The Collected Wisdom of Fathers. Will Glennon
Director, Dads and Daughters,
and author of Dads and Daughters:
How to Inspire, Support and Understand
Your Daughter When She's Growing Up So Fast
My copy of the first edition is crumpled, with most of its pages dog-eared, dozens of sections underlined or bracketed, and more than one stain from something spilled on it. The book looks so abused because it was (and still is) so much used. When they were teenagers, my daughters teased me about the book's condition, even as I (believe it or not) sometimes read some of its insights to them and (believe it or not) they actually listened.
This isn't the first fathering book I've owned, but it's the first one I read straight through. That's because Will Glennon and the dads he interviewed are too smart to do the silly things so many of those other books do, like presume to lay out ten guaranteed steps to becoming the ideal dad. I read The Collected Wisdom of Fathers without stopping because it was the first place I heard the voices of men speaking to me, from every page, about fatherhood's real questions, uncertainties, obligations, opportunities, and unimaginable joy.
It's never been easy to be a dad, and recent times hold their own special challenges. Our culture expects fathers to remove ourselves from our children, reinforcing the absurd notions that “providing” for our family is confined to the wallet, that rearing children is mother-only territory, and that fathers are second-class parents. It's important to remember that we men often buy into these very notions, and that the solution does not lie in getting pissed off about it or finding someone to blame (including our own fathers).
Like most men I know, my father said very little to me about being a father or what it meant for him to be my dad. In his actions, I read flashes of fathering lessons, some more clear than others: work hard, hug and kiss your kids, never talk directly about serious stuff (like sex or money), drink a lot, hold everything in until you burst out in rage, care deeply about social justice and faith. Some of these lessons I cherish, some I could have done without, and others I still don't comprehend. But never did he speak to me—nor do I imagine his father ever spoke to him—about the most important event of his life: being a dad.
It seems clear that the first solution to our fathering challenges lies in breaking this “Silence of the Dads.” Will Glennon and the other men in The Collected Wisdom of Fathers powerfully illustrate how to begin. We have to start talking to each other. I draw great comfort and inspiration from the voices in this book; they help me know that I'm not alone in my moments of uncertainty, that other fathers have wisdom, humor, and experience to guide me (if only I have the courage to ask), and that I'm lucky to have my very own challenges rather than the more difficult ones some other fathers face.
Most important, The Collected Wisdom of Fathers showed me that one thing never changes about fathering, no matter what uncertainty, challenge, fear, hurt, joy, circumstance, geography, personality, or other variable I encounter. My first obligation as a father is to do everything I can to nurture and strengthen my relationship with my children.
I've best learned how to do this from the fathering pioneers of our times, men who (like Will Glennon) live away from their children because of divorce, separation, or other circumstances—and stepfathers who step into the already-established lives of their kids. Successful live-away dads and stepdads do their fathering on purpose; they make time and sacrifices to be with their kids. They know that the job can't get done through blaming or worrying over the behavior of a wife, an ex-, a court judge, a schoolteacher, a relative, a boss, or anyone else. The job gets done by using our only truly effective tool (and the only tool we ultimately can influence): our-selves. If my behavior, attitudes, resentments, mistakes, prejudices, or inexperience get in the way of nurturing my relationship with my children, then (with the help of the many dads who've been down this road before) my job is to cast those limitations aside.
Yes, fathering is scary and confusing sometimes. But, as I wrote in my book Dads and Daughters, “Fathering can be stunningly euphoric, too. The most powerful name anyone will ever call us is ‘Daddy.’ When our name is Dad, we hold infinite opportunity in our hands.”
The Collected Wisdom of Fathers can give you the courage to absorb everything the name “Daddy” means. You'll begin to understand how much you mean to and influence your child, and how much she means to and influences you. Glennon and company show us that we are better men because we're fathers. Of course we'll screw up and stumble sometimes, but that's part of the gig. The bottom line: When we start listening to other dads, we learn that no man ever found a more wonderful job than the profession of Father.
Introduction
When I first undertook to pull together the material for the first edition of this book, I was motivated simply by the discovery that no other book on the subject directly represented the voices and experiences of real fathers. Every other book I had found out there was written by some sort of “expert” (usually a therapist or clergy). As a man, I knew that men don't take easily to being told by experts how to do things, particularly things as important as being a father. And, as a father who had to struggle alone through learning about being a father, I also knew that there was no such thing as an “expert” in this area—there was only a very large pool of dads in various stages of training, all learning and making their own mistakes, largely in isolation from each other.
What I wanted to do was talk to as many fathers as I could to try to glean the best and most important lessons we had learned and turn that into something like the collective wisdom of fathers. The process itself was an extraordinarily powerful one. In my twentysomething years of being a father, I don't think I'd ever talked to another man to share experiences around fatherhood, and now all of the sudden I was deep into hours-long discussions with more than 150 dads. Not surprisingly, but increasingly poignant, father after father told me that our interview was the first time they had ever had this conversation.
Although talking about the kids and problems or issues in dealing with them is one of the first topics women dive into, we men rarely if ever get around to it at all, and that turns out to be a real tragedy. The wealth of knowledge and wisdom about this most difficult of all jobs is out there in abundance. Unfortunately we acquire this wisdom by stumbling around making mistake after mistake until we finally get it right, by which time our beautiful resilient children are all grown up. Then all that hard-won knowledge sits silently in the backs of our. minds as we watch the newest generation of fathers stumble along the same path we did.
One of the most moving lessons I learned when interviewing all those fathers was how unbelievably deeply they loved their children. As the saying goes, big boys don't cry, and men certainly don't, yet in well over half the interviews the dads at some point broke down in tears. Tears of pain, tears of shame, tears of frustration, tears of love so strong it hurt, just a pure deep flood of overwhelming emotion. At the same time I was struck by how frighteningly often these loving men simply did not know how to translate that love in a way that their children really received it, and how often our instincts as men was to do the exact wrong thing. Fathering is not a role we are well prepared for, and until and unless we start talking to one another we will simply learn our lessons the hard way and leave a tragic trail of open wounds behind us.
At the core of this most difficult undertaking is the simple fact that childhood is almost entirely an emotional experience, and as a product of growing up male in American culture, most new fathers are relatively challenged in the world of emotions. It can make for a devastating combination, with dads constantly (and desperately) trying to respond to their children's emotional pleas with logic and solutions, when what they need from him is a powerfully felt and articulated emotional bond.
In the nine years since the first edition was published, many things have changed, and unfortunately many have not. The most exciting development is that more new fathers are diving into the experience of childrearing and exploring how to get more fully and deeply engaged in the lives of their children. Equally exciting is the beginnings, at least, of an awareness that, for everyone's sake, we absolutely must begin raising our sons to be well-integrated, emotionally intelligent men, so that when their turn comes to assume the