> SOUTHERN INDIANA — As a child, I never really understood Father’s Day. It’s most likely because, like too many children in America today, I never really had a dad. Resembling the Easter Bunny and other holiday creatures, my father only came to visit me about once a year, usually with a present, some gum and a little awkward small talk.

Around the same time, I stopped believing in Santa, and I also stopped believing in my father. He moved away as I was entering kindergarten and, during the next 25 years, I only met him three additional times.

When you’re young, you don’t mentally comprehend abandonment. The effects of it sneak up on you like slow moving storm clouds in a clear, sunny sky. Only this cloud follows you around for a lifetime, making it difficult to take shelter from the sprinkles of anger and self-doubt so many of us experience.

Numerous studies have shown that these, and other psychological changes, arise from not having a father around and translate into some pretty big obstacles for those affected to overcome. According to the website fatherhood.org, children raised in single parent homes face an increased risk of poverty, incarceration, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness. We are twice as likely to drop out of school before graduation and more likely to suffer alienation from our peers. Girls without fathers are also twice as likely to be involved in early sexual activity and seven times more likely to get pregnant as an adolescent.

If that’s not enough, our daddy issues pop up later in life as well. Since my father wasn’t around, I now have a 92 percent greater chance of getting divorced than those from a two-parent home. Talk about the gift that keeps on giving.

Oh, and that quip right there. That’s a defense mechanism. If you haven’t figured it out yet, mine is humor. Most kids find an outlet for their emotions and feelings of rejection. Whether it is productive or not is the question. For some it’s a laugh. For others, they attempt to fill the empty hole in their psyche with a boyfriends’ love, be it physical, emotional or sexual. And still a few drink their sorrows away.

That’s what my father did. He coped by pouring a burning liquid down his throat until he was unconscious. It made him forget his ill health and troubles, but it also blinded him to the luster of the world and to me.

Like a lit Molotov cocktail, the alcoholism imploded my parents’ marriage and they divorced before I was born. His drunken anger boiled over her once when she was pregnant with a son. She lost my brother to miscarriage. Second chances only go so far, and when she discovered she was carrying me, she left. Yes, she abandoned him. Mind you, she never said a bad word about him, even though it was more than deserved. He always had every opportunity to visit. He just didn’t.

Now I’m not saying only men leave their families. Mothers do too. And most of the single fathers I know fight to have their children in their lives, be it every other week, weekend or summer break.

Yet these men and other members of society continue to pick up the slack for those dads who don’t stay around. The mothers try to compensate, but it’s rough. Mentors provide a positive role model to children who might need that extra support. Aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers and cousins can become surrogates, allowing kids to actually give a Father’s Day card to someone other than the usual garbage dump.

As for my story, my father died about six years ago. Deathbed confessionals, for me, only occur on the big screen. I didn’t see or talk to him before he went. We lived in Hawaii at the time, so I have a valid excuse, but I know in my heart I wouldn’t have visited anyway.

In my mind, I rectified things with my dad nine years ago, about the time a screaming baby boy entered my world. When motherhood arrives, you must either push all those hidden emotions further down into a dark mass at the base of your spine, or you release them into the unknown. Not that the feelings don’t try to re-enter, as is evidenced by the bitterness of this very column.

I have a choice, much like the choice my father made. And I choose to be thankful that alcoholism wasn’t a daily fixture of my early life, which means an upside existed to my dad being absent. If we find a positive in life, those negative statistics above don’t necessarily have to translate into reality. Early intervention, education and counseling can quench the troublesome embers that, over time, cultivate into destructive actions.

Unlike Santa and the Easter Bunny’s cyclical, pre-determined appearances, we choose the path of our lives. Instead of a list, sometimes we all just need some signage, or perhaps a grumpy newborn, to point us in the right direction.

— Amanda Beam is a Floyd County resident and Jeffersonville native. Contact her by email at hoosiermandyblog@gmail.com or visit her blog at HoosierMandy.com.