No Ifs, Ands, or Buts

Rachel and Rebecca made Father’s Day the best yet! Like marriage, fatherhood seems to just get better with age. The girls’ unique and distinctive expressions of love and appreciation highlighted this twenty-fourth observance of the day they qualified me for. I’m aware of some other reasonably functional nuclear families, and it occurs to me that we need to find a way to lift up these examples above the highly publicized glut of dysfunctional ones. Just like the individuals of which they are composed, families have unique characteristics which tend to defy sweeping generalizations, but I am going to be so bold as to suggest that there is one trait which virtually guarantees a healthy, functioning family: unconditional love. This is a tricky one, to be sure, because we humans seem to just love to attach conditions of one sort or another to almost everything we say and do. I will do this for you if you do this for me. And we’re very adept at leveraging the conditions we set into controlling power. I’m reasonably certain that I’m not the only one who has experienced termination as the result of the conditions being placed on a relationship not being met. I will love you if… However naïve we may have been at the time, when Mary and I vowed that we are husband and wife until parted by death we cut all the conditional strings tied to our relationship. When the option of splitting up was permanently removed, we embarked upon a journey of figuring out how to make things work. It was our choice, but making it eliminated the possibility of contrary or contradictory choices in the future. I like to think that it was into this unconditional setting that Rachel and Rebecca were born, and that in spite of all the usual disagreements and spats that occur wherever two or more are gathered together they never once worried about whether or not Mary and I love them. That’s a given. That’s unconditional. That’s what makes for happy, healthy families.