On Father’s Day: Fatherhood, memory, and the mercy of being remembered kindly

By Lukie Pieterse, Editor/Publisher Potato News Today

Dedicated to my late father and my two children.

Today is national Father’s Day, celebrated in many countries around the world. This Day has a way of stirring things that usually lie quietly beneath the surface.

It is not only a day of cards, phone calls, old photographs, and kind wishes. For many of us, it is also a day of memory. A day when the past comes and sits beside us. A day when we think not only of the fathers we had, but of the fathers we tried to be.

I am the father of two children who are no longer children. They are adults now, walking their own roads, carrying their own joys, burdens, convictions, disappointments, and dreams. There is a strange tenderness in that. When children are young, fatherhood feels like a daily task: provide, protect, guide, correct, drive, pay, worry, show up, try again tomorrow.

But when they are grown, fatherhood becomes something quieter. You no longer stand at the center of their lives in the same way. You become part of their background music. Part of their memory. Part of the story they will one day tell themselves and their children about where they came from.

That is both beautiful and unsettling.

Because every father knows, somewhere deep inside, that he did not get everything right.

I certainly did not.

There were days when I was patient, and days when I was not. Days when I listened well, and days when I should have listened better. Days when love came easily, and days when it was hidden beneath worry, tiredness, pride, fear, or my own limitations as a human being.

Fatherhood is not lived in theory. It is lived in kitchens, cars, hospital rooms, school halls, long nights, empty wallets, hard conversations, silent regrets, and the thousand small moments that often matter more than the grand ones.

I had a father too. And like many sons, I did not always understand him while he was alive and close enough to be understood.

There were times when he was difficult to live with. Times when his ways seemed hard, confusing, even impossible to explain. As a younger man, I saw his sharp edges more clearly than his wounds. I noticed his shortcomings more readily than his sacrifices. I judged him, as children often judge parents, without yet knowing the full weight of adult life, disappointment, responsibility, and the private battles a person carries in silence.

But memory is a mysterious thing. It does not always erase the hard parts, but it often rearranges them. It gives them context. It places them beside the good. It allows a fuller human being to emerge.

And now, when I think of my father, I do not think only of the difficult days. I remember a remarkably human man. A kind man in ways that perhaps I did not always recognize at the time. A lovable man, not because he was perfect, but because he was real. He had his faults, as we all do. He had his moods, his limitations, his habits and burdens. But beneath all of that was a person who lived, struggled, tried, cared, and loved in the way he knew how.

That realization has softened me.

It has taught me that fathers should not be remembered only by their failures. Nor should mothers, children, friends, or anyone else, of course. We are all more than our worst day. We are more than the words we wish we could take back. More than the silences we regret. More than the mistakes that linger in someone else’s memory long after we have punished ourselves for them.

To be a father is to live with the hope that love will be understood in the end.

Not perfectly. Perhaps not even fully. But enough.

I hope that, in years to come, my children will remember me with mercy. I hope they will remember that I loved them, even when I did not always express it well. I hope they will remember my few qualities as a person, and not only my follies. I hope they will remember the things I tried to teach them, not as commandments carved in stone, but as offerings from a father who wanted them to be strong, decent, thoughtful, and kind.

I hope they will remember laughter. I hope they will remember concern. I hope they will remember that I cared deeply about their lives, even when I stood at a distance because adulthood requires that a parent learn the painful discipline of letting go.

And I hope they will forgive me for the times when I failed to be the father I honestly wanted to be.

Because fatherhood, at its heart, is not a story of perfection. It is a story of effort. It is the story of a flawed person trying to love in a lasting way. It is a lifelong apprenticeship in humility. Children arrive and change us. They expose our weaknesses, enlarge our hearts, test our patience, and give our lives a meaning that is almost impossible to put into words. They make us vulnerable forever.

A father may grow older, quieter, slower. His children may move away, build their own homes, make their own decisions, and no longer need him in the same visible ways. But somewhere inside him, they remain the children he once held, worried over, prayed for, worked for, and loved beyond explanation.

That love does not retire.

Today, I honor my father. I honor the man he was in his fullness — not only the parts I understood, and not only the parts I struggled with, but the whole human being. I honor the kindness that now shines brighter in memory. I honor the life he lived, the burdens he carried, and the love he may not always have had the words to express.

And I sit with my own fatherhood too — grateful, humbled, sometimes regretful, but mostly thankful.

Thankful that I was given the privilege of being a father.

Thankful that my children came through my life and changed it forever.

Thankful that love, despite everything, remains.

Perhaps that is the quiet prayer of every father in the end: that when all is said and done, when the years have done their work, when memory has softened the hard edges and gathered the scattered pieces, our children will see us not as perfect men, but as human ones.

Men who stumbled.

Men who tried.

Men who loved.

And men who hoped, with all their hearts, to be remembered kindly.