Reflection on Fathers’ Day, 2025

Fathers’ day in 2025 falls on the Ides of June, a month containing thirty days thus set squarely at the end of the first half of the month. Interesting. Why though, I don’t know. The world seemingly finds itself on the brink of World War III as Israel, backed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France continues its rampage in the Middle East, engaging in genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine while it invades and occupies Syria and Lebanon and now, has launched an all-out, Pearl Harbor style, war against Iran. But it’s still “fathers’ day”, somewhat of a commercial disappointment but meaningful in its own way.

On Fathers’ Day I frequently reflect about fathers who’ve lost access to their children or who’ve become estranged from their children, sometimes deservedly so but too often due to a complex mix of reasons over which neither they nor their children had control. Of course, this year, thanks to Israel, there are a great many more fathers who’ve lost their children, permanently, and children who have lost their fathers (and their mothers), also permanently, but that has been the norm in Palestine since the Zionist invasion. Thus, for me, it’s not really a day for celebration but rather, for mourning. And for reflection and introspection. I certainly want to reflect a bit on fatherhood, it may be the last chance we get. But this year, I want to focus on my sons, Billy and Alex, who are now fathers, and on my third son, Edward, who has deferred the experience, as well as to reflect on my own parents, and my own related experiences.

My son Billy’s fatherhood represents the idyllic spectrum in an idyllic setting with an idyllic wife and two idyllic children: Rosario, the eldest (by quite a bit), and Cameron, the new kid on the block. The positive family television series of the 1950s and early 1960s (e.g., Father Knows Best, the Danny Thomas Show, My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver, etc.) have nothing on Billy’s actual life. And I fervently hope it stays that way. He is married to the only woman who he has ever dated, graduated from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, as I did, and has been employed by the same financial services firm for a decade. Stability in a positive setting is his hallmark.

Alex’s experience with fatherhood has been more complicated. Alex’s experiences in everything have been more complicated. He has lived a full life even though he’s only thirty-seven. Some of it has been harsh and unfair, but he’s always turned his negative experiences into assets and is not a published author researching and writing about things that have fascinated him since he was a child. He was an excellent teacher while he lived with me in Colombia, perhaps the most popular English teacher in the City of Manizales where people still ask me how he’s been doing, but he met a coworker who he married, and she was afflicted with the North American dream and talked him into returning to the United States. She had a baby daughter when they met and Alex quickly became the only father she ever knew. They immediately bonded and grew to love each other completely. Alex eventually married Salo’s mother, largely, I believe, because of his love for Salo, and subsequently became the father of his own daughter, Melissa, an absolute delight. Unfortunately, his world was recently stricken by a bitter divorce where he had to fight with everything he had to retain even shared custody of Melissa. That is hardly unusual when the North American Dream is involved and the spouse attains United States citizenship, permitting her (or him) to initiate the process of bringing their own families to the United States without having to count on their former spouse. But divorce, for whatever reason is all too common now although, in my admittedly biased opinion, it was very much undeserved in Alex’s case. He is a great dad and one of the most empathic people I know. Many of his friends have told me that they owe their lives to him as he was there for them when they most needed someone. He has also been there for me in my own darkest hours. I certainly hope fate will reciprocate that empathy in Alex’s case. No one deserves it more than he does. More than any of my other sons, Alex has mirrored my experiences, on the positive side with respect to his vocation as an educator and a writer but on the negative side with an unsuccessful domestic relationship. Hopefully, in the end, Alex’s experience will turn out as positive as mine has, albeit with less stops along the way.

My youngest son Edward, perhaps impacted by the trauma occasioned as my marriage to his mother fell apart, has avoided the issue altogether. He has done so by remaining single and has instead dedicated himself to being the best uncle ever. Edward’s is the safer route and the one that so many people are now taking, avoiding the terrible pain of unsuccessful parenthood but missing out on the indescribable joys that parenthood so often brings. My aunt Carola followed that path, as does my current sister-in-law, Diana Carolina. As does my nephew Robert.

