“Daaaad?” my daughter called from upstairs. “Daaaaaaad!” “Yeah?” I answered. “I need you!” she yelled.
I went upstairs. No crisis; just a good old everyday “Can you get me a towel?”
While still upstairs I heard, two floors below, “Daaaad?” from our middle son. On my way down to the basement, I passed my wife at the kitchen table, where she gave me a look of sympathetic amusement, and I responded with one of amused frustration. “This is fatherhood,” I thought to myself. “Being constantly needed, and going up and down stairs all day as a result.”
All fathers, I’m sure, can relate. All mothers, for that matter, though children often need fathers and mothers in distinct ways. It can be easy to think, “Do they know how much we give? Do they just take us for granted?”
I was reminded of a passage—I think from Chesterton, because it has his characteristic way of flipping our instinctive understanding of things on its head—that said something along these lines: “In a certain sense, it is good and right that we take God for granted. This is how a child is with his father. It means that the child does not worry that his father will be there for him. He knows his father will, so deeply that he doesn’t even know he knows it. It is just a Fact.”
If things are going well, children will know that they can call upon their father. They will know it so deeply they can take it for granted.
(William Hamant, husband and father of three, is the Director of Campus Ministry and Catechesis at the Saint Thomas More Oratory, a parish of the Diocese of Wilmington for students at the University of Delaware.
