I am using paternity instead of fatherhood because, for me, paternity has a distance living in it. It’s not a cuddly word smelling of aftershave. It doesn’t make me think of being tucked into bed or watching the Thanksgiving turkey being carved. I don’t get sentimental over paternity. I get sober and mature and inquiring.
This is not a sentimental Father’s Day post about Daddy, it is a post to inspire you to look into yourself and find the parts of you that have paternal roots. I suggest four areas to contemplate: inheritance, connection, blessings and problems.
Notice that you are thinking of yourself in your formative years – the first 21 years. As an adult we only need inner fathering.
I share some of my own paternal roots in part to inspire and to model, but also to be transparent and real.
Paternal Inheritance: Biologically, how are you your father’s child? Do you look like your father? Or your father’s father? Did you inherit his digestive system, his ears, his musical ability?
I looked like my father. I sang like my father (danced like my mother). Ate like my father. I suspect my cerebral cortex is like my father’s because my capacity for thinking and questioning, looking at things from unusual perspectives is like his.
I am using the past tense because I have become more myself and less his child even in my biology. The form and functions of my body parts are surprisingly shaped at my current age more by me and less by my genetic roots.
Paternal Connection: How connected were you to your father? Did you have a special affinity with him? How did it shape your sense of relationship to men? Did you trust him? Could you confide in him? Did he respect you?
I was deeply connected to my father. I felt I belonged to him and with him. He understood me because I was like him. (I felt little connection to my mother.)
Yes, I look for my father’s gifts in men. I have found them, but I have also found his difficulties and problems.
Paternal Blessings: What parts of you did your father see, cultivate, appreciate, honor? Did his life choices provide a model for your personal choices? Did he protect you?
My father didn’t actively see me or cultivate, appreciate or honor my talents. He adored me, but I never asked him why or what? He wasn’t around from age 10-17 to bless me because my parents divorced and he lived 1300 miles away from me, rarely wrote or called. He neglected me and our relationship…there is still a hole in my psyche.
I found my father magical in his sense of language, his desire to imagine a better world, and his ability to not let his demons defeat him. His courage helped me find mine.
The dream of him and the connection I felt to him protected me from my very unhappy reality. I was a lost princess holding on to the protective memories of my father’s kingdom.
Paternal Problems: Too much or not enough paternal presence? Too rigid or too indulging? Did his personal challenges and sufferings undermine his paternal responsibilities?
My father wasn’t around to father me when I started to step into the world as an adolescent. He wasn’t present to help me shape my thinking, express and regulate my feelings, or engage my will with focus and success. I couldn’t rebel from any paternal constraints. I couldn’t seek paternal guidance, direction, and discipline.
My father was marginalized and marginalizing and could not find community or social connection. He spoke and wrote articulating his dream of a better world, but never found others to help manifest his vision in any practical way.
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I encourage you to imagine your relationship to your father, describe your paternal roots, even briefly, you will find much self-awareness in the effort. Don’t be afraid to let go of sentimentality (or rage) and name the blessings and the problems. Do this with compassion for your father and compassion for yourself.
Dear Reader, When you read my posts you are meeting my father in small ways: my language, my imagination all sparkle with his blessing. I also suspect that my focus on leading others to a vital and mature imagination of self, confident that a new self, self-imagined, will then imagine and manifest the better world and future, stems from seeing his failure to imagine himself in freedom (he could only defend himself and cling to grandiose identities.)
I have my father’s sturdy legs to this day and was challenged by a similar difficult brain chemistry and physical inertia. I have his sharp wit, precise vocabulary, and enormous capacity to learn.
I have had to learn to connect to more than my achievements, money, and prestige, (or the lack thereof) which was all my father ever recognized in himself and others. I never trusted his superficiality, shallow and conditional morality, and his need to belittle and marginalize others when he felt shamed and small. I have attracted men very similar who valued and envied me for what I achieved and then marginalized me when they felt inadequate.
My father’s courage to leave a successful corporate position to start his own business with a family of four has always inspired me and shaped my deep affinity for the self-employed. My father shaped the foundation for my work in the world.
Watching my father unsuccessfully anesthetize his emotional pain gave me the resolve to remain conscious, clear, and ever present to feeling, expressing and releasing my own emotions.
His presence was either explosive or absent – great gusts of irreverent and off-color humor, then simmering, piercing barbs. No one has made me laugh harder or more often than my father. Mostly buzzed, mean, and dismissive at mealtimes – the only time I remember seeing him with any consistency when he wasn’t traveling on the road.
I knew he never really saw me but referred to me often as the “smart” or “good” one to shame my siblings into behaving. Rarely would he address me directly and when he did it was to spout some empty maxim like, You can do anything you set your mind to” but never followed up with any real interest in what that might be and how he could encourage or support me. Lots of air blowing around as a underdeveloped Gemini…
Wow – great exercise. I made peace with him and loved caring for him at the end of his life, but his mark in my life is still what it is.
My father was a cross between Peter Pan and Houdini. He escaped all opportunities for growing and developing by disappearing, drinking, or disappearing to drink. On his good side, he was funny, friendly, hospitable, and a good provider. He seemed to think these qualities were enough, that they exempted him from any responsibility for anything else or to anyone else. He thought fulfilling the role of supporting six kids entitled him to violate the rights and boundaries of others. Because he recognized no limits and resisted any that were placed on him, he was unable to fulfill the guidance and protection functions of Father. If things got “out of control”, he disappeared. If Mom wanted to communicate, he disappeared. If the kids got noisy, he disappeared. And he always came back “funnier and friendlier.”
Because I grow up with an absence of the fathering function in my holding environment, I did not develop the capacities to take care of and protect myself in the adult world, and I lacked basic trust that anything or anyone was looking out for my best interests and would be there to provide what I needed. I thought if I were to survive, the “fight” would be up to me.
It was through the long process of inner development that I came to understand the hole. Guides and mentors, one of which was Lynn, helped me to develop some capacity to connect with Inner Father and parent myself. I sometimes experience Basic Trust that the universe is friendly, and sometimes I don’t. But more often now, I can “know it” even when I don’t experience it – which at least holds me until I’m reconnected.