The echoes of my father surround me, not intrusively and not permanently, but in the way I can tell a piece of silver which is Georgian with its simpler and elegant forms from an even simpler Queen Anne style. When I see an unfilleted trout I know how to gut and scale it, even better if I could smoke it over birch and serve it with chantrelles in butter as we did in the mountains in Norway. I have an enduring love for Iberian culture and can play a mean game of Scrabble. The writings of Steinbeck or Hemingway are nostalgic and connecting. All echoes. At the same time when my young son accidentally spills something or wipes chocolate on his t-shirt I can feel an inappropriate and disproportionate rage. When my daughters do the same thing it does not elicit the same feeling. Echoes. A kneejerk disdain for anyone who does not appreciate the history of pan European politics and alignments circa 1939. Echoes. I can indulge the positive ones. Most of the time I can suppress and act against the negative ones, but not always. There are also great big yawning chasms where there are just no reference points. I hug and kiss my son. I apologise to him and I tell him that I don’t know things which I don’t know. I tell him I love him and let him know he deserves my time and attention even if I don’t give those gifts to him as often or as well as he deserves. They will never hear a lewd comment about a woman escape my mouth and I will not be unfaithful to their mother. These are not echoes but rather me filling in the gaps and making things up on the fly.
The importance of fathers has never felt quite as pronounced as it does today and yet the role of the man has never felt so conflicted nor uncertain. Thank God that we have been moving away from the gender inequalities of the past centuries and of course we have a long way to go before that parity exists. We have missed something though. Something important. I remember the phrase “girls run the world” ringing out in our house for a while. I appreciate the sentiment of that phrase, which I assume was derived from the song. There were a couple of problems which cropped up though. I had to explain to my girls that it was not true (At this moment in time I wish it were), but it wasn’t true and they needed to keep fighting for their place and right to be part of that. The other thing I noticed was that my son felt excluded within that (he was quite outnumbered). We do not want to elevate women and girls to the position they inherently deserve to be in on the backs of boys’ shame. The results of not examining and tending to the chasms, fissures and vacuums we leave by shifting roles is not pretty. As men and boys are not guided in a positive way through this transition we will see really negative exploitation of this negative space. Hyper masculinity and the manosphere are ugly replacements and band aids for a deeper disease. One of my other sons who is on the verge of adulthood (yes, I have many children) shared with me that it was confusing in his social circle where the boys could not pass commentary on the physical appearance of the girls at college, yet the girls freely commented on the attractiveness of the boys. I struggled to find the correct answers except to acknowledge that that sounded confusing and he still shouldn’t and the girls probably shouldn’t either, but, he probably shouldn’t be the one to point that out.
Western men of Generation X are often expected to share in the domestic duties, child rearing, to be emotionally intelligent, utilise the current nomenclature in the dizzying variety of cultural issues du jour but can also be expected to be the bread winner, be gentle but not soft, still pay for dinner or to know when it is insulting to offer to pay for dinner. To hold the door open except the times when doing so is absolutely not appropriate. I am over egging this to prove a point. The point isn’t that any of this is unreasonable and luckily we are largely seeing shifts in that direction. I would like to think I can wield a hoover as well as the next man and I am delighted that my sons see me cook, clean and engage in every possible domestic duty. My daughters hopefully know they can come to me and cry on my shoulder, discuss their hopes and dreams or even ask me about thorny topics like consent, periods or sexuality. But most of these things have had to be learnt by us not through paternal example but somewhat on the fly. Again I am not saying women have all had great examples either, but this is about fathers day so bear with me. So, have forgiveness and encouragement when it is done imperfectly because castigation and shame can lead to an abdication and entrenchment which we do not want our sons or daughters to witness as examples.
We have to keep working on the role of the father, when fathers do not live under the same roof as their children, the expectation falls far too heavily on the (correct) expectation that they financially provide. At least as important is their responsibility to raise their children but we do not emphasise it nearly enough. At a time when boys are educationally falling behind, girls lets help define and involve the role of the father to fill the chasms and the voids.
I only wish my father had been held to higher expectations in this regard. I only wish I knew which bits of my raising I needed to pay attention to and which ones I could discard. I have spent a lot of my life seeking and finding replacement models of masculinity. It has enriched my life and my relationships, but, what I wish were that those echoes which still follow me everywhere and which continue to shape my life and the lives of my children were all ones I could smile at, could have a positive sentiment about. I wish all those echoes filled me with pride and shone through me to the generation coming behind me. So on this fathers day, despite the commercialisation with the cheap cards and the token breakfast in the morning, let us try to have some grace for fathers in this rapidly evolving cultural era. Let us take fathers by their hands and help them to become the best role models they can be. Let us please ally with the best we have to give and shine a light on this most crucial role so that the light we shine on it will dissipate the dark shadows and the sound of appreciation will drown out the negative echoes which have caused pain not only for the children of fathers but for the unfulfilled love and joy being a loving father can provide to a man.
