This is what I have discovered about fatherhood as a son.
A father is a person that you know well, sometimes too well. Perhaps a father is even that person you helplessly grow into. That way in which you hold the newspaper when you read it? Yes, it’s true, that’s the way your father read his newspaper. You have decided never to worry about money (even as the unpaid bills rise ever higher on your desk)? That, as you no doubt know even if you won’t think about it, is exactly what your father would never have done. In this way, a father is never a complete mystery, for your father is in you. Pride or shame or indifference—whatever your assessment of your father, you move inexorably towards a knowledge of him.
But that is not the whole truth, is it? For your movement into knowledge over the years is asymptotical—you are that curved line that approaches the straight line of your father without ever touching except, as the mathematicians say, at infinity. At a certain point, if events proceed in a natural order, a father dies (as mine did a few years ago), and you recognize what you should have always known, that your curving knowledge, ever bending towards your father, will never make its ordained connection. So you will never know your father after all. Your father will always be an unavoidable mystery.
So much for what I know as a son. And then there is that which I have discovered as a father myself.
To be a father is to encounter a mystery that rivals the mystery that is your father—and that mystery is yourself. There is no handbook on how to be a father. You figure it out yourself, whether well or poorly or indifferently, as the case might be. At some point, your son will become eighteen (as my son will in a few weeks). He will become his own person. You have managed to get him there, to the threshold of adulthood. How did you manage it? There is no final answer to that question. But there are many small answers along the way—answers that amount to knowing yourself just a little bit more.
All life is a bending towards a knowledge of yourself. And you will know yourself, as you will know your father, at infinity.
S. Shankar 