"The affirming embrace of a father's love..."
When Michelle Obama, beaming in green, shared her father's work ethic and familial committment during her Democratic National Conventional address this evening I felt more than a tinge of envy. I felt what many say what Barack Obama felt when he was brought into the Black family Robinson, South Side Chicago residents, Cleaverish in their own right, in the early nineties, longing.
So much of participation in popular culture relies on a familiarity with this intimate nuclear family of father providers, mother martyrs and siblings of various stripes. Lack one and suffer a sort of social exclusion. It's, I imagine, quite validating to find what one lacked in childhood late in life, what one compensated for in achievement or with mentors, one receives by virtue of a romantic relationship.
I'm still coming to grips with my own family's frailty and its profound impacts on my behavior. I can attribute more than a few personal pathologies to not being able to ever voice anything like Michelle Obama's witness to her father's reliability and resilience this evening,
My Dad was our rock. Although he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in his early thirties, he was our provider, our champion, our hero. As he got sicker, it got harder for him to walk, it took him longer to get dressed in the morning. But if he was in pain, he never let on. He never stopped smiling and laughing - even while struggling to button his shirt, even while using two canes to get himself across the room to give my Mom a kiss. He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder.
It's funny 'cause I don't care much for conventions even as I envy those who were raised up in healthy examples of our chief modern domestic tradition. I'm still figuring it all out and trying to let go of the past and attempting each morning to say "Yes, I can" but those echoes of "No you can't" are hard to mute.
By speech's end, I was more connected to Barack Obama, who Michelle described as,
"a man who drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital ten years ago this summer, inching along at a snail's pace, peering anxiously at us in the rear view mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he'd struggled so hard for himself, determined to give her what he never had: the affirming embrace of a father's love."
In this one instance, he has so far managed to be in it but not of it, to be what he pined for in his own childhood, and if he can take a smidgen of that essence into the presidency we will soon be in better shape.
Read the full transcript of Michelle Obama's address and watch the streaming video at Hip Hop Music Dot Com.
Photo Credit: AP
Tags: DNC '08, Fatherhood, Obama, Personal is Political
de.licio.us
digg
Furl
Reddit
YahooMyWeb
Comments
There are no comments on this entry. Be the first!