The Collected Wisdom of Fathers. Will Glennon
Читать онлайн книгу.
at the heart of the crisis. Paradoxically, however, it is the miracle of becoming a father that opens up for us the most inviting, most surprising, and most promising avenue for finding our way back to our hearts and souls. Fatherhood is a precious opportunity, and we know it, even if we cannot comprehend or articulate why. It is something we feel in our bones. We want to understand it, to face the challenge and be found worthy; we know that there is something to it that can transform us if only we do it right, but often we don't even know how to begin.
Out of fear, out of ignorance, it is easiest to gravitate toward the patterns of fathering in which we were raised. From the birth of our first child, we tend to concede the role of comforter and nurturer to our wives and find ourselves removed from our child. The family dynamic becomes established, and we find ourselves somehow inexplicably “outside.” For most of us it is not a good place to be, but we feel powerless to change it; we don't even have a vocabulary for how to talk about it. It is just a feeling, a very deep and painful feeling, but talking about our feelings is not something with which men are terribly comfortable.
This distance, which has been created slowly and silently, can no longer be tolerated. Somehow now, not tomorrow, not next year, we need to begin to forge a path back to ourselves and our children, to discover how to create and maintain deep and strong emotional connections with them.
Inretrospect, it is astounding that we could have allowed things to deteriorate so dramatically without noticing. As painful as it might be to admit, sometimes life must deliver us a solid blow to the solar plexus before we get the point. For many men that blow comes with divorce, when distance becomes an inescapable result, and they are suddenly faced with the bleak probability that the strength of their connection to their children will be severely tested.
The pain I was feeling and that of my ex-wife, I reckoned, were our just desserts for the situation we had conspired to land ourselves in. But the boys, then just three and five, could scarcely be expected to understand what was going on. I wept loudly each evening as I drove to a strange apartment with the grief and bewilderment of these two innocents fore-most in my mind. I had no idea what to do—no road map, little guidance, and precious few positive stories to tell myself about what was happening. Instead I could count on only an act of faith, a fool's promise perhaps. I could hear the song going round in my head, “Everything's gonna be all right, everything's gonna be all right.”
For many men, divorce is a defining moment. Standing amid the rubble of shattered illusions, broken promises, and best intentions gone awry, it can be a time of painful clarity if faced courageously and honestly. Over and over in these pages, the one issue that surfaces with overwhelming power for men is the absolute terror at the prospect of losing their children through divorce. It is from this battered emotional outpost that the crisis looms clear and threatening, and it is largely from these men, struggling to come to grips with how to maintain and nurture a connection to their children, and from the growing ranks of full-time fathers, often treated as an oddity rather than the pioneers they are, that the alarm is being sounded.
This book is a report from men on the front line. The original inspiration came from Denys Candy, a friend and father who has grappled with maintaining strong bonds with his children despite the distance imposed by divorce. Since this has been my experience also-I was divorced when my children were very young and, for the past sixteen years, I too have searched for ways to remain connected-Denys's idea struck a cord. I began to search out other fathers—eventually interviewing more than a hundred—young, old, and in between, and in all kinds of circumstances: still married and living with their children, divorced, single, remarried with stepchildren, even some grandfathers. I wanted to find out what they had learned about how to be a good father. More important and somewhat surprising, I also learned how they felt about their own fathers and the process of fathering itself.
What I found initially was alarming. Although one of the most important goals of almost every father I spoke with was to have a close relationship with his children, when it came to knowing how to get there, far too many men admitted being at a painful loss. But I also found something quite hopeful that makes up the heart of this book: a depth of feeling and openness that was powerful and consistent. The answers may not always be clear, but the commitment to finding them was unwavering.
I've also come to see that when discussing fathering there are no experts. There are only men who have tried to do their best and are willing to share their experience-their accomplishments and their failures, their heartaches and their joys, their confusion and their clarity.
There are no secret answers. Building and nurturing a father-child relationship requires the knowledge that it can be done, the commitment that it will be done, the persistence to keep on trying, and the courage to do whatever is necessary to make sure it does get done.
The next two chapters explore how we got here, first from a social and then a more personal level, with the belief that this understanding is important only in that it can help us ease our way back out. This is not a time or a place to assess fault–and it would a heartless and futile undertaking. What we need is not the paralysis of guilt or the distraction of assigning blame, but rather the commitment to not let ourselves and our children continue to drift apart, encouragement and support from those who are finding their way back, and bold signposts to help us on our way.
With this book, the one hundred of us hope to at least make a start: to explore the problems that fathers face, and to identify the things we need to do, the feelings we need to become more comfortable with, the parts of our role as fathers that we need to have a deeper understanding of, and the mistakes we need to avoid in order to nurture our relationship with our children.
We can make fathering a word that is as comfortable as mothering, one that evokes warmth, strength, security, and a deep unbreakable bond of love. But it will take understanding and courage.
NOTES
1. Osherson, S., Finding Our Fathers: The Unfinished Business of Manhood.
2. U.S. Census Report; Princeton Survey Research.
3. U.S. Department of Justice; California Youth Authority; National Council on Crime and Delinquency
Chapter 2
Caught in the Currents of Change
I was working out of town for nearly two full months last year, living at a hotel where a lot of other men working on the same project were staying. It was kind of an unusual situation because we were all strangers, from very different backgrounds, but we would work together all day and then see each other at the hotel restaurant and bar each night. For the most part, they were men that normally I would probably never say more than a few words to, but because of the circumstances I ended up getting to know quite a few of them pretty well.
When the conversations finally got around to their children—which was only long after we had exhausted all the sports conversations we could come up with, and usually after a fair number of drinks-I can't tell you how many of these guy were just baffled, almost shell-shocked. They loved their kids, they would swell up with pride just talking about them, but at the same time there was this huge empty space. They'd joke about not being able to understand babies or teenagers, or about not knowing how to play with little kids. They'd tell me how “good” the wife was with their daughter, or their son, or their kids. They'd complain about not having more time to take the kid out to the ballpark. But underneath it all was this very sad sense of loss. It's like they knew something was missing but couldn't put their finger on just what it was or how to find it.
Something unusual has been going on recently—people are starting to talk about fathers. Unfortunately, as is so often the case when the bright lights of attention are suddenly turned on, much of the commentary is decisively negative. As noted in chapter 1, a flood of studies have been released, documenting in stark detail the absence of fathers, physically and emotionally, and bringing into sharp focus the increasingly long list of ugly consequences.
Mothers, who have traditionally taken the rap for screwing up the kids because,