Knowing Our Fathers

Do we know our fathers?

Do any of us know our father? I mean really know him? At a recent get-together, the subject of fathers came up. And one of the questions was this: “Do any of us really know our fathers? Who they really are?” After some thought, no one said they really knew their fathers. Men most of them had spent most of their lives with, worked with them, lived with them.

For those of us who have already lost their fathers this is a sad reminder that our fathers had died with few of us being able to really get to know them. My father lost his father when he was in high school during the depression. Long after my father died, I learned from a relative that, as a boy, he was the one who found his father in the family car – dead of a stroke at age 53. What was that like? How did it affect him? How did he get through this terrible loss? For me, this would have explained a lot of my father’s puzzling behavior in his life. But it never came up and we never talked about it.

After your parents are gone you remember the things you’d wished you’d asked them. Maybe we were too young at the time to know what questions to ask our fathers. Maybe the only way we break the inter-generational cycles in which we have inherited (like not showing our emotions, attitudes about women, always being the strong one, and so on) is by intentionally confronting them.

I remember my dad making fun of me because I shared diaper changes with my wife. I ignored him at the time, but today it would have been interesting to have asked him where he got such ideas and where did they come from?

We men often find ourselves isolated. Some of us have been able to develop good friends with our wives, but when it comes to close, intimate relationships with other men, we avoid them at all costs. A great number of men in our society have no real friend beside their wife – no wonder few survive if she dies before he does.

In the 1970s, women banded together in the feminist movement and found they could create better lives for themselves and their daughters than the lives they saw their mothers and grandmothers live. Perhaps it is time for men to do the same: to get together and work on developing deep, honest and trustworthy friendships with other men including their fathers.

What was your father’s life like when he was growing up? If he served during a war, how did that experience help or hinder his life? What were his hopes and dreams? What does he identify as his “dominant life values” and how has he acted on them? Once your father is gone, these questions, and others you may have, will never have a chance to be answered. Maybe today is the day you sit down with your father and say, “Dad, there are some things about you I would like to know…”

You may not get your questions answered, but if you never ask them -- you never will!