Father's Day Is About the Children and Their Mother

Being a father isn't like anything else a man does -- it is not simply a role -- it's reality that changes a man's way of being-in-the-world, and for the better.

WASHINGTON (Inside Catholic) - Father's Day is supposed to be about honoring fathers, but for me it's for being grateful to my children and to their mother. Being a father isn't like anything else a man does -- it is not simply a role -- it's reality that changes a man's way of being-in-the-world, and for the better.

Hannah was born twenty years ago -- she has always been "my little girl pink and white as peaches 'n cream is she," as Billy Bigelow sings in "Carousel" (see below). I was coaxed into being in the operating room when Hannah was born. After a last minute procedure that saved her from being strangled in the womb, she was put into my arms, and I fell in love, immediately. I didn't know that happened to husbands once they became fathers.

When Chippy came to us eight years ago from Romania, it happened all over again. People say to us what a "good thing" we did for him, but I always hear myself saying in return, "Oh no, he was a gift to us." And it's true, Chippy brought a huge amount of love into this home, perhaps because he had to love life so much to survive those early years in an orphanage.

Letting him find us was Hannah's idea, the prayer of an 11-year old Catholic schoolgirl, overheard by a man who thought he was too old to start over with a child. (Silly me!)

On this Father's Day, I am grateful to the children who fill my heart when they call me "Dad," and to their mother, Theresa, who did almost all of the real work of raising them.

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