Happy Father’s Day | The Press

I think we (pretty much) all grow up with a certain antipathy towards our parents, I’m talking about the teenage years, the beginnings of adulthood.

I’m talking about a spectrum of antipathy, going from light to heavy metal. We don’t find them enough of this, not enough of that. Too much of this, this and that…

I’m not talking about psychopathic parents who mistreat their children. These belong to a different category of antipathy in the hearts of children. I’m talking about imperfect parents, the average mother bear and father bear, those parents who, like all parents, learned the “job” on the job, without instructions, because even parenting books don’t really prepare you for what it is, this lifelong contract.

It’s Father’s Day and I’m thinking about mine, as on every Father’s Day, my father left younger than I am now, at 53, in 2000. He left and everything was not “settled” between us – everything would undoubtedly have been if cancer had not interrupted his life trajectory too early, everything was being resolved with the passage of the years…

He died five years before my son was born.

Perhaps you will recognize yourself in what I am about to say: having a child(ren) softens the way we look at our fathers, at our parents. At least that’s what happened to me as Zak grew up.

We understand certain things. We understand that this is learned on the job. We understand that our flaws are revealed when we raise them, when we take care of them, when we love them. We hear our parents’ voices when we lecture our children, decades later. We understand that we are, like them before us, products of our time, our culture, our society…

An example: yesterday was my son-in-law’s birthday. Ten children in the house, on a rainy day, in a party organized by my wife, who turned into a masterful summer camp leader for the occasion…

But I digress.

A father came to drop off his boy. I don’t really remember the context, but the father said to him the most normal thing in the world, he was talking to him and he called him “My love”.

I say “the most normal thing in the world” about this “My love”: “normal” in 2026. But in 1978, when I was 6, fathers generally didn’t say that and didn’t say it in public, in front of other children.

When I say that we, parents, are products of our times and our cultures, this is one example among a thousand. I think that as in many areas of society, the level is rising in parenting. I could be wrong, of course.

When it came to my parents, especially my father, I felt dissatisfied for a long time. Not enough of this, too much of that, misunderstandings never resolved, wounds never quite named…

So many dissatisfactions and misunderstandings which sometimes survived his death.

Then, Zak came into the world, five years later. And little by little, I understood that my parents did what they could, that my father did what he could.

You get older, you grow up, you become a father and… And you understand that you too, are too much this, not enough that in the eyes of your child…

You understand that it’s hard. That you make your best possible, juggling like a circus monkey with all the other trials that life throws at you, alongside your life as a father.

You understand that this discovery is not an excuse either. It’s not a shield for not trying to be better, to learn from the mistakes and shortcomings that you may have blamed on your parents, on your father.

So every day, from their birth to your death, you try to be better. Not perfect, just better, better than yesterday, better than last year. Good enoughas my half-Anglo mother used to say.

On Father’s Day, what I measure now are not the faults of mine, when I was young. That’s how much he loved me.

Just that: loved.

This love guided all his decisions, all his postures towards his son. For the better and the worse.

On Father’s Day, what I measure today is how much this love has been beneficial to me. I know because I’m a father now. I know the immensity of this love.

I already said in my heart, Dad, that I have forgiven you…

I know today that thinking that was a mistake. There is, there was nothing to forgive.

You gave me the essentials and even more.

Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers who try, every day, to be better than yesterday.