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Sir,
I recently came across a picture of a father fixing his daughter’s hair. It had me thinking, such sights are rare. Sights of fathers being loving and gentle with their children are hard to come by. We occupy a world that has bestowed upon the female to be the sole giver of affection, care and providing the day to day necessities a child may require.
A man, on the other hand, is basically expected to be the hunter, gatherer and provider. His involvement in the home ends up being minimised to superficial interactions with the children and monitoring academic progress; always something that doesn’t require emotional perusal. This role-playing was manufactured by some anonymous authority that has kept our fathers away from us, even when living in the same house.
Assumed
I always assumed that having an absent father meant one was definitely bound to have more daddy issues than, say, a person whose father was present. A father’s absenteeism, I assumed, created a vacuum in a child’s life of all the unlived memories that peers were sharing with their own fathers and the undiagnosed feelings of rejection that last way beyond childhood. But the more I interact with people, it’s evident that even children with present fathers have daddy issues. These issues seem to lie in the mere fact that children long for a relationship with their fathers, yet due to socialisation, fathers withhold that level of emotional interaction and assign that responsibility to the mother. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all fathers; some do share a much more personal relationship with their children.
Valued
A father’s presence is often considered slightly less important and the mother’s presence highly valued. I guess it is because the woman carries the child for months, so to some biological extent, the mother shares a special bond with the children. We can see how viciously protective mothers are of their offspring, it’s everywhere across nature.
There is this tendency to assume that the mother needs to be more involved. I mean, it takes two to make a child, surely the parenting should function the same way? We cannot undervalue any parent’s contribution to a child’s life. Both have certain roles that they need to play in moulding this young human. But I cannot stress how important a father’s presence is to both the girl child and boy child.
The father and son dynamic is always plagued with interesting interactions. Fathers always view their sons as the child that will further the surname. It’s also biological as we are programmed to leave as many copies of our DNA as possible, therefore, the son is viewed as that conduit.
But the way the structures of maleto-male interactions are set up, the father-son relationship begins to be plagued by tension as fathers have specific expectations of their sons, but deny them any emotional interaction.
We create the same pathologies of past generations because we, as men, are expected to be void of any feeling because this is inexplicably viewed as a weakness. Those sons then in turn teach their sons the same, and that’s how we got here. This is why at times the son runs to the feminine energy, to gain relief from the hardness of the father-son relationship.
I have much respect for fathers of this world who love their children and converse with them about more than academics or any other empty conversation. We know being a parent is probably the hardest job in the world, but you’re necessary to your children’s lives.
Z N