A Father's Weight, Part 2

The Good Father: On Men, Masculinity, and Life in the Family
by Mark O'Connell, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

Like so many men these days, Gary had suffered a kind of fatherlessness, the costs of which could be seen in the reasons he first came to talk with me. Sure, Gary had a good job. But as I learned about his education, and his singular academic accomplishments, it became clear that he was bored and underchallenged. He could get done what he needed to get done in a very brief time, using little or none of his creative mind. He spent most of his time daydreaming — playing privately with mathematical and technical problems that interested him but which had nothing to do with his job.

And sure, Gary loved his wife, Margaret, and their two children, Jason and Catherine. Margaret appreciated him as a decent husband and father, which he was, and he felt that she was a good wife and mother. But he didn't feel passionate and alive with his family. "I'm there," he told me, "but I'm not really there."

Gary and I went to work — on his detachment, and on the lack of meaning and passion that characterized his out-in-the-real-world life. Along the way we learned a lot.

I say "we" quite deliberately.

I learned because our talks led me to think not only about Gary's father but also about my own. I recalled how mine had been a withering and dying man who occasionally burst forth with fits of hepatic encephalopathy — transient out-of-control behavior brought on by the effects of his chronic alcoholism. I thought about how this man, who had seemed to me to be part ghost and part home care patient, had affected my life. I came, in particular, to know more about the ways in which my own pattern of withdrawal and self-deception grew from my fatherlessness.

And Gary, I believe, also learned, as we fought things out, usually playfully, but sometimes more seriously (particularly when I took him on about his ironic detachment). And while I don't wish, here or elsewhere in this book, to imply that the only thing that matters in life is one's relationship with one's father, I think you will be able to hear how some of Gary's vulnerabilities, in particular his pattern of withdrawal and self-deception, grew directly from his father's absence.

I will fast-forward to a conversation that occurred some three years into our therapy, when things had begun to change, and when Gary, by dint of hard work and commitment, had become more effective in his career and more present as a husband and a father.

One day, when he'd been building a stone wall, the feeling of working with his blistered, dirty hands led Gary to a memory. "All of a sudden I can picture my dad's hands," he said, beginning to sob. "He was good with his hands. They were strong — kind of flat. It's so weird. I thought he and I were so different. Me the long-haired freak that I was back then — him a military man. It turns out that a part of me is just like a part of him. Why couldn't we find each other?"

Gary had begun to remember his father. He had begun to feel how much he missed him, and to recognize that he, like so many children, had been profoundly shaped by his father's absence. The fleeting sugar high of "outsmarting" his father had only obscured the fact that he had needed his father desperately. As he grew more able to tolerate his pain, Gary could see that he had, as a boy, retreated into the privacy of his own mind so as to armor himself against loss and disappointment. And now, as an adult, his private "mind play," his working problems and thinking creatively in a place no one else would ever know, merely continued what he had done years before. Like my son when he knelt among his knights and beasts, Gary played a game that existed outside of his job and family, outside "the rules" of consensual, daylight life. He continually fled to a place he could control, a place where he could not be hurt.

These realizations led to changes. Rules, Gary now could see, weren't the "Great Fascist" after all. They were, as he came to call them, the "Great Father," guiding embodiments of the daylight world of competitive and cooperative interchange in which we all must try to live. Gary now resolved to step back into this world. He got himself a job that demanded that he use more of his mind, and he worked on getting his innovative thinking a more public airing. At home, he pushed himself to talk more intimately with his wife, and to be more of a presence in his children's lives. His efforts made him feel anxious, exposed, and vulnerable, but what he was doing mattered to him, and he stayed with it. His life began to feel more alive and grounded, as though he was, to use his own words, "really there."

I found Gary's self-confrontation both inspiring and fascinating. It challenged my assumptions about the goals, and limits, of therapeutic "cure." His life-solution was essentially an existential one. He saw the problem, saw what it was costing him, and he took a risk. He didn't think of himself as "cured"; rather, he simply committed himself to challenging what frightened him. You can hear how he felt about things when, toward the end of our time together, he told me, "I think that what has changed is that I would rather know what I can really do, even if it means feeling the pain of finding out that there are things I can't do. I think that it's better to stay in the real world than to go into my head, even though in my head I can pretend that anything is possible."

