Dad—plus three

Sometimes some of us get a father—or he gets a son—that’s not a good fit.  That was the case with my father and I.  He and I were ‘ships passing in the night’ or ‘men cut from different cloth’. It was difficult to ever connect or understand one another.  I’m not sure there is any blame to place.  My father tried to parent the only way he knew how which for him, growing up with a step father, it was not the best.  Not long after his new father showed up, he got a sister, aunt Faye, and her twin brother, Robert, who lived his life at home in a wheel chair with cerebral palsy.  I would guess that of her four kids, Robert got the lions share of his mothers' attention.

Many boys grow up in much worse situations than mine.  Rather than be affirming dad tried to man me up—at least manliness as he saw it.  That only proved to create insecurities about who I was.  Throughout my childhood and adolescence I had strong female figures in my life—my mother and three grandmothers—one extra due to divorce.  There were a few other brief male influences via my scouting experience and church, but not many.  Even with this ‘daddy deficit’ I managed to successfully make my way through college and grad-school.  Since I was the first of the family to go to a university my parents were not much help.  My maternal granddad had been an engineer of sorts—a refinery superintendent, so I followed suit by choosing that as a major.  Even with a good job guaranteed with the US Corps of Engineers and having a B+ grade average, I just did not like engineering so I left the College of Engineering for The College of Arts and Sciences declaring a psychology major.  I then went on to grad-school for an MRE from seminary and an MSSW from the University of Texas.  

Entrance to The Chalet Retreat in East Tennessee

Young married life was consuming with two daughters and an overwhelming social work job.  I was years into my adult life that I met my ‘surrogate’ fathers.  The relationship with my own father never improved and when he remarried, his new wife (she was the mother of my brother’s second wife) moved in controlling the show—think Disney and stepmothers.  He joined her family and distanced himself from all Malloys.

One year while still at the non-profit I was approached by two men in the county jail who asked that I come visit them.  They’d heard me speak on radio and wanted to talk.  Having done no jail/prison visitation, I reluctantly, anxiously (one of them had murdered and mutilated a man) went expecting it to be as I’d seen in the movies.  That is, me in a booth safely on one side of the glass, them on the other.  That day, I was ushered into a small room with glass walls and a narrow table down the middle of the room.  The officers were outside the room.  All kinds of scenarios went through my mind.  In all of them I was the loser. The inmates were brought in sitting two-three feet away. It was plain to me had the murderer decided to pull a stunt like I’d seen in movies, I was a goner. The visit went amazingly well though.  I related to them both as two married men with kids that had made horrible decisions. The murderer ultimately committed suicide while on death row.  I continued to visit the other inmate for years a couple of times a year in Mountain City, Tennessee.  His case too had been well publicized in the media.  We would write and talk on the phone in between those visits.  I heard about a retreat for missionaries and church leaders called The Chalet Retreat on Tiger Creek Road off Highway 19E on the way to Roan Mountain, Tennessee.  The retreat center was about an hour from the prison. Clyde and Marguerite Powell managed it.  They had dreamed of and basically built the place themselves.  I stayed there each trip to East Tennessee.  

Clyde and I struck up a friendship instantly.  Ironically, he had gone to Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College for an engineering degree.

Clyde Powell

Oklahoma A&M became, Oklahoma State University where I went to college first declaring a major in civil engineering.  After a time at Chrysler Air Temp, Clyde went back to school for a counseling degree. After the five hour drive from Nashville, Clyde would check me in and ask when we could spend some time together.  Most often it was Sunday morning for a few hours before I had to leave for home.  With the similarities in career paths we talked about anything and everything.  As he approached retirement he even tried to get Jeannie and I to consider moving there to manage the retreat center.  The common element each of my ‘extra dads’ demonstrated was their pursuit of me, wanting to be with me.  My father never acted that interested.  Clyde died the summer of 2012, age 92. 

Later when chairing a conference our agency was sponsoring I found myself without a keynote speaker.  Barbara Johnson had to have emergency surgery and had to cancel.  Someone asked if I knew Don Joy from Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.  I did not.  So, cold calling him with the hopes that he was available and willing, I gave it a try.  He was!  As conference chair I picked him up each morning from his hotel and took him to breakfast. With Don it was like we’d know each other for years. He was professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the seminary and had authored seventeen books.  Additionally, he, like me, was a Meyers Briggs INFJ. There is an uncanny recognition INFJs often have.   It’s like we are visitors from another planet, aliens of a sort to the rest of you, but there’s an internal light that goes on inside when we meet another INFJ. Our profile has the fewest numbers of all 16 profiles described by the test.   

I and Professor Don Joy

As I always did following a conference I wrote thank you letters to all speakers and at the bottom of Don’s added a note about how much I enjoyed our time together and hoped it was not the last.  Within days he got back to me and we planned a time to meet.  Those times continued over the years, some just hanging out at Saint Meinrad or other locations.  Other times we would hike, correspond via the internet or phone.  When I had surgery for prostate cancer Don came the next week for three days to babysit me—preparing lunch, watching movies together and helping me get out of a chair. (Birth-dad did not offer to come.) During the difficult transition leaving the non-profit I’d been with for twenty years, Don and Robbie, his wife, invited Jeannie and I to their Wilmore home for a weekend of just loving on us.  Don passed away the summer of 2020, age 91.  

Thirdly, comes my own uncle Leroy, dad’s brother.  I don’t ever remember my father saying anything nice about my uncle.  Dad harbored some resentment and grudge that he nursed his entire life.  I asked him once what it was and he could not even say.  Sometimes it seems when a person has held on to anger so long it’s no longer about whatever created it to begin with.  They are just so used to holding on to the hate.

I was the third male in the family to be diagnosed early with prostate cancer.  Uncle Leroy had it and his son, my cousin Steven.  We were genetically pre-disposed to an early diagnosis. To compare notes about treatments and the cancer I contacted my uncle.  Having cancer of your ‘private parts’ ends up being very personal for most of us men—not the subject of dinner table conversation.  Uncle Leroy was very supportive.  He and aunt Betty (mom’s sister) had always been cheerleaders for me while growing up.  Prior to my diagnosis, uncle Leroy and I had gotten closer. He was very easy to talk to. Both of us love barbecue so every time I was headed to Tulsa for a visit he would find a new barbecue joint for us to try.  At times my cousin Scott would join, but mostly it was my uncle and I. Cancer drew us even closer.  He would call to check on me or just to talk and catch up.  Again, like Clyde and Don, my uncle pursued me and enjoyed being with me.  Uncle Leroy was deeply admired and respected by everyone that knew him.  He was the real thing.  As a grandpa he had gone back and got his GED having never graduated from High School. It was after he had passed in December 2003, age 79, that I was at my aunt Betty’s viewing the following February.  Long time family friends who had known all of our Malloy clan for decades, approached me and said, “Mike, we never told you before, but you were born in the wrong family.  You are more your uncles’ son”.  I’ve never received a better compliment.  

My uncle, Leroy Malloy, my father’s brother.

Even though you may have come up short with your own daddy, keep your eyes open.  Over the years three wonderful men of my fathers generation came into my life.  They demonstrated to me that love pursues the object of its affection, me in this case.  Love truly is a verb.

And I loved each of them back.