S3, E2: "The Living Years" by Mike Rutherford
This is the second episode of the Fatherhood series.
Today's poem is a song lyric: "The Living Years" by Mike Rutherford, of Mike and the Mechanics.
The first memory I have of this comes from when I was 10 or 11 years old, and how emotional it made my father, who like a lot of fathers, then and now, wasn’t really one for emotion. His father, my grandfather, had died before I was born, 13 years before this song came out and was a hit in 1989. It was written and performed by Mike Rutherford, the guitarist with the rock group Genesis, as part of Rutherford’s side project Mike and the Mechanics.
And one of the big ironies of this whole story is this. I’m around about the age he was then. My father is still alive now. I was with him just this morning, transporting him to and from a hospital appointment. But my father, as far as I know, doesn’t know about this podcast. He doesn’t know about this series on Fatherhood. I haven’t told him, and while I’ve talked around my work, and poetry, I don’t think he’s interested or that he gets it. So here we are, my father is still alive, we’re still in the living years, and for whatever reason I still can’t admit we don’t see eye to eye.
The Living Years is a gorgeous song, and when I first read the lyric closely I felt it really stood up as a poem in its own right, and I hope this reading did it some justice.
One of the people that comes to mind when I read this is Steven Bartlett, the Diary of a CEO podcaster and entrepreneur and one of the dragons on the BBC’s Dragons Den. I’ve heard Bartlett speak a number of times about the difficult relationship he has with his own father. It seems, listening to Steven Bartlett, and thinking about my own relationship with my father, that father-son relationships often enter this no-mans-land. It’s not unconditional respect and love. Nor is it open hatred or estrangement. It’s something in the middle. A lack of understanding. Maybe, sometimes, a weird form of one-upmanship or rivalry, or a decades-long miscommunication between generations that cuts both ways.
And that’s what’s so heartfelt about the words of Mike Rutherford here. Even though, as he writes, I just wish I could have told him in the living years, you get the feeling that if they had the living years all over again, it still — ludicrously — might have been impossible to do and say what needed to be said.
I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that this friction, especially between fathers and sons, is so common that it seems unavoidable. If you have a great and open relationship with your father, I am, and I say this without any resentment, very happy for you. And if you’re someone in that no-mans-land, or worse, I hope that the words of Mike Rutherford in today’s poem provide some crumbs of comfort.
This is a poem from the Fatherhood series of Poems for the Speed of Life.
All the poems in this series will be about fathers or by fathers.
They will have something vital to show us about the experience, either of fatherhood itself, or of being a son or daughter of a father.
One of the poems was written in 1603, another in 1800, but most will be from the last 50 years or so. There will be a poem by a star of social media, there will be a poem that is actually a song lyric, and I also — and this is a first for me — will be including one of my own poems in this series, a poem I wrote last year about and for my daughter.
This series will be for men who would like to be able to emulate their own fathers, and also for men who want to become the father they never had.
But it won’t just be for men. Around 60% of the listeners to this podcast over the past 18 months have been women, and all the episodes in this series will be for women too. Because men need women and women need men. We need each other to sustain life, and we need each other to enjoy to the full the life we sustain. At our best, we each bring something different and essential.
So there can be doubt that there are lots of women out there who would like their men — their husbands or partners or the men they would like to meet, the men who are the fathers of their children now or might be in the future — to fully embody the role of father, in all its complexities and challenges and glories.
We all need fathers and father figures in our lives, and maybe now more than ever, with so much immaturity, short-term thinking and lack of leadership in the world. This series of poems will try to bring some of that inspiration and wisdom straight to you.
So thank you for being here. Please enjoy this series of Poems for the Speed of Life, and if you do, please share one episode with someone who might benefit from hearing it.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out these two episodes:
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Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/