A Father's "Weight"

Salman Rushdie writes: "The reality of a father is a weight few sons can bear." What does Rushdie mean by this "weight"?

One could certainly argue that a father's "weight" is a burden of pain. This pain may flow from a father having been actively hurtful and injurious, or, as is the case for so many men and women, it may be the legacy of bitterness, hunger, disappointment, and anger that results from a father's being absent. It may even be the weight of a father's own pain, transmitted to the next generation. All of these weights are heavy indeed.

To my ear, however, Rushdie has more in mind. The word "weight" — so open-ended and evocative — comes as close to the essence of a father's authority as any I have heard. I believe that Rushdie also alludes to a weight that is to be honored, a deeply human and necessary experience that flows from what goes right between a father and a child. I'd say that Gary's father failed him because he, like me in my early years of fathering, and like so many other men struggling to find a place for their masculine, paternal authority, had no weight, at least not for his son. Gary couldn't feel his father's love, but that wasn't the whole of it. He also couldn't feel his father's impatience, irritation, pride, ambition, and anger. He didn't have his father's rules to shape himself to, and to push off against. Without his father's impact, his gravitational pull, Gary spun off in space, untouched and ungrounded. Not only did he not know his father, he also didn't know himself very well. How could he? He had not been able to bump up against his dad, to use these collisions to test himself out against a man whom he valued and trusted.

So, working from the lesson that can be learned in Gary's father's failure, here is the first of many attempts to go beyond Webster's, and to communicate both a deeper sense of what is meant by the words "a father's authority" and also a preliminary understanding of why authority is such a core element of being a good father.

In a mode that can be quite different from that of a mother, a father conveys to his children, ideally in a way that can be emotionally metabolized, the often reasonable, sometimes harsh, always inescapable, rules, expectations, and inevitabilities of life. A father does this by teaching his children about the realities of time and limit. He does this by being a relatively nonnegotiable "other." He does this by using the right amount of power at the right time to help his children understand that the world does not lie in their omnipotent control. In these ways, all of which involve bringing his very being, his weight, into contact with the mind of his child, a father inoculates that child against retreating into the muffled, daydream world of fantasy, pretend, and self-involvement. And so a father teaches enduring lessons about living and thriving in the real world.

Gary and His Son

The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. And then, as we all know, the children visit the sins of their fathers upon their own children.

As with so many men, Gary's sense of himself as a man was intimately and inextricably linked to his sense of himself as a father. As it turned out, much of our work became focused on his relationship with his son, Jason, who was eleven at the time we began.

Jason did reasonably well in school, and dabbled in sports and music but wasn't fully committed to any endeavor. I sensed that Jason was drifting, yet for some time I could not put my finger on why.

Eventually I realized that my lack of clarity reflected something about the father-son relationship. Gary was a decent man, and he was certainly an adequate father. However, just as his own father had with him, Gary stayed on Jason's periphery. Their relationship was without fight or struggle, in large part because Gary didn't weigh in with demands and expectations. For example, though Gary was himself a brilliant man, he didn't seem to be very interested in Jason's mind. Now some might say that Gary gave his son space to grow, but this wasn't the whole story. The fact was that Gary assumed that Jason's mediocre performance in school was a product of his being reasonably, but not exceptionally, intelligent, and he made this assumption without ever really getting to know his son's mind.

Over time I became troubled by the seemingly Teflon-smooth surface of Gary's relationship with Jason, and I increasingly called Gary's attention to the fact that father and son didn't scrape against each other very much. "You're being like your own father was with you," I'd say. "You can see what it cost you, and I imagine you can appreciate what it costs Jason when you do the same. What's going on that you keep your distance like this?"

Gary quickly acknowledged that something problematic was going on. He was not depressed, as his own father had been, and he had not retreated into alcohol. Nevertheless, he could tell that he was not all there. He seemed, at times, more like a pal or big brother than a parent. He didn't seem to realize how much Jason admired him and looked up to him. He didn't see himself through the eyes of his boy — as a big, strong, smart man, one who could use his fatherhood to shape his son's character and behavior. In essence, he lacked a sense of his own power and weight: his authority.

