Did You Need a Father Growing Up?

Content note: This article discusses domestic violence, child abuse, alcoholism, abandonment, and family trauma.

We were cleaning when my mother asked the question. I was fourteen years old, living in Wisconsin, and doing what I often did when we worked beside each other: asking about life. There was so much I didn’t understand - school, sports, college, work, money, marriage, fatherhood, relationships, community, history, politics, religion, and friendship. Adults seemed to know the rules of the world without ever explaining when or where they had learned them.

Somewhere between the cleaning and the conversation, my mother asked, almost casually, “Did you need a father growing up?”

The obvious answer was yes, but I didn’t answer immediately. My father had already abandoned us twice - once when I was almost three and again when I was thirteen. His presence had brought alcohol, violence, yelling, police officers, courtrooms, fear, and an anger I was too young to carry safely.

Still, a simple yes did not describe what had been missing.

After thinking about it, I told her, “I needed someone to answer all my questions about how the world worked.”

She barely reacted. It remained an ordinary conversation between a mother and her son while they cleaned. The work continued, but the answer stayed with me.

My father was born in Mexico and worked construction in the United States. He received amnesty during the Reagan era and earned American wages while building a house in Mexico. The house was supposed to belong to our family. My mother believed she and her children would eventually live there. That was the plan she had been given: work, contribute, build the house, and return to it together.

In my early childhood, my mother was not allowed to work. According to my father, her job was to remain in the house with the children. He would not let her get a driver’s license. Work, transportation, and money - the ordinary tools an adult uses to move through the world - were kept beyond her reach.

Eventually, she got her license against his wishes. Then she found a job and began contributing her wages. Her earnings joined his, just as her paid work joined the years of unpaid labor she had already given to the home and children. Her sacrifices made his work possible, and her money helped build the house she believed would shelter her family.

That house was built from more than my father’s construction labor. It was built from my mother’s restricted choices, unpaid work, earned wages, physical exhaustion, and belief in a shared future.

My father abandoned us for the first time when I was almost three. Later, my parents found each other again in their hometown. My mother believed she could make the relationship work and perhaps recover some version of the future she had been promised. My grandmother saw it differently. She believed my mother might have been subconsciously reaching for the only plausible path back to the United States - the place where a future for her children still seemed possible.

No one can know precisely what was happening inside my mother. Survival is rarely driven by one clean motive. Love, fear, hope, necessity, and the need to create a future can all occupy the same decision.

Between my father’s first abandonment and his final one, life did not move in a straight line. My mother had two more children with another partner, a man who eventually went to prison for trafficking across borders in a semi-truck. Four children needed food, shelter, transportation, and a future. The adults who should have created stability repeatedly brought uncertainty instead.

My father’s final abandonment came when I was thirteen, after I fought back.

Until then, he had one person he could abuse. That changed when his son became old enough - and angry enough - to stand between them.

How many thirteen-year-olds have to fight their fathers? Not argue with them. Not slam a door or raise their voice. Fight them literally - hand to hand, fist to fist, belt against belt.

A child should never have to decide whether absorbing a beating is safer than allowing it to continue toward someone else. I did not have the language to understand what that moment would do to me. I only knew I was no longer willing to stand there and watch.

After that, my father had two people to fight. The abuse was no longer one-sided, private, or easy.

Then he left.

That was when my mother understood the house was gone.

I do not know what ultimately happened to it, who controlled it, who lived in it, or who benefited from it. Personally, I never cared about owning that house. I have lived in their hometown, and it is not a place where I see a future for myself.

My mother must have felt differently.

For her, the house was not simply a building in Mexico. It represented years of work, a promise, and the belief that her children would have somewhere permanent to belong. Losing it meant losing the physical evidence of what all that suffering was supposedly for.

It is fair to say that her labor was stolen, along with the future she had been promised. My father never paid child support after leaving. My mother was left to raise four children while the value created through their marriage remained somewhere beyond our reach.

The house existed, but our claim to it did not.

The final abandonment was not a clean departure. It was violent and filled with yelling, alcohol, police officers, courtrooms, fear for someone’s life, and fury that found a home inside me before I was old enough to understand what it would cost to remove it.

Then, one day, it was over.

