A father never gives up on a son, not really, no matter how poorly he behaves at times or how many stupid decisions he makes. He tries to help that son learn how to become the man he was meant to be.

There was no jealousy on the part of a new spouse over the love or affection a man or woman shared with a former spouse. It was considered a blessing to have had such loves in one's life.

They won’t turn away a father who has come to find his son.

my father...there was never any mistaking his love for me. When I walked into the room, his eyes lit up and he wrapped me in his arms as if it was Christmas morning and I was the best gift imaginable.

Kinder machen sich Phantasievorstellungen von ihren Vätern, formen sie sich nach ihren kindlichen Bedürfnissen. Die Realität eines Vaters ist eine Last, die nur wenige Söhne zu tragen vermögen.

Some years later, after Scott’s death, we came my father and I to the Field Museum, a long dismal peristyle dwindling away into the howling distance, and inside stood before a tableau of Stone Age Man, father mother and child crouched around an artificial ember in postures of minatory quiet—until, feeling my father’s eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me—very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship—and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, through a child’s cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned away, refused him what I knew I could not give.