Whether or not our fathers were available when we were growing up, we all had fathers. However, God is very different from earthly fathers.
The God revealed in his Bible is the perfect Father. Our earthly fathers were very imperfect.
My father was available on the weekends as a traveling salesman and manager. He never perpetrated any physical or emotional abuse on us three boys. But he never disciplined us either. My mother was the opposite as a strict disciplinarian whose discipline we hardly ever understood.
I wish my father had set limits for us boys and disciplined us when we got outside of them. Instead, mom would say that the boys shouldn’t be doing this or that. He just said that we would learn it on our own.