Vachon Imagined

Every Father’s Day, for as long as I can remember, I have struggled to find the perfect card, the perfect sentiment. Cards that say “you’re an awesome dad” or “you were always there for me” don’t fit everyone’s experience.

For many of us, Father’s Day carries a different weight. Some had fathers who were absent. Some had fathers who were abusive, or who violated boundaries in ways that are unthinkable to most. Walking through a Hallmark aisle for someone like that can feel like standing in line at the inoculation center during Army basic training—standard issue, no room for individual experience.

And yet, fathers and mothers shape children long before they are even born. In ways both visible and invisible, they become part of us. Which is perhaps why some of us carry so much of them in our own behavior—the good and the difficult, the admirable and the painful.

I see my father in me all the time. Some of what I see I am proud of. Much of it I am not.

Over the years, I have tried to remember the good moments, knowing that the mind tends to harden the painful ones into story while letting softer moments slip away. I have worked instead to hold onto fragments—small, human memories rather than fixed narratives.

Like learning to drive with him in the passenger seat, listening to the Doobie Brothers. Black Water is still a song I love, and it still brings him back to me in a gentler way.

I did not have a consistently present father. In fact, I struggle to remember long stretches of presence at all. He was, in many ways, consumed by life itself—by movement, by doing, by busyness. And I imagine that absence must have haunted him in ways I will never fully know.

Because memory returns whether we invite it or not.

So on Father’s Day, for those who did not have the father they hoped for, or the one they needed, perhaps there is another way to hold it.

Not through denial.
Not through idealization.
Not through anger either.

But through a kind of honest recognition.

Because memory can bring up defensiveness in us. It can make us want to turn away, to dismiss, to explain it away, or to get angry at what cannot be changed. I understand that impulse. It is often easier to protect ourselves than to feel what is there.

But there is another way to meet it.

With gentleness.

Not softness that avoids truth—but gentleness that allows truth to be seen without becoming violence.

Honor requires that kind of gentleness. Especially when speaking about people who are no longer here to respond, or who may not have been able to give what we needed.

Because without gentleness, even truth can become a form of harm.

You got the father you got. And part of the work, however difficult, is learning to see what was given—not only what was missing—and to understand that it has become part of you.

To honor it not because it was perfect.
But because it shaped you.
And because what shaped you is still asking, in its own way, to be seen.