Once Gary realized that he was repeating what his father had done, he did what he did best — he resolved to change. He took Jason to his gym, and working out together became a regular routine. He involved the boy in building the stone wall, the one that had blistered his own hands and conjured memories of his own father. And he also became more involved in Jason's education. He challenged his son to get more from himself, sometimes by simply pointing out that Jason could do better. The two worked math and science problems together, and this gave Gary the occasion to show his son his own considerable talents (talents about which he had previously been overly modest). As things turned around (which they did quickly), Gary talked with his wife, and the family made a plan to send Jason to a more challenging school.

Two years after we began, Gary told me the following story about himself, and about a far more focused and content Jason: "I was working on the stone wall — you know, I never knew that I could be as happy as I am when I'm out there, in the crisp air, working with my hands, with the stone and the dirt. Anyway, Jason came out, and he worked with me for a while. He set several rocks. When he left, I went over to look at his work. It wasn't bad, but his rocks were a little loose. I thought, should I go chew him out? But I decided no, I'll wait till he comes out again, and I'll just talk to him about it. So an hour later, he came out to do some more work with me. I took him over to the rocks he'd set before. I showed him how they were loose, and I showed him how he had to fill in with more gravel to make them solid. He just listened. And after he'd worked for a while, he came over, and asked me to take a look at what he'd done. His rocks were in there really solid. I said that it was good, that was all. Just good! Neither of us said anything more. We just kept working — together. What else is there to say?"

As you can hear, Jason didn't need hard discipline, in the form of punishment and consequences. He wasn't that kind of kid. But Jason did need his dad's presence, his authoritative presence. Gary provided this in quietly forceful ways. He communicated to his boy not only his interest, persistence, and expectations, but also his own ambitions, struggles, and irritations. And in this way, he became the opposite of his own father's ghost. He became a man whose weight could be felt. He became a better father, and, as is always the case, in so doing he became a better man.

A Few Words on Method

There are many experts out there who fancy themselves able to pull the sword from just about any stone imaginable. They write in the popular literature about how to parent, how to love, how to discipline — about virtually all aspects of how to "be." Some of these experts are open-minded and thoughtful; quite a few are polemically driven. Some refer to research. Some of this research is reliable, some of it suffers from methodological flaws, and a surprisingly large percentage of it is influenced by ideological bias. Some of this popular work is worth knowing about, but the words "caveat emptor" apply even to the best of it. The expertise of others, no matter how smart, can never, by itself, lead us to better understand, and master, life's most deeply meaningful and personal experiences.

Moreover, as Ann Hulbert notes in her book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children, literature on parenting has undergone an endless series of pendulum swings, from one single-minded perspective to another. This certainly holds true for the surprisingly small subset of the parenting literature that pertains to fathering. On one side there is a "hard" school in which the father is king, and the rule is that children should have a clear sense of who gives the orders. On the other side there is a "soft" school, the aforementioned "fathers-should-be-more-like-mothers" school, in which men are exhorted to eschew what is seen as their traditional masculine roles for more "civilized" and "loving" attitudes like attunement, negotiation, and, as Susan Faludi puts it in her popular book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, "husbanding." Embedded in this division can be found a critical distinction. Is a father's masculine presence shaping, generative, and organizing, or is it oppressive, domineering, and even abusive? In other words, to introduce another important concept, is it authoritative or is it authoritarian?

While polemics do, at times, contain truths, in the end they are of limited value. For one thing, polarized thinking does not help us to embrace, and then work effectively with, our human natures: rather it seeks to simplify and control by disavowing one aspect of our essential selves in favor of another that is more palatable in the context of the given cultural moment.

Meanwhile another, related reason that we would be wise to be judicious in our use of the experts has to do with the critical matter of "authenticity."

The advice literature is based on the notion that what matters most is what you say and do; in other words, that to act a certain way is the same as to be a certain way. Well, it goes without saying that what you say and do matters a great deal. But it also needs to be said that saying and doing aren't the whole story. Words and actions, those things that are manifest and on the surface, often diverge from what is true beneath the surface. And when it comes to all manner of relationships, this divergence matters. When what you do or say accurately expresses what you feel, what you think — in essence, who you are — you are being authentic. When the opposite is true, you're being disingenuous. Authenticity is better. Wouldn't you rather be with someone who loves you deeply, even if he or she rarely tells you, than with someone whose affection is fleeting and superficial, even though he or she showers you with gifts, and tells you often and profusely how wonderful you are? Can't you usually feel which is more real? Our kids certainly can.

Gary read all kinds of self-help books. He and I went over ways that he could approach Jason. (I may be a