you more stories. This is perhaps not the most egregious. I honestly don’t know. None of that matters now.
What does matter is how we use our power over others, whether that be our children, our spouses, our coworkers, or the people we run into on a day to day basis. How we treat a waiter or a cab driver says just as much about us as how we treat our spouse or child. To the extent that I’ve told my children to watch how a potential match treats people in public.
The experiences I had as a child under my Dad marked me, both in good ways and bad. I’ve had to deal with feelings of inadequacy, abandonment, and anxiety as a result. But I’ve also recognized that Dad himself had his own problems. He didn’t come to be the way he was without his own past. This certainly doesn’t absolve him of anything he’s done, but it does tell me it wasn’t my fault. Something I didn’t know at the time and didn’t even know until much later in life. He wasn’t mad at me. He wasn’t disappointed in me. He was an angry, hurt, damaged little boy in a man’s body.
There are a lot of those people running around. Heck, that was me for a long time. Then I went and got some therapy and some more therapy. I’ll probably be in therapy off and on for the rest of my life. Not just because of my Dad, of course. I’ve got a lot of other issues. But that little boy forty-seven years ago still aches inside when its cold or life gets hard. And he needs all the help he can get.
Matthew 20:25-28
English Standard Version
25 But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. 26 It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, 28 even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
What a great post. I think all of us have a similar story tucked away in our past. But as our father’s grow old and die, we seldom feel comfortable exposing them like that. It’s a conflicting thing to contemplate. I became a father myself thirty-five years ago. And, I worked for 25 years in law enforcement, and in very high ranking positions at that. So power, and dominion over others, in some form or another, has been something I’ve had to reflect on nearly my whole life.
What I think I know, at least feel, is that power, like fatherhood, is fraught with all sorts of complexities. It is often marred by intention gone awry. Robert Penn Warren captured this reality when he wrote, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” The stench of our failings clings to even our noblest acts. There is always something, indeed.
As fathers, we inherit the mantle of power, sometimes unwelcome, and often shaped by the men who came before us. Like the story you shared, my own father’s legacy was not one I sought to pass down either. His intentions, I’ve now come to see, were not malicious, but his execution was often cruel, tinged with anger and imperfection. In my zeal to shield my son from those memories, I crafted a fortress around him, high and impenetrable. I worked tirelessly to be the opposite of the man who raised me. Yet, in doing so, I see now how I stripped away the fragments of goodness my father sought to convey in his fumbling way.
There is an unyielding honesty in the bad we endure. It sharpens us, sculpts us, and sometimes wounds us so deeply that we vow to spare our children at all costs. But in that vow lies a blind spot. By insulating my son from the jagged edges of my own upbringing, I denied him the tiny but luminous moments buried in the shadows—those rare instances where my father’s love emerged, raw and awkward, but genuine.
Fatherhood is, in essence, power wielded over fragile lives. It is the power to build, to shelter, to break, to heal. And yet, in all our striving to master it, there is always something. Perhaps it is inescapable: the mistakes, the blind spots, the unintended harm. We may inoculate ourselves against one evil only to unwittingly breed another. Just a thought.
I’m loving this app, the ability for writers to inspire writers, and share experiences in the process. Like therapy, only educational.