I recently listened to a podcast about a song and his father. The son was confronting him with long-postponed questions and old disappointments. The father admitted that he had fallen short, but he had no answers. He looked like someone who had lost something and did not know how to get it back.

The conversation unsettled me. Perhaps because I love my own father deeply. Perhaps also because I am a father, and I fear that one day my son may judge me for shortcomings I never intended. He may never know how many nights I stayed awake thinking about something he was going through or worrying about what might lie ahead of him.

In an age of inspirational clips and carefully arranged conversations, fathers are expected to live up to a collective ideal. They must always be present, naturally expressive, and skilled in the arts of explanation and apology.

But fatherhood is not a carefully produced performance designed to move an audience for a moment. It is an experience in which fathers do their best and learn much of what they know through trial and error.

That conversation led me to a question: What about ordinary fathers?

What about those who do not have the luxury of expression, who do not know how to answer when asked, “Why did you do that?” or “Why weren’t you there?”

What about those who struggle to express themselves and do not know how to answer when asked, “Why did you do that?” or “Why weren’t you there?” What about those who performed no miracles but quietly did what they could, despite their exhaustion, through efforts no one noticed and routines repeated day after day?

Some fathers never read modern parenting books. They never learned how to say “I love you” in the correct way, but they said it in their own ways. Through being present, even in silence. Through their exhaustion and their efforts to keep the ship moving.

Many good fathers do not speak the language we want to hear. Not because they have no feelings, but because they are exhausted. They were busy doing what they could and had little opportunity to shape it into words. When the questions arrive years later, all they can find in their memories is an old exhaustion that cannot be explained in a single sentence.

The greatness of some fathers lies in how ordinary they were. They did not save the world or change the course of humanity. They simply woke up every morning, went to work, brought home bread and medicine, and raised their children with what they knew and what they had.

Having a simple, uneducated father, or even one distracted by his own world, does not mean that you had a bad father. Nor does he deserve to have a noose placed around his neck after twenty or thirty years of giving, simply because he sometimes fell short or could not offer you the perfect answer.

In many cases, our fathers were wonderful as they were, not as we wished them to be. They were not perfect, and they were never required to be. Our responsibility as their children is to see them as they were: human beings who gave what they could.

Perhaps they did not know how to express love in words, but they loved. Perhaps they sometimes fell short, but they never stopped trying.

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