Which Dad Tonight?
A while ago I listened to Will Smith speaking about his father and found myself thinking about my own. Our lives unfolded on opposite sides of the world and under very different circumstances, yet beneath the details there seemed to be a familiar pattern, one recognised by many boys who grew up loving a father they could never quite predict.
Like Will’s father, my dad was a big personality. People were drawn to him. He could be funny, generous and full of life, the sort of man who seemed larger than the room he occupied. Even now, when I think of him, the first images that come to mind are not of houses or arguments but of open country, fishing boats drifting quietly on still water, my grandfather and uncles nearby, and piles of freshly cut firewood carrying the smell of eucalyptus into the afternoon air. As a boy, I admired him enormously and felt proud to be in his company.
Yet memory, if it is honest, eventually asks us to look at the whole landscape.
Alongside those treasured moments lived another reality. It usually arrived towards evening and often travelled in the company of alcohol. Nobody announced its arrival, yet somehow we all recognised the signs. My mother would sense it first. A look would pass across her face, a subtle tightening around the eyes, and the atmosphere in the house would begin to change.
Children become remarkably skilled at reading such things. Long before they understand addiction, liver damage, or the effects of alcohol on the brain, they learn to recognise emotional weather. They notice changes in a voice, the way a door closes, the sound of footsteps approaching down a hallway. They learn, without ever discussing it, that some evenings are different from others.
The question hanging silently in the air was always the same.
Which dad tonight?
Would it be the father who took us fishing, told stories, and filled a room with laughter, or the father whose anger seemed capable of filling the entire house?
I remember fists driven through walls and doors. I remember lying awake at night listening to shouting from my parents’ bedroom and hearing fear in my mother’s voice. I remember sitting in a car on a dark country road while my mother pleaded with my father not to drive after drinking, only to watch him stop the vehicle, climb out in fury, and disappear into the forest, leaving the rest of us sitting there in uncertainty, not knowing what would happen next.
Looking back, it is not the individual incidents that stand out so much as the unpredictability surrounding them. The good father and the frightening father occupied the same body, and nobody could be entirely sure which one would appear. That uncertainty settled over the household like a weather system of its own. Even on the good days, part of you remained watchful.
When I later heard Will Smith describe seeing his father strike his mother and draw blood from her face, I recognised something deeper than the event itself. He spoke of feeling powerless and of carrying that feeling for years afterwards. Many boys from volatile homes understand that experience. We worry about our mothers. We feel responsible for things beyond our control. We imagine we should somehow be able to fix what is happening, and when we cannot, a quiet sense of failure often takes root.
My mother carried her own burden. She was a small, intelligent woman with a gentle spirit, and over the years a deep depression settled across much of her later life. Human lives are far too complex to reduce to simple causes, yet it is impossible for me to look back without wondering about the cumulative effect of living year after year beside a man whose moods could change so dramatically.
For a long time I tried to decide which version of my father was the real one. Age has persuaded me that the question itself is flawed. Both were real. The father who gave me some of my happiest childhood memories was real, and so was the father who frightened his family. The tragedy lies not in choosing between them, but in recognising that they coexisted within the same man.
Perhaps that is why stories such as Will Smith’s resonate so widely. They remind us that behind many accomplished adults stands a child who spent years asking a simple question and never quite knowing the answer.
Which dad tonight?