“I’ve Been Given My Father’s Test”
I hope I don’t fail
Every young man reaches the point in his development, his edification, where he will proclaim the statement aloud.
“I’ll never be like my father.”
The statement is screeched into the atmosphere. It’s typically made in pain. A pain that the man you loved or have been educated by on the semblances of masculinity has broken your heart.
Maybe they showed you they weren’t following through on their own teachings. Maybe they abandoned you. Maybe they hurt someone you loved and placed you as the appointed protector before it was your time.
For any reason or explanation, all of us men reach this particular point in our lives where, in anger, in heartbreak, and in pain, we disavow our fathers when we should be criticizing and disavowing their actions.
We hide our father wounds deep, and if we’re lucky, we share our emotional burdens with the women in our lives. The ones we choose to be in them, wives, girlfriends, etc. This in itself is a tragedy. Any parent or parental figure who loses the trust of a loved one is grounds for a real seismic analysis. But I’ll make the argument that this alone isn’t the worst part of it all.
We look to the heavens as men, and to our wives, and to our children, promising them that we will never be like the men who hurt us. Only for us to carry out the same patterns and behaviors, albeit in a different context and a new era.
This is the mindscape my brain sits in. I am cognizant of my father's and the failings of most of our fathers. You could be a perfect stranger, and perhaps you would have the ability to tangibly describe my predicament. Despite the need to be seen, the lust for a community of my own, of like-minded individuals facing the same hurdles and challenges, I want to move past the bars that have kept my healing caged. I don’t just want to trade war stories and show scars and feel emboldened in my pain; I need to feel healed and progress forward to a better path.
And the only way to do that is to do this.
I currently have to sit down, strategize, and remove myself from the echo-chambers of finger-pointing. Or perhaps I should more accurately say that I was forced to sit down and remove myself. Every day I am above ground, every day I am outside, I am handed my father’s test of masculinity.
Our Pride is a Birdcage
This beautifully ornate, designed contraption is meant to house and maintain custody over a thing that was never meant to be confined.
Respect, pride, and ego often operate as similar mechanisms. Contraptions gilded and shimmering as if they descended from a high, ethereal place, only for them to rust as the years go by, yet still maintain your captivity.
As men, we speak so profoundly about respect, pride, and ego that we treat them as idols that cannot be disavowed or questioned. And when they are all hell breaks loose.
I am not calling for us to be someone’s doormat, I am saying that often our mythologizing of these terms means that we operate at a hypervigilant mindstate when we feel that they are being challenged.
Our insecurities allow us to sense a “tone” or a countenance that may not exist. We may let our anger and emotions get the best of us and destroy beautiful relationships built, to prove we can’t be trifled with. We may go out of our way to seek conflict to prove the same preceding point.
I, too, when I came of age, had to reconcile these truths. For these were the same multiple-choice questions my father received every day of his life and will receive until he passes.
“Will you show compassion when that person disrespects you?” Will you let God sort them out? Or will you let other people’s perceptions alter your actions and seek revenge? Will you use the little piece of leverage you have not for your survival but in an attempt to flex your muscle?
As men, we are all asked these questions every day, and many days we fail. For many days, we have allowed the dogma that has been fed for generations to mask our humanity and play puppetmaster with our decisions.
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We can no longer destroy our families or rip ourselves from relationships as a means of exonerating our perceptions of respect. It’s killing us and further perpetuating cycles of things we claimed to disavow.
The Details Matter Little, The Impact Is Ultimate
We miss so much of the real-life choices, and there are many, from our fathers’ test answers, because we focus too heavily on the individual circumstances and situations. We attribute all focus to the individual circumstance versus the impact it had. Then we end up with the same result, and we feel we should be pardoned because it didn’t look exactly the same.
For example, let’s say your father is an Appliance Repair Tech who has never owned his own business and was never at home and readily available to you or your mother. If you only focus on the details, you reject the immediate and tangible aspects of him that you feel contributed to his absence. That would be his profession and his status as an employee, not an owner.
So you work your butt off, you go to school, get a law degree, and you open your own firm. You're raking in any and every decimal of cash available. You have a wife and kids at home, but you believe they will suffice knowing you're at work providing them a lifestyle different than the one you had.
You’re landing all these cases and winning, but your kids don’t know you. You’re earning all this acclaim, but your marriage is on the rocks. You missed all these milestones and birthdays, and suddenly, your achievements don’t cover the pain you're feeling.
Suddenly, you hit middle age, and it dawns on you in a shock, staring at yourself in the mirror.
“Oh my God, I am exactly like my father.”
As men and as people in general, we are terrible at understanding the concepts that aren’t immediately able to be held and felt. And in turn, because we are so visual, we miss opportunities to grow and be better because we are still waiting for that explicit note.
The answers aren’t in the details, but in the impact and outcome. How did your father’s absence make you feel, and from that level of textural emotional analysis, what can be done to alleviate that stressor on your family? What guidelines need to be met to protect yourself from stepping over that line of making your job your new family? Or if your father struggled with fidelity issues, what can help you keep your gaze steady on your wife and partner?
The lesson and the answer aren’t just in the explicit; it is also in the implicit, but are still so tangibly felt.
Empathy Through Experience
“One day, when your older you’ll understand.”
My father would always say these words to me. Typically, he would utter them in moments when an apology was in order, or an objective failing needed to be more subjective and nuanced to shield from the pain of scrutiny.
They eventually did carry more weight than perhaps even he imagined. I believe with 95% of my heart and brainpower, he believed that I would see things from his perspective and make the same mistakes. Of course, he never saw them as mistakes at the time.
The truth in my father’s words that is so universal and profound is that all of us men understand consciously or subconsciously our fathers. We do one day reach the fork in the road where we must choose. We feel the burdens and the weights on our chest, and from that get a bird’s eye view into his mind and decision-making. We may succeed in picking the best path, not necessarily the right path, or we may be confined to our past teachings and what was instilled in us.
This is why the statement that started this whole conversation is so unproductive.
“I’ll never be like my father.”
It’s a brutal rejection that kills the man and doesn’t analyze his behaviors and their impact. It also alludes to the notion that your habits aren’t already absorbed until the point the statement is uttered.
Here is an uncomfortable truth. Our parents made us, biologically and physically. What was swimming around in their hearts and minds joined together and was passed down to us when we took that first cry. You can hide from it, you can change your name, move to another land, and adopt that culture. However, we will never be able to deny the truth that we are our parents' children and they nurtured us for better or worse.
All of this doesn’t mean for a second that your destiny is written, and that your parents' life is your life. But we cannot, as men, let our anger and emotions deny us the truth of our history. For it is history that provides the answers and keys to our future.
Let’s replace the phrase:
“I’ll never be like my father.”
With:
“My father struggled in this area; this is what I can do to be better.”
