For generations fathers had watched earth and sea. Pearl S. Buck
Was Father getting sadder, or was she just getting old enough to see it? S.D. Smith
Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your child to live without you. Nicole Krauss
One of the biggest things that hold men back from being the fathers, husbands, and leaders they are meant to be is that we are often unfit, unhealthy, or otherwise limping along. Josh Hatcher
He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to. Richard Ford
Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness. Fyodor Dostoevsky
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. George Orwell
“Are you a devil?” “I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart.” G. K. Chesterton
A couple of weeks ago, a favorite cousin of mine died from a sudden and gruesome bout with cancer. His life was like many men I know, complex in its core, attempting to blend families and his responsibilities to them, attempting as well to overcome impediments – including to his own sight – that made many of the things he did more of an ordeal than they might have been, including the challenge of landscaping from which he made a living and to which he gave his most grateful soul.
My cousin was in great physical shape which likely prolonged the ordeal of his cancer but also made it possible for him to have the kinds of conversations with loved ones that help the dying to let go of life. As his daughters occasionally reminded him, in ways subtle and not, he was not always the father of their dreams. And like myself and many others, my cousin often “limped along,” in a world which disposes benefits and good fortune unevenly, trying to figure things out for himself and others, offering coaching guidance as he was able regarding how to persevere through adversity which is, after all, the lot of most of us in this world.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, the mask he wore was not particularly thick or meant to deceive. He was more transparent than he might have needed to be, perhaps more so than his corner of the world was prepared to accept. He also evaded that all-too-frequent demon of ingratitude, the assumption that the world owed him more, owed him differently. And he avoided that curse of our modern age, the error of exalting judgment at the expense of reflection, the knee-jerk reactions of too many of us to situations that just don’t seem right “to us,” reactions that grant us the arrogance of verdicts without trial, verdicts generally devoid of context.
I raise up the image of my deceased cousin not because he was unique, but because he was not. The responsibilities he assumed, the holes in his life that he tried to fill, the matrix of complex relationships he attempted to navigate, the impediments he sought to overcome – including some self-imposed – this constellation of challenges and, if you will, demons, are representative of many of the men in my life. It is perhaps a function of our longer-than-anticipated pandemic bubbles that so many of us now indulge in acting out, including of our ideological predispositions and prejudices. But it is also true of how many men I know, including my cousin, who are genuinely trying in more controlled ways to figure things out, including figuring out how to support the fixing of racial, gender and social class discriminations that impede our social development and, in some core ways, threaten the very existence of our species.
These men have, at least to some extent, sought to understand their privilege and overcome the cultural conditioning which, in the US at least, simultaneously critiques and reinforces the narrative of men as predators, men as habitually self-absorbed, men as the reinforcers of a manifestly unjust social order that privileges the needs of the few over the needs of the many; men who take more than their share and give less than they claim; men who imagine themselves as some sort of “gold standard” even when others see mostly fools gold. This is a deep if self-deceptive conditioning, one which is often reinforced across gender and economic lines, one which allows only a few to prosper as privilege leaks inexorably into entitlement.
And as our societies shift, slowly but inexorably like the tides of the sea, there is positive momentum to report, even to celebrate. At the UN we routinely discuss the gendered dimensions of food insecurity and counter-terror operations; we routinely discuss the importance of reproductive rights for the health, well-being and educational and social opportunities of girls; we spend much time and energy, albeit at times beset with numerous frustrations, attempting to end impunity for the commission of sexual violence crimes in and out of conflict zones. During my annual lectures for NATO School I also do my part to hold brass to the commitments made to the UN by NATO both to small arms proliferation and to their Women, Peace and Security responsibilities. On both counts, there is less and less resistance to changes that they know they need to make, that it is in the best interests of everyone that they make.
But there is no patting ourselves on the back here on gender (nor or on racial, cultural or religious discrimination) any more than the fathers (and mothers) I know seek to glorify themselves for upholding basic obligations of parenting. We know full well that change has come too slowly. And we know that we have not always put the authority and leverage at our disposal to use in making it come more quickly, in balancing the leger sheet and creating horizontal space within and beyond our perpetually vertical structures. Moreover, we have not been grateful enough for our own circumstances nor sufficiently attentive to the cries for relief from others.
None of this is to our credit, and yet I wonder about the implications of the current narrative that, within the UN to be sure but also outside it, privileges judgment over thoughtfulness, judgment that rightly assumes a gendered dimension to the world’s many problems but which also implies that the value of men is solely a function of their ability to support and sustain others, that the intrinsic value of their activities is up for grabs, and that no matter what their journey or context, they remain directly accountable to the worst of their kind, the worst forms of patriarchal entitlement, the worst forms of violent recourse, the worst forms of inattentive and degrading parenting, the worst forms of predatory economic decisionmaking.
All of these conditions are real and all of them must cease. However, in certain circles at least, much of this assigned only to the actions and priorities of men. In addition, much of this is divorced from context, assuming that the demon-load residing in some can be attributed in the same measure to all, thereby justifying judgments that ascribe the worst to mostly all and the best to relatively none. In too many of our policy settings, we don’t talk about men, we don’t ask probing questions of men, we don’t show much interest in their well-being or growth edges aside from how their lives might negatively impact others. We tend to assume that we know all we need to know about men when what we actually know is clearly at low tide.
I don’t know entirely what to do about this condition, but on this Fathers Day when it seems safe enough and useful enough to speak of men, it also seems relevant to raise such concerns.
Because I know so many men who are not lording it over others, who are not trafficking in hostility, who are not venting their patriarchal spleens on a no-longer unsuspecting world; who are instead trying to understand and then off-load their unearned privilege. I know many men who spend more time wondering if they did the right thing coaching their children and investing their own life energy than wondering how they can separate yet another community and its people from their worldly assets. Whether others want to hear it or not, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, there are glimmers of sadness in the eyes of more than a few of the men I know, a sadness that things have simply not worked out the way they could have, the way they imagined they might – not for the self-sufficiency of their children or the strength of their marriages, not for the impact of their careers nor for prospects to reduce the misery load of a world which is arguably and generally in worse shape than it has been in some time, worse not primarily for men, but surely for many men also.
These are some of the people we have yet to engage in a larger social purpose, a purpose which can level and empower, can inspire and reassure. This Father’s Day, or any day for that matter, I urge you to reach out to those men for whom sadness is possibly crowding out ambition, those anxious to stop limping and get back to full living, those who need reassurance that they are more than “ringing absences,” that they indeed count for something and can count for more in this broken, screwy, patriarchy-saturated planet given the right assurances and contexts. For many of the men I have been honored to know, for many of the Fathers I have been honored to watch, most need something different to become their better selves, different than neckties and power equipment. They need to be asked better questions; they need fair and thoughtful judgments; they need persons around them sensitive to context including the context they have helped men create for themselves and others. Such men may also need help, while they are still on this earth in “calculating their happiness,” in translating sadness and fear into gratitude and thereby finding the energy to create more harmony and justice in this world until their time has passed.
My cousin’s time has passed. He tried as best he knew to create beauty and honor his responsibilities. He would want others to try also.
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