You don’t know it, until you become a father, but a father quickly realizes he is in uncharted personal territory. One would not trade the experience for anything, but is it “priceless?” Not if one accepts that love and suffering are the albeit-unpriceable prices of fatherhood.

The potential for absorbing pain that a father must accept is unprecedented in his life. The vulnerability is unknown and unquantifiable. Some dangers are common and well-known, but in the golf swing of life, what went wrong last time isn’t the thing that will go wrong the next time. While fixing one thing, something worse goes wrong, with a worldwide television audience watching.

In accepting the presence of a child, one accepts the possibility of the irreplaceable loss of the child. Even the thought that “something might happen” is terrifying enough to keep a parent awake at night.  

As intense as a father’s feelings are for his child, so immense and vast is the suffering that may lie in wait for the parent as the child undertakes his solo combat with his life and his world. A child arrives innocent (leaving aside the obtuse issue of “original sin”) and undefeated, and remains blameless throughout toddlerhood. That the child is utterly dependent is a defense for parents against accusations of self-interest in their all-encompassing efforts to protect the child.

The father, for the first time in his life, is actually “needed.” Parents don’t “need” their children. But a child doesn’t come into the world without a father. Father figures can be many, and superior in almost every meaningful way to the biological father, but if the baby is to have his biological father, there is only man qualified. Without the biological father, the child is left with a missing link to his past, with questions no one can answer as well.

To understand one’s self as a child’s father, a father looks to himself for insights into the child. My father died when I was very young, so that has shaped my understanding of it, but my perception is that, above all else, the individual is unique, and sovereign. I know only myself. I did not know my father to know in what personal ways I am descended from him. I know my brothers, but not how they are descended from our father. I know myself and how I have been influenced by events, but I do not know what qualities I inherited from my father that made me the person who was influenced in unique, particular ways by those events.

Having one son, he is the only possible son I could have had, if my wife and I only had one, although I know well from my brothers that two people can produce a wide range of children. Each is as inevitable, and random, as the others, brothers who define themselves more by their differences than their similarities.

To my son, I am, and will be, “father:” an archetype, the only person who could have been his father, the only one who could have been the husband of his mother, the only one who could have been the father of his siblings. But I will also be just one more father among fathers, one more parent among parents, one more obstacle in his way. He will be the unique person, the sovereign being who is transcendent, above and beyond all the historical and family baggage, the one who will discover for himself, not his “potential,” as my teachers used to say, but his aptitudes, and passions, and inclinations, while his father sometimes wonders where it’s all coming from.

As he settles into himself and looks outward, and inward, he will not look up to me, or down on me, but he will see me alongside himself, not just as his father, but as a fellow man. A fellow human being, who, like himself, was once upon a time his age, once upon a time had dreams that never came true, once upon a time had problems that had no solutions, once upon a time was a drifter without a wife and son, with a future with everything uncertain.

Perhaps he will marry, and have a son, and eventually, the details will fall into place, and he’ll appreciate all the very good reasons why his father had always seemed to think, sometimes for no apparent reason, that never was anyone so special as his son!