Men who don’t run: Good fathers keep families on right track
- Jeff Kidd
- Jan 26
- 9 min read
Updated: Mar 22
About the time I met Jessica — the single mother I dated before throwing her over for her best friend — I got some troubling news about my cousin.
Wayne and his girlfriend, Kathleen, had unexpectedly conceived. He is a year younger than me and, at the time, was just out of high school. Kathleen, whom I had not yet met, was a year younger and had not graduated.
What the hell are they going to do now? I wondered. How will they possibly manage?
I tried to imagine myself in Wayne’s position. How would I ever break such news to Mom and Dad? And how would I explain to some girl’s flush-faced father how I had stolen his daughter’s virtue? I imagine his screaming. My cowering. The humiliation of knowing I deserve all that is being poured out on me.
And that is to say nothing of the scorn with which I would douse myself. College? Out the window. Earning potential? Gone. My time, attention and money? They would belong to others. A child for whom I am not prepared. A baby momma with whom I might share no more than fleeting sexual attraction and judgment too easily overwhelmed by passion.
Yes, that to me seemed the most miserable part — being forever fettered to someone who was not the love of my life, dragging her like a square-wheeled wagon through every consequential decision I would ever make and probably many inconsequential ones, too. Life would never again roll smoothly.
For days, I wore these thoughts like a lead jacket. Poor Wayne, I thought. I was sure he had wrecked his life.
Such are the faulty conclusions drawn by those crumpled by crisis, who cannot peer beyond the immediate threat to their comfort to see a future in which all things work out for the best.
You see, although Wayne’s life became more difficult, it was hardly wrecked. Raising a child, particularly at such a young age, reroutes plans and requires sacrifice — the sorts of demands that can send a man scurrying for an escape hatch. But Wayne did not flee; he anchored.
My cousin and Kathleen married soon after their daughter Kelsey was born. Wayne took a job in a manufacturing plant, and the newlyweds put a home on a plot of family land within a stone’s throw of his parents’ house. After graduating from high school, Kathleen studied radiology and became a technologist.
And Kelsey was followed by daughters Kayley and Kyndal, and a son, Koda.
Thirty years on, there have been plenty of additional struggles, as there are for even the most meticulously planned families — health scares, financial uncertainty and tough decisions about children’s well-being. But life is not radically different from what Wayne and Kathleen might have aspired to before their unplanned pregnancy. It simply unfolded at an unanticipated pace. They remain happily married and are well-established in their careers. They have a wide circle of family and friends. They are blessed and without regret.
Moreover, Wayne and Kathleen might have been startled by the starting gun, but they did not mistake it for mortar fire.
(Mouse over gallery images for captions.)
Not everyone is so clear-headed in crisis, however.
One early spring afternoon in 1998, about six months after Debi and I started dating, my sister, Jennifer, came to Beaufort, S.C., for a visit. I had to work on the Saturday she arrived, but she seemed insistent on coming. So when I got off, I met her at Debi’s apartment. After brief hellos, we decided to drive downtown for dinner. I scrunched into the rear passenger-side seat of Debi’s Corolla so that Jen could sit in the front.
My sister and I have always been close, and we were usually happy and playful in each other’s company. But as we started out that afternoon, she seemed oddly quiet. Debi had not said much to me, either, and was giving me nervous glances in the rearview mirror. I could see only the back of Jen’s head, but she told me she had something serious to say and did not want me to get angry about it.
I do not recall the exact words she used to tell me she was pregnant, but I remember distinctly the feeling of being caged in the back seat and wanting immediate escape. I was angry, though initially at no one in particular and for no reason I could clearly discern. Wayne’s daughter Kelsey was 8 years old by this time, and it seemed as though he and Kathleen were doing well. Nonetheless, I was ambushed again by the same, shortsighted fears for someone close to me.
What the hell is Jen going to do now? I wondered. How will she possibly manage?
At the time, my sister was a 27-year-old divorcee without a college degree, working in an eye-care clinic. Jennifer had no children by her first husband and suspected she could not conceive. So she was surprised when she became pregnant by a man she had been dating for a short while … surprised, and then scared to death when that boyfriend sprinted from all responsibility.
At first, he denied paternity and made it clear he did not intend to marry my sister. Even after a DNA test proved he was the father (a test that was not necessary, by the way), he agreed only to pay for a few months of Jacob’s health insurance and half of ongoing essential expenses. Diapers and food only; no toys and no education fund.
And after a brief appearance at the hospital when Jacob was born, his father never laid eyes on him again.
That was not the last we saw of him, however. Two decades later, the business section of the Columbia newspaper for which I once worked published a profile of Jacob’s father. Near the end of the article, he lamented that he had no heir to whom he could pass his substantial family business.
I know — the clackers on this jackass!
Like so many unwed mothers, Jennifer entered parenthood unsure how she would get by. She started by moving out of the home she and a friend were renting and moving in with Mom and Dad. Our parents purchased a roomy home in Lugoff, which is in a county adjacent to and about a 20-minute drive from the community where Jen and I grew up. They supported her through prenatal checkups and the anxiety of a blood test to determine whether their grandson would be born with spina bifida. (The test was negative.) They were in the delivery room with Jen when Jacob was born, Mom holding her hand and Dad standing in a corner to avoid too close a look at the business end of this miracle.
My parents’ walk with Jennifer did not end with Jacob’s birth. The four of them lived together in that roomy home for several years. With only a few modest bills to pay, Jennifer went to school to earn an associate’s degree in nursing, which she completed about the time Jacob was entering kindergarten. The initial living arrangement also allowed her to save enough money to later rent and furnish a place for her and Jacob, then to purchase a home a few years after that. Jen also took online and weekend classes to complete her bachelor of science in nursing, about the time Jacob graduated from high school.
Meanwhile, Jacob flourished. He was precocious and well-adjusted as a youngster, devoted to church and school as a young man. Crime, substance abuse, obesity and poor grades? He avoided every one of those pitfalls so common to children — particularly male children — of single parents. In fact, he graduated with honors from Lugoff-Elgin High School, then earned an electrical engineering degree from Clemson University.
For those with persistence, triumph grows from the germ of trouble. Wayne and his family, Jennifer and Jacob — they make this plain.
My sister deserves a lot of credit for raising such a fine young man in the face of such challenges, but she is the first to admit the credit is not hers alone. As she says often, she was a single mother but never a single parent.
Jacob’s arrival reawakened in Mom the maternal instinct that once made her ache for my adoption and rendered her joyous at Jennifer’s conception. She retired early from her job in accounting and human resources for a brick manufacturer so that she could help out with Jacob. She continued to provide after-school care even after he and Jen moved into their own place.
Observing Mom’s devotion to Jacob was almost like watching a rerun of my upbringing. A sunroom in the rear of that house in Lugoff was Jacob’s make-believe library one day, his train station the next and his cave lair the day after that. Mom was his sidekick for every adventure. She let him dabble with her paintbrushes and helped teach him to read and count. Around the holidays, they baked together and carried tins of their cookies to the firefighters at the station down the road. At nap time, Mom rocked Jacob to sleep with her whispery, woefully off-key rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
By all of this, Mom did for Jacob what she did for the first little boy in her care — she aroused his creativity, and she infused him with confidence that overwhelmed any misgivings he might harbor about the circumstances of his birth.
For all of Mom’s love and nurturing, though, she was incapable of providing one critical element of a proper upbringing for Jacob — a positive male influence. As with all boys, someone needed to teach Jacob how to be a man. Keeping bad influences at bay would not be enough. Indeed, role models are crucial to the socialization of children in single-parent families and can fill the gap left by absent fathers.
This is what Dad provided for Jacob.
Ironically, Dad’s initial reaction to Jennifer’s pregnancy was averse, to say the least. Assessing the odds stacked against her and the unwillingness of Jacob’s biological father to take responsibility, he told Mom that Jen should probably terminate her pregnancy. It is a notion that he later regretted deeply.
Fortunately, it is a notion Jen never entertained.
After believing for so long that she could not bear children and not knowing if she would ever have the opportunity again, she was determined not only to give birth, but to raise Jacob herself. That decision made, never again was there so much as a suggestion from anyone in our family that Jacob was anything but a blessing.
Least of all from Dad.
For just as Jacob’s birth prompted Mom to reprise her role from my youth, so, too, did my father burn with familial purpose. He configured the new house with a toddler in mind. For fun, he stocked a toy room. For safety, he installed a pool cover sturdy enough to support an elephant. Dad put a basketball goal in the driveway and sacrificed spots in his manicured lawn for Jacob to swat at golf balls and batting tees. And he filled the garage and pool house with bikes and scooters and motorized cars.
But the example he set for his grandson and the time he spent with him made the biggest difference in Jacob’s life, as in mine.
That’s because Dad is one of the most dependable people I’ve ever known. You see, he did not stop off at the bar on his way home from the office. He did not leave town for weekend hunting trips or golf outings with the guys. If Dad was not working, he was doing something with or for his family — building a treehouse, tending to some home-improvement project, ferrying the kids to and from ball practice.
I often wonder how much of the world’s dysfunction would be erased if every boy’s father showed as much devotion as Dad. They need not fend off every threat to their children with a flurry of martial arts maneuvers or superior firepower. Or teach their boys how to fish, frame a house or supercharge a big-block engine. They do not even need to answer their son’s every query with sage advice.
Moreover, they don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be present. They need to stop running. Men who stay — men like Wayne and men like my Dad — make the world functional.
Perhaps I would discover that my biological father grew to be such a man, too. Perhaps I should not hold against him mistakes he made at age 16. Mistakes not much different from the ones I made myself as a young man. Mistakes for which, by God’s grace, I was never forced to pay full freight.
Perhaps.
Still, I did not believe he was due the same debt of gratitude I owed to my biological mother. Men can run. She could not.
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