The Wisdom of a Father Who Has Suffered
SAN DIEGO -- Wisdom is born of suffering. It comes from what the Greek playwright Aeschylus called "pain that cannot forget," the trials that transform wretched souls into better people "through the awful grace of God."
There is nothing more awful, more cruel or more unnatural than a parent burying a son or daughter. It's a wound that never heals.
So it was that I found myself spending the lead-up to Father's Day thinking about a wise man I met recently with strong opinions on child-rearing.
Who better to explain the meaning of fatherhood than the dad of a dead Marine?
Socrates Peter Manoukian is a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge. With fatherhood weighing on my mind, I called him up and asked for his thoughts about the one thing that matters most to him: family.
"You know, there's that old saying," he said. "Any man can be a father but it takes a real man to be a Daddy."
This is going to be a tough interview, I think to myself at this point as my eyes well up with tears.
As he warms up, Manoukian mentions how every father should listen to and take to heart Harry Chapin's classic 1974 folk song "Cat's in the Cradle" about a father who was too busy for his son until one day when his son was too busy for him.
The judge recalled the years he spent in juvenile court where people came before him who could have had better lives if they'd had better parents. Then there was the stint in family court, where parents fighting over custody of their kids sometimes stooped to making false allegations of child abuse to hurt their former spouse.
Born in Lebanon to parents of Armenian ancestry, Manoukian explained that both of his parents grew up without fathers -- one of them felled by cancer, the other by genocidal Turks.
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