The yelling stopped. The police stopped coming. The court dates ended, and the immediate danger receded. The house became quiet.

No one prepares you for the silence that follows survival. We had won, if escaping could be called winning, but I was wounded. The danger was over, yet something inside me remained prepared to fight. Fury had been easy to enter. It was not easy to leave.

Maybe I have been carrying some of it ever since.

Safety did not restore what had been taken. Peace did not return my mother’s labor, replace the missing child support, or answer the questions that remained after my father was gone. It simply gave us enough quiet to hear them.

My mother went to work. Not the kind of work people romanticize when they tell stories about perseverance, but double shifts at McDonald’s with no guarantee that effort would produce security.

Her body told the story every day. She would come home wearing her uniform and lie faceup on the bed. There was no blanket and no careful transition from work to rest. She would say she was only going to close her eyes and then fall immediately into a deep sleep. Sometimes we found her in the same position, still in uniform, face toward the ceiling, snoring from an exhaustion so complete that her body had simply shut down.

That is not one childhood memory. It is an everyday memory.

The absence was everyday. The exhaustion was everyday. Knowing that my mother was carrying responsibilities meant for two parents was everyday. Years of working too much eventually became physical agony and pain. Her body continued paying for a debt created by people who had already left.

My father never paid child support.

My mother paid with her body.

There was, however, another man whose place in this story deserves to be remembered. His name was Keith Manning. He was from Raleigh, North Carolina, and at the time he owned seven McDonald’s restaurants. He was my mother’s boss, but he also became one of the people who helped our family keep moving.

Keith recognized my mother’s work and helped her professionally and financially. When she needed her first financed car, he helped her obtain it and contributed one thousand dollars of his own money toward the down payment.

That car was not an abstract symbol of independence. It was how she reached work. Work was how she paid the bills, kept the lights on, and kept our world moving forward.

A man who owed our family nothing helped my mother when the men who had made promises to her would not. One man prevented her from driving; another helped her purchase a car. One benefited from her labor; another invested in her ability to support herself.

I do not know what Keith’s life looks like today, but I hope God has blessed him. I hope the seven restaurants became fifty and the kindness he extended to my mother returned to him many times over. He may remember the thousand dollars as a relatively small act from decades ago.

Our family remembers his name.

That is how much one person’s decision can matter.

Still, a car could not answer every question. My mother was working to keep the family alive. She could not simultaneously replace every lesson, opportunity, connection, and explanation that should have come from a present father. Her absence from the house was not abandonment. It was the price of ensuring her children could eat.

The physical presence I remember most became the sight of her asleep in a McDonald’s uniform.

That was the environment in which she asked whether I had needed a father.

By fourteen, the missing pieces were becoming visible. Computers fascinated me, and I was already teaching myself things many of my peers had not begun to consider. They were busy experiencing the ordinary freedom of being American teenagers. Curiosity had me studying a future I did not yet know how to enter.

Computers offered a different kind of world - one governed by logic, curiosity, and systems that could be understood if I stayed with them long enough. I became so absorbed that I began testing what I could make software do inside the school’s computer environment.

I was not surrounded by engineers who could recognize raw ability and teach me how to develop it responsibly. I was surrounded by peers who reported me and a principal who immediately threatened expulsion.

Not suspension. Not a warning. Not a conversation about what I had built, what I understood, or what that ability could become.

Expulsion.

So I stopped.

The software stopped. The experimenting stopped. A possible future stopped before anyone helped me understand that it was a future.

The school may have seen a disciplinary problem. What no one appeared to see was a child teaching himself the beginnings of a profession. Guidance could have drawn a boundary while still protecting the curiosity behind it: “You cannot do this here, but you are clearly capable. Let us show you where that ability belongs.”

No one said that.

With the proper guidance, I believe I would have become a software or computer engineer.

Marketing eventually became my career, and it has given me opportunities, accomplishments, and a life I value. Gratitude for what I built does not require pretending every missed road was meant to be missed.

What I lacked was not intelligence. It was inherited knowledge. Some children receive answers early enough to use them. Others discover those answers only after the decisions have already been made.

Books became teachers. Faith gave me direction. Mistakes became expensive lessons, and watching other people move faster showed me that another way of living existed.