With reference to my own experience as a son I frequently think about my own parents, my mother, my father and my stepfather. I am among the majority who now sport a fragmented family. I’ve sometimes been critical of them all, although mainly of my father who vanished when I was three, who sort of reappeared, at a distance, when I was fourteen only to quickly vanish again when I was twenty-two, and who then, reappeared for good (but also for ill) when I turned fifty-four. He was a brilliant, deeply talented but horribly blemished man who left children scattered here and there as one attempt at a family after another failed. His refusal to acknowledge the verities involved eventually alienated him from all his children, although a few of us nonetheless made sure that despite our abandonment, he was taken care of in his final years. He had a very different upbringing than I did. He was raised in a traditional family with a father who was a well-known and respected sculptor and artist as well as a civic activist and he seemed headed for an illustrious career as an innovative aeronautical engineer as well as a journalist. As a young teen he had already founded and published a newspaper in the Colombian city of San Gil, the “Gazette Juvenil”, and had engineered a prototype jet engine. But perhaps too soon, he had met my mother, secretly married her and, when their deception was discovered, was given the choice by his parents of abandoning her or being cast from his family. He chose my mother and was taken in by my grandmother but his dreams had been dashed and he became an accountant instead. Unfortunately, perhaps, the marriage did not last. After a manic series of successes and failures and way too many intimate relationships, his life ended several years ago in a small, somewhat primitive adult congregate living facility in Venezuela where he was visited frequently only by my half-sister Ellen. A sad end to a sad life.

My stepfather, to whom I always referred as “Pop”, at his suggestion, was a very loving father but apparently also deeply flawed, immersed in mysteries from which I was shielded, and involved in occasional instances of violence towards me, although to the best of my knowledge, not towards my siblings or my mother. He was a felon having been sent to jail in his youth for a botched burglary involving a union scandal. He’d been tasked with breaking into the home of a New York labor leader to obtain documentation proving that union funds were being misdirected but as a burglar, he was not very successful and had been easily captured. His future prospects were destroyed in that instant as those who’d sent him on what to him appeared to involve a noble mission all too quickly disavowed him. When he was eventually released from prison decades later he worked as a short order cook but presented himself to my mother, when they met, as a successful restauranteur. His family was well off and owned the Metropole Café and Restaurant in New York City as well a large beauty salon on Northern Boulevard in Flushing, but he had no economic interest in either and he was living in Miami Beach anyway. The foregoing could have been overcome had he not also become addicted to gambling. He apparently felt that through gambling he’d be able to make up for all the economic opportunities he’d missed while imprisoned. He neither drank nor consumed narcotics but his gambling seemed all consuming as a result of which we never, during our nine years as a family, lived in the same place for longer than a year. I loved him very much but eventually, although I knew nothing of his past, I lost respect for him, ironically, as his respect for me grew. He died very young, just before his sixtieth birthday, when I was twenty-six and was about to start law school. His last words to me were to the effect that he had more faith in me than he had in god, asking me to look after my siblings, my sister Marina and my brother Teddy.

And my mother?

Why discuss my mother on fathers’ day; after all, this reflection is about fathers.

Well, … she was an amazing human being, something common to many mothers, albeit not free of flaws. She made mistakes but always tried her very best and she was amazingly successful in providing for our needs, providing for them alone after her marriage to my step father ended in 1962 when she, like so many other mothers, became a single parent. She was a much more successful provider than seemed possible, never permitting me to grasp just how hard it had been for her to earn enough to give me an excellent education. I love and respect her more every day despite the fact that she’s been gone for a bit over thirty-five years, and I admire her, not least of all, because rather than criticize my failed father figures, she hid their flaws and emphasized their good points, creating a virtual father for me from traces of my father and from her own inventions, giving him credit for many of the things for which she herself had been responsible, all woven into a benign albeit illusory paternal tapestry. A trajectory very different from that employed by most single mothers who instead disparage their former spouses seeking to induce their children to do the same. That’s why she fully belongs in my reflections on fatherhood.

Although my early life was difficult, I thought it normal. Neither my father nor my stepfather were really active in my upbringing. Neither taught me sports nor enrolled me in little league or pop warner football, which I would have loved, or taught me how to play any sport, but somehow or other I learned the related skills on my own. Perhaps because of that neglect I promised myself that if I ever had children I would be a very active part of their lives. And I was. But as I now understand, they would have much preferred that I’d been more distant and less involved. I tried to be the best father ever but, according to my sons, and they would know, I failed.

