Author's note: I wrote this a few months ago but felt burdened to post it on my World Race blog.
The first Eminem song I ever heard, even before the lyrical genius of “The Real Slim Shady” graced my ears, was “Cleaning out my Closet.” I remember flipping through the channels one summer before starting high school and seeing the music video on MTV. Back then I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV, but I was so intrigued by the music video, especially the haunting images of Eminem digging a grave in the pouring rain, that I immediately downloaded the song.
Nine years later, I was hanging out with my roommates on a Tuesday afternoon when one of them whipped out Eminem’s greatest hits CD and started playing it on his laptop as I cooked lunch. It had been years since I heard the song, but when “Cleaning out my Closet” came on, even more than the surprise of how many of the lyrics I remembered was the feeling of how profound this song was. Back when I was fourteen it was just a cool beat and a secret way for me to rebel against my conservative evangelical upbringing; now it seemed to be a poignant commentary concerning our increasingly fatherless youth.
The song is primarily an autobiographical account of Eminem’s life and experiences with a mother he hates, but in the second verse, Eminem recalls being left by his father as an infant. As he split, I wonder if he even kissed me goodbye / No, I don’t want a second thought, I just f**king wished he would die. He says that he couldn’t even imagine leaving his own daughter, even if he hated her mother, because even though he has made mistakes, he’s “man enough to face ‘em today.”
As I contemplated what it would be like to grow up without a father, living in his absence but having no idea why he left, I was reminded of Shinichiro Watanabe’s anime Samurai Champloo. In it, a young girl named Fuu travels to find her father, a Christian samurai fugitive named Seizo Kasumi. When she finally finds him, lying ill on his deathbed, she weeps because she has sought him this whole time with the intention of tearing him a new one. She can now only see him die.
Facing execution at the hands of the shogunate’s hired assassin, Kasumi calls to her: “Fuu, I have no right to ask your forgiveness, but I want you to know that not a day has gone by when I did not think of you and your mother.” Kasumi was forced to flee his home, leaving his family to protect them from the shogunate’s hounds. At that time, in the early 1600’s, Christianity was illegal in Japan, and it was for the safety of his beloved daughter that he left. Staying would endanger her very life.
I really hope that Eminem’s father is like Seizo Kasumi. I want there to be some justification for his absence, some reason good enough to explain a childhood of empty memories. I hope that, even though he had no right to do so, he begged Eminem to forgive him, or even just to know that he still loves his son, a sad and angry little boy named Marshall Mathers.
But that’s probably impossible for me to know, and to be completely honest, I don’t think that is the case for most men who leave their children without a father to raise them and care for them. I have friends who don’t have real fathers, or who are raising kids by themselves, because some male in their life couldn’t or wouldn’t be man enough to face their mistakes.
When I think about all the kids out there without dads, it makes me proud of my dad, who raised four kids into adulthood, always sticking around and providing everything his family could have ever needed or wanted; it makes me proud of my roommates who work at the Boys’ and Girls’ Club, trying to keep young teens off drugs and in school and out of trouble with the law, many of whom are being raised by one parent, or by grandparents or even foster parents; it makes me proud of my friends who traversed the perilous road to adulthood without a father, who are living with that pain even today and are still trying to be the best people they can be.
I know that Jesus tells us that we are to call no man ‘father,’ because we all have one Father who is in heaven. But I like to think that he’s okay with us having one down here in addition to the one up there, even if just for a little while.