The Milwaukee Athletic Club became one of the first places where the hidden machinery of the world began revealing itself to me. It was my first professional marketing job, but it was also a private city club filled with executives, business owners, civic leaders, and people who understood how opportunity moved.

They knew businesses could be built and sold. They understood networks, capital, ownership, and influence. These were ordinary facts in their world. In mine, they were revelations.

People at the club encouraged me to see myself as a bridge between two economies, cultures, and groups of people. Someone once explained it bluntly: “You look like them, so they trust you. You think like us, so we trust you.”

The statement was complicated. It divided people into sides and reduced cultures to appearances and ways of thinking, but the larger message reached me. There was value in being able to move between worlds. The difference that had sometimes made belonging difficult could become a strength. Experience had taught me how to translate more than language. I could translate expectations, behavior, opportunity, and trust.

“Spread your wings,” they told me.

Those words mattered because they came from people who could see paths I still could not. For once, people with experience were not telling me where I belonged. They were telling me how far I might go.

Some families are eight generations deep in property, investment accounts, professional relationships, education, and lessons passed quietly from parent to child.

We are catching up in generation two.

That does not make me sad. It motivates me. God has given me clarity about my place in the world and strength for the work ahead. The past explains the distance we have traveled, but it does not get to determine how far my children will go.

My children are two and a half and one year old. Their questions have barely begun, but my answers have already started. Every day includes feeding them, changing them, holding them, hugging them, and kissing them. “I love you” is said so often that one hundred times a day would not feel like an exaggeration.

Every day, I thank God for them.

My presence is ordinary at their age. It looks like meals, diapers, bedtime, toys, tears, small hands, and children who trust that someone will come when they call. It also looks like weekly family activities - going somewhere together, creating memories, and making family time part of the rhythm of their lives.

Already, I talk to them about their futures. They may not understand what I am saying yet. They do not know what an investment account is or why their father talks about possibilities that remain years away.

I tell them anyway because someday the words will make sense.

My father’s absence was an everyday memory. My presence will be one too.

Being present means answering questions before confusion becomes a wound. It means recognizing ability before opportunities pass. It means teaching my children how money works, how education connects to choices, how relationships should feel, how faith steadies a person, and how to recognize love that does not require fear.

A father’s presence is protection, instruction, discipline, example, emotional safety, love, and trust.

It is staying for the questions.

One of my dreams is to place ten thousand dollars into an investment account for each child. The money could grow throughout adulthood and perhaps remain invested until retirement. The amount matters, but what it represents matters more.

It represents calm.

When they reach my age, they could have assets, stability, and more options than I knew existed. They could grow sooner because they would not have to spend the first part of adulthood discovering the rules alone.

My father used American labor and my mother’s sacrifice to build a house his children could not inherit. The work happening now is meant to build something no one can take from mine.

Knowledge cannot be signed away with a deed. Presence cannot be relocated to another country. Trust cannot be repossessed. The certainty of being loved cannot be stolen by someone who leaves.

This is not a forgiveness story. There are things we do not forget, harms we do not rename as love, and choices that do not become acceptable simply because enough time has passed.

We never forget. We never forgive.

But refusing forgiveness does not require surrendering the future to fury. Anger may have helped a thirteen-year-old survive what was happening around him. It cannot be allowed to raise his children.

When my mother asked whether I had needed a father, she was living with the consequences of having trusted the wrong one. She had survived control, violence, stolen labor, abandonment, and the daily exhaustion of keeping four children alive. Still, she created room for her son’s questions while they cleaned.

Perhaps that was part of the answer too.

The person who taught me most about staying was the parent who had every reason to collapse and kept getting up - sometimes after falling asleep faceup in a McDonald’s uniform without even pulling a blanket over herself.

She stayed. Keith helped. Books answered some questions. Faith answered others. Mistakes answered the expensive ones. Mentors eventually showed me doors that had been there all along.

Now it is my turn to stay.

Someday, my children will ask how the world works. They will ask about school, money, work, marriage, faith, friendship, failure, and the futures they are beginning to imagine. Every answer will not be perfect, but perfection is not what I needed at fourteen.

I needed someone willing to remain present long enough to help me find the way.

That is the father I choose to be. That is the calm I want my children to inherit. That is how generation two catches up, and that is how the village begins.