Parenting standards have changed a great deal during my lifetime and the ones Billy and Alex have adopted certainly seem superior to those I and their mother employed. But parenting standards as well as the nature of the family are in flux and that has led me to conclude that perhaps Edward’s choice might have been the wisest, at least for me. Still, that seemingly logical observation is tempered by my own memories of the unsurpassable joy my sons engendered when times were good. Or at least when I perceived that they were good. I’m reminded of the controversy over Bing Crosby as a father but he at least had the opportunity to correct the errors he made trying to raise his first four sons during a much happier experience with the three children from his second marriage. Second chances, however, are not all that common. Nor would I now want any more children of my own. However, another strange element somewhat related to parenthood is the relationship I’ve had during the past six decades with hundreds of young people, initially only males but during the last two decades with young women as well, my former students. First at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York, which I attended and where I returned as an instructor and administrator after I’d graduated from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina; and then, at various universities in Manizales, Colombia, the city of my birth. As a student at Eastern one person stood out as a father figure to many of us, Leopold Hedbavny, Jr., first as the dean of faculty and then, when I returned, as the headmaster. Another wonderful paternal figure awaited me at the Citadel, the assistant commandant of cadets during my tenure there, Lt. Colonel Thomas Nugent Courvoisie, a father to all of us (to whom he referred as his lambs). Interestingly, to a degree, following their example I morphed into a father figure for some of my own students and I felt that kinship profoundly, one molded of responsibility and privilege, and that sense continued when I returned to Colombia after a life in the United States.

There’s a saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, at least in important aspects and, as a historian, that seems to me to be a refrain that has echoed in one form or another through the millennia. Parenting standards and goals seem to alternate generationally. We seem to try to fill the gaps in our own experiences but, once filled, what we thought was essential seems either irrelevant or negative to our children. Instead, they find their own serious gaps in what we sought to provide them. Intergenerational communication, as of today, seems to have always been a largely hopeless goal. At least in too many families, mine certainly included, and that bidirectionally.

So, all things considered, on this fathers’ day, a very complex day for me as it is for many others, as I reflect on my life and paternal experiences, I come to the conclusion that, despite my lack of success, in reality, I have a great deal for which to be grateful. I give thanks for the lessons in fatherhood my sons learned from my mistakes, lessons which have made them wonderful parents. I profoundly regret my failings which have led to estrangement from them but which, perhaps, have made them better men, and I give thanks for the fact that if I was not the father I hoped to be, I now have a wonderful wife who I cherish and who cherishes and cares for me and who, to an extent, fills the void which the estrangement from my sons has left. Last but certainly not least, I give thanks that I have many hundreds of former students from over half a century as an educator, some of whom have seen a father figure in me. I remain in almost daily contact with many of them and still try to help them whenever I can.

As an important and very relevant aside, my younger brother Teddy passed away in his sleep at the end of May with his daughter Alissa, with whom he too had had a complex relationship but one that, at its end, became profound and beautiful, at his side, … literally. During a part of his life he revered aliens that he’d once feared and, on the shores of Venice Beach in California, on certain dawns only he knew how to identify, he could be found seeking to evoke them. Not to ask for anything but rather, to express his gratitude, although gratitude for what I don’t know. He would chant “Great Ones, we are grateful” in that phrasing sharing the grace for which he hoped with us all. He was a child woven from threads of love into a somewhat tattered and battered but beautiful tapestry. His experience of fatherhood reminds me of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained rather than of Dante’s Inferno in which I sometimes imagine myself to be trapped (but from which I always somehow finding a means of escape). For me, it’s not been a perfect life but it has been one that’s given me a great deal for which, deservedly or not, to be grateful. And perhaps, it’s given me hope that, assuming that the end is not as near to us as it appears to be, I’ll have more for which to be grateful as time flows on.

Since I cannot change the errors of the past, a bit of wisdom, perhaps, would be nice.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.