By PETER ST. CYR
For Pete’s Sake
© 2023 New Mexico News Services

This Sunday, like millions of Americans, I will celebrate Father’s Day.

I will cherish the memory of my adoptive father’s life and the impact his love had on my wellbeing.

His active engagement in my life positively influenced my social development, helped me achieve academically and steered my moral growth from childhood into adulthood.

I was blessed when my adoptive parents rescued me from a Catholic orphanage for special needs children six months after I was born with a hole in my heart. It was a dangerous physical ailment that had scared away other couples looking to grow their families through adoption.

My father, a military man stationed in Aurora, Colo., wasn’t deterred by doctors’ suggestions that I would require open heart surgery, a costly procedure to repair the inner walls separating the two sides of my heart.

My dad knew when he adopted me the healthcare benefits he earned as a master sergeant in the Air Force would cover the steep surgical costs. A devout Christian, he prayed that his benefits would help save my young life.

After I gained the weight and strength needed for the surgery, cardiologists determined the organic murmur, which affects only one percent of the population, had miraculously healed itself.

A lucky break. Even as the hole in my heart closed, my father’s always remained open to me and two siblings.

The Fatherhood Project, a nonprofit fatherhood program seeking to improve the health and well-being of children and families by empowering fathers to be knowledgeable, active and emotionally engaged with their children, has researched the specific impacts of father engagement during different childhood development stages.

The group’s researchers determined that having an authoritative father leads to better emotional, academic, social and behavioral outcomes. In fact, children who feel close to their fathers, like I did, are twice as likely to enter college or find stable employment after high school and are 75% less likely to have a teen birth, 80% less likely to spend time in jail, and half as likely to experience symptoms associated with depression. On the other hand, children whose fathers are absent may suffer lifelong psychological harm.

I know my father’s involvement in my childhood made me a happy, well-adjusted child focused on earning A’s and preparing for college more than dropping out or having to repeat a grade.

My father told me he vowed to be involved in his children’s lives after watching his own father, a top lawyer, drown the sorrows of losing his young wife to cancer in booze. It was embarrassing, my dad recalled, to get frequent calls to come pull his drunk pop out of a bar.

I’m lucky my father put the negative relationship he had with his own father aside and focused on making me a well-rounded, happy person with a sharp mental dexterity.

I still smile when I look through the family photo album and see pictures of my older brother wrestling my father on the living room floor while I half cried out loud, “My turn, my turn!”

A black-and-white photo that captures my dad lifting me into the sky while I lay prone on his hands and feet will always make me smile from cheek to cheek.

This Sunday, when I celebrate the memory of my father, I’m grateful for his involvement in my life.  I’m grateful he spent countless mornings reading newspaper columns aloud and asking me to think critically about community issues.

I’m thankful my father inspired me to become a journalist where I’ve spent most of my life writing stories in the public interest.

It’s what I plan to continue to do, in his honor, with this monthly column, For Pete’s Sake.