The sins of the fathers…
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on July 5, 2023.
Outsider, by Brent Poppelwell, just published, is an enquiry into what makes an old man – in his 70s – run every day for several hours in the mountains in interior BC. He lives a hermit-y life in a hidden, aging school bus, occasionally coming to town for supplies, but also competing internationally in ‘death races’, the likes of 24-hour marathons in punishing conditions. Before becoming an extreme runner in his 50s, he was an extreme skier of international note, a stunt man, a logger and various other death-defying occupations. A driven man. Why?
Turns out it’s about his father. Which gave me pause for thought because I was reading the book while noting how little foo-fa-rah Father’s Day is given relative to Mother’s Day. And because there has been in my life a recent spate of adopted people seeking information about their biological family, with a noted focus on mothers and siblings, fathers a far-second thought. There’s growing attention to toxic masculinity, on one hand, and the outing of misogyny on the other. The roar of the war between the sexes. Little wonder the younger generation want gender to be a country without boundaries.
But parenting is indisputably gendered: women bear babies. There is little ambiguity – although potential mystery – about whom one’s mother is. With fathers, it’s not so clear. Bottom line, they’re who the mother says they are. OMG, the power! Which maybe explains patriarchy. If a man can’t be sure whom he’s sired, hard to blame him for branding as his own the woman he depends on to ensure his DNA doesn’t come to a dead end. And the progeny who carry that DNA.
Although that doesn’t really explain why heirs are preferred to be male. Could it be that male lineage allows the sire to imprint on his son socially with a certainty not possible biologically? That evidence of verb-fathering – raising a child – compensates for the invisibility of noun-fathering, ie contributing genetic material? Except, if that were the case, we’d be much clearer about what constitutes good verb-fathering. And we’re not, as the confusion around what we’re celebrating on Father’s Day attests.
In the case of Dag Aaybe, the extreme runner in Poppelwell’s book, the mystery at the base of his self-punishment is that it was thought he was sired by a Nazi soldier when they occupied his country, part of the scheme to use the spoils of war, in this case Norwegian women, to ensure the continuation and improvement of the Aryan race. This belief made him an alien in his country, an outsider in the rich (from the maternal side), Nazi-friendly, Norwegian family who adopted him at age two, and possibly the reason for his adoptive mother’s mistreatment. His verb-father seemed like a good guy, doing his best under difficult circumstances, but the putative noun-father shrouded his life. It perseveres even when Poppelwell, seized with the mystery for reasons that remain mysterious (although the book ends with he himself becoming a father), finds the name of Dag’s birth father, a Norwegian name, only to have it neutralized by the general understanding that Nazis gave false names to hide their identity, and the inability to find anything more about a man of the given name.
Dag almost made it as a good-enough father himself. He learned he’d noun-fathered a son with a woman with whom he’d lived for a couple years in his wandering life; he received a photo of a 5-year-old boy, no name, no address, no clarity about what, if anything, was wanted of him. That progeny remains a mystery. But he married and had four children and a good-enough family life for maybe twenty years. His wife finally divorced him, but only to legally end a marriage that he had gradually abandoned after he inherited his adoptive mother’s estate (she died intestate -- he wasn’t even good enough to be named as heir!), gave most of it back to Norwegian relatives, withdrew from society, drank himself into oblivion with the remainder of his inheritance, and became an extreme runner. His family life is safely frozen in the past, when he had a life. His current life is day-to-day survival: his daily runs, weather, geopolitical events he hears on radio meticulously journaled as if to prove he has a continuing existence. Until he doesn’t. Which seems imminent as he continues to batter his aging body with unreasonable demands.
The jealous God that promised to visit the sins of the fathers of those who hate him into the third and fourth generation certainly did a job on poor Dag. And, perhaps less spectacularly, on countless others. We don’t choose our fathers. Women’s choice about who will noun-father their children is constrained. Let’s celebrate verb-fathers for doing the best they can.
