Men's Rites of Passage, Scotland, July 2014

Why attend the MROP 2 from Adrian Scott on Vimeo.

Father Anniversaries

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of my father's death. Such a lot has happened in that time. I have a daughter whom he never met, which occasionally provides a poignant moment. My son hardly knew him, being tiny when the old man died.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't know what I think about him, or our relationship, such as it was. My view of it changes subtlely all the time. But I'm now slightly older than he was when I was born. I have some of the middle-aged slowdown that no doubt contributed to his being perhaps more distant than he ought to have been. However, I can quite understand the terror of becoming at father again at an age close to my age now. I wouldn't plan it that way either. But my mother was a lot younger, and she took the strain of childcare while he worked hard and long hours, and, well, here we are.  For sure I'm not the only man with a father wound - we all have them.

Perhaps I don't find thinking about my father a specially useful way of engaging with my topic. It becomes empty argumentation rattling around inside my head, and I get bored with myself very quickly when I indulge it. So, finding attempts at rationality tiresome, I revert to my preferred way of engaging; poetry and creative writing.

I have been poring over some father/son poems from one of my favourite books, Brother Songs, A Male Anthology of Poetry. And I'm going to post some of the poems in there about father and son stuff, not specially because they relate to me or my father, but because they illuminate the ways in which others have experienced that relationship. The son/poets are, to my way of thinking, full of courage and have found a way to explore bravely and vulnerably this most formative and most troublesome and broken of male relationships. Perhaps they might even prompt me into exploring this myself, in due course. I don't feel the compunction to do so at the moment - in fact I've always harboured a curious desire to paint my father's portrait, even though I don't know a pigment from a pig's ear.

You might feel so moved yourself. If so, don't hold back. Let rip, let fly, let go, and see what comes out. Poetry is my way of counselling myself, of listening to my own voice. You never know - you might produce something that your father might be proud of, whether he's alive or not. I doubt that my father would understand the stuff I write, but he might be proud that it made its way into a published book.

(See, I would still like to have his blessing. It never really goes away.)

If you know of other poems in the same vein that move you, please let me know and we can post them here.