astronauts, farther and farther away from the heartbeat of our humanity. We have sentenced our children to the bewildering experience of growing up with a desperate need to feel loved by a father who all too often is simply not there, either physically or emotionally.
There are even more statistics—ones that reveal the devastating ripple effects on society of absent fathers who fail to forge strong emotional ties to their children. These statistics are the most frightening of all, because they are, by definition, so impersonal and, tragically, so irrevocable: Nearly 80 percent of those who end up in our juvenile justice system lived in homes without a father; the overwhelming majority of our adult prison population grew up without fathers; the single strongest predictor of violent juvenile crime, specifically robbery and murder, is that the child grew up without a close relationship to his father.3
The statistics don't lie. We are in a crisis of major proportions, and the casualties—both parents and children—are increasing at an alarming rate. We find ourselves at a juncture in time, where a staggering proportion of men feel distant and alone, each of us, like the boy in the hermetically sealed bubble, moving through life separated from everyone else by some inexplicable, invisible barrier. It begins when we are just boys, too often boys without the fathers we need, and it persists when we grow up, becoming fathers ourselves and, out of ignorance, re-creating the cycle of distance with our own children. And we've reached this place despite the fact that none of us ever wanted to be here.
My children are all grown and have families of their own. I rarely see them and when I do, it is usually strained and awkward. I know that it is mostly my fault because I was never there when they were young, but that doesn't make it any easier.
I just wish I knew back when I was a young father what I know now. When I finally realized what was really important to me—my kids—I had to face the reality that I had done this to myself.
It is the absence of the father—physically and, much more important, emotionally—that is at the heart of the crisis. Paradoxically, however, it is the miracle of becoming a father that opens up for us the most inviting, most surprising, and most promising avenue for finding our way back to our hearts and souls. Fatherhood is a precious opportunity, and we know it, even if we cannot comprehend or articulate why. It is something we feel in our bones. We want to understand it, to face the challenge and be found worthy; we know that there is something to it that can transform us if only we do it right, but often we don't even know how to begin.
Out of fear, out of ignorance, it is easiest to gravitate toward the patterns of fathering in which we were raised. From the birth of our first child, we tend to concede the role of comforter and nurturer to our wives and find ourselves removed from our child. The family dynamic becomes established, and we find ourselves somehow inexplicably “outside.” For most of us it is not a good place to be, but we feel powerless to change it; we don't even have a vocabulary for how to talk about it. It is just a feeling, a very deep and painful feeling, but talking about our feelings is not something with which men are terribly comfortable.
This distance, which has been created slowly and silently, can no longer be tolerated. Somehow now, not tomorrow, not next year, we need to begin to forge a path back to ourselves and our children, to discover how to create and maintain deep and strong emotional connections with them.
Inretrospect, it is astounding that we could have allowed things to deteriorate so dramatically without noticing. As painful as it might be to admit, sometimes life must deliver us a solid blow to the solar plexus before we get the point. For many men that blow comes with divorce, when distance becomes an inescapable result, and they are suddenly faced with the bleak probability that the strength of their connection to their children will be severely tested.
The pain I was feeling and that of my ex-wife, I reckoned, were our just desserts for the situation we had conspired to land ourselves in. But the boys, then just three and five, could scarcely be expected to understand what was going on. I wept loudly each evening as I drove to a strange apartment with the grief and bewilderment of these two innocents fore-most in my mind. I had no idea what to do—no road map, little guidance, and precious few positive stories to tell myself about what was happening. Instead I could count on only an act of faith, a fool's promise perhaps. I could hear the song going round in my head, “Everything's gonna be all right, everything's gonna be all right.”
For many men, divorce is a defining moment. Standing amid the rubble of shattered illusions, broken promises, and best intentions gone awry, it can be a time of painful clarity if faced courageously and honestly. Over and over in these pages, the one issue that surfaces with overwhelming power for men is the absolute terror at the prospect of losing their children through divorce. It is from this battered emotional outpost that the crisis looms clear and threatening, and it is largely from these men, struggling to come to grips with how to maintain and nurture a connection to their children, and from the growing ranks of full-time fathers, often treated as an oddity rather than the pioneers they are, that the alarm is being sounded.
This book is a report from men on the front line. The original inspiration came from Denys Candy, a friend and father who has grappled with maintaining strong bonds with his children despite the distance imposed by divorce. Since this has been my experience also-I was divorced when my children were very young and, for the past sixteen years, I too have searched for ways to remain connected-Denys's idea struck a cord. I began to search out other fathers—eventually interviewing more than a hundred—young, old, and in between, and in all kinds of circumstances: still married and living with their children, divorced, single, remarried with stepchildren, even some grandfathers. I wanted to find out what they had learned about how to be a good father. More important and somewhat surprising, I also learned how they felt about their own fathers and the process of fathering itself.
What I found initially was alarming. Although one of the most important goals of almost every father I spoke with was to have a close relationship with his children, when it came to knowing how to get there, far too many men admitted being at a painful loss. But I also found something quite hopeful that makes up the heart of this book: a depth of feeling and openness that was powerful and consistent. The answers may not always be clear, but the commitment to finding them was unwavering.
I've also come to see that when discussing fathering there are no experts. There are only men who have tried to do their best and are willing to share their experience-their accomplishments and their failures, their heartaches and their joys, their confusion and their clarity.
There are no secret answers. Building and nurturing a father-child relationship requires the knowledge that it can be done, the commitment that it will be done, the persistence to keep on trying, and the courage to do whatever is necessary to make sure it does get done.
The next two chapters explore how we got here, first from a social and then a more personal level, with the belief that this understanding is important only in that it can help us ease our way back out. This is not a time or a place to assess fault–and it would a heartless and futile undertaking. What we need is not the paralysis of guilt or the distraction of assigning blame, but rather the commitment to not let ourselves and our children continue to drift apart, encouragement and support from those who are finding their way back, and bold signposts to help us on our way.
With this book, the one hundred of us hope to at least make a start: to explore the problems that fathers face, and to identify the things we need to do, the feelings we need to become more comfortable with, the parts of our role as fathers that we need to have a deeper understanding of, and the mistakes we need to avoid in order to nurture our relationship with our children.
We can make fathering a word that is as comfortable as mothering, one that evokes warmth, strength, security, and a deep unbreakable bond of love. But it will take understanding and courage.
