Paternal Overtures: A Disjointed Medley
some personal and impersonal thoughts about fathers
The second half of this post is a lot more vulnerable and personal than my content typically is, which is why the comments are closed, but the topic won’t leave me alone. I had to write this one to get the voices in my head to shut up.
Introduction: the Speech
When I worked in a grocery store during high school, a coworker—then a senior in high school—told me one day that his girlfriend was pregnant and had decided to keep the baby, so his life was about to change radically. He was my best work-friend, and I felt both free and obligated to be honest with him, so I gave him a speech.
I’ve given that speech eight more times since, to every male friend who has told me that his girlfriend or wife was pregnant.
It goes like this:
I’m sure you’re going to be a great dad. If I didn’t think you were a good guy we wouldn’t be friends. But there’s something you may not know, that I want you to know.
We constantly hear all the time in the culture about how important fathers are to boys. Nearly every statistic about dads is about fatherless boys, or things like how we need more male teachers to try to help fill the void. And all of that is totally true. 100%. I read a story once about a greeting card company offering free Mother’s and Father’s Day cards to the inmates of a prison. The inmates lined up for hours to get cards to send to their mothers, but not one single inmate needed or wanted a Father’s Day card. That doesn’t surprise me. So I need you to understand that in what I’m about to say, I don’t mean to diminish the absolutely crucial importance of the father/son relationship in any way, shape, form or fashion. Truly.
I just want you to know that fathers being around, and affectionate, and involved, and loving, are equally important for girls. Nobody talks about that much in our culture, except to laugh at how easy ‘Daddy Issues’ make it to get a woman into bed. There’s no equivalent to East of Eden, The Road, Death of a Salesman, or any of the other great literature about how men suffer when their father fails them. There’s mostly just comedians making jokes and jerks who want to get laid taking notes. But I need you to hear me when I tell you that it’s just as big of a thing for girls, and in some respects more dangerous. Every fatherless boy doesn’t end up in prison. Every fatherless boy isn’t at risk of ending up in prison, but every fatherless girl is at risk from other men.
I don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to grow up as a little boy, and I’m not claiming I do. But I can tell you this: when a girl’s father doesn’t love her, isn’t someone she can count on to protect her, isn’t someone she can trust, there’s a kind of question mark imprinted on her soul and she spends the rest of her life trying to replace it with an answer. And right about the time she gets boobs, the most likely way to try to answer it is with male attention. And I don’t have to tell you how many disasters that leads to.
So please, please, please, if something in you is kind of half-bailing, or is only planning to stick around while the kid is really little, or in any other way isn’t fully committed to this woman you’ve made a baby with—please make up your mind that you’re going to stick around for your kid. Even if you have a girl. She will need you every bit as much as a son would.
That’s what I needed to say. Thank you for listening. If you fuck this up, you won’t be able to say nobody told you.
I am still in touch with four of the nine recipients of that speech. They’re all active, involved dads.
I don’t delude myself that my speech had anything to do with that, but it does make me smile.
Impersonal Thoughts
Evolution
Something is true of me and of the four friends I’ve had who endured abuse from both parents (two men, two women). For all five of us, the father-rejection hurts a lot more, and has longer-lasting consequences, than the mother-rejection.
I have a….well, it’s not well-developed enough to be called a hypothesis, so let’s call it a….speculation… about why.
Mothers are so intimately involved with their children, and the biology of childbirth is set up to facilitate bonding so powerfully, that when a woman fails to love her child it’s pretty easy to conclude that there’s something wrong with her. Evolution has made it impossible for a woman to reproduce without absolutely massive investment on her part, for the better part of a year just to get to the birth.
A woman looking at her baby and seeing an annoyance, or at her toddler and seeing a burden, or at her older child and seeing a rival, is at fault. Something is wrong with her. No child can make this deduction, of course, but when you’re an adult trying to process these issues, it’s pretty easy to understand.
Evolution made it different for fathers. Men can have children they don’t even know exist.
Men only invest in their children if they choose to. And in modern times, many of them don’t make that choice.
That makes a father’s love and investment feel like a vote of confidence. A statement of worthiness. This is likely unconscious, if it’s true at all — it’s just a speculation on my part, remember — but I think there’s something to it.
And that makes father-rejection feel like a deeply personal rejection.
Like getting branded by the universe with the word UNLOVABLE.
Like the rest of your life is a quest to do enough, achieve enough, be helpful enough, overcome enough—all of that—to fix whatever was so wrong with you that you weren’t worth your father’s investment.
A deeply entrenched sense of unworthiness is a brutally difficult thing to shake, because there’s only one way to do it. You have to decide that your own love and approval is enough, and find a way to give it to yourself. This first involves figuring out what it even means to be the recipient of love and approval, which is a pretty tall order if your parents don’t give you those things when you’re young.
And you have to do this even though you are the person who best knows the details of your flaws, failures, and shortcomings.
Nobody else can do this for you, and you can’t give it to yourself as long as even one micron of your soul is still hoping for someone or something external to give it to you.
Trans
On the anti-woke side of things, there is a constant drumbeat about how Munchausen Mommies are transing their kids. This is true and appropriate. Yes. Absolutely. It’s sick and tragic and it needs to be called out, and I’m glad it is being talked about so freely and openly.
I do wonder why the anti-woke side never mentions the role of fathers. Fathers could be stopping this shit. The Family Court in all 50 states—but especially the states that presume 50/50 custody as the default, which will, I hope, be all 50 of them soon— should be absolutely jammed with fathers seeking injunctions, suing for full custody, suing schools and doctors, and otherwise conducting lawfare. Failing that, there should be fathers—of the patients—chained to doors of gender clinics.
Every time I mention this, the fathers are immediately excused because lawyers are expensive and family courts can be unfair to men.
Maybe I think too highly of men. Maybe I think too much of the male sex. Because I would expect a good father to be willing to die to protect his child from being mutilated.
I certainly expect good fathers to be willing to go to court.
Men used to be expected to storm beaches and kill Nazis, and now they get excused from having to…..hire a lawyer to go talk to other adults, in black robes, in air-conditioned buildings…because there might be debt and an unfair outcome involved.
Oh no! A grown man might have to do something to protect his children from being mutilated, and it might be hard and unfair.
Much is said about how these “trans kids” will hate their mothers when they’re adults, and that’s true. They will, and should.
They’re going to hate their fathers, too, and just as justifiably.
I hope some of these fathers wake up and find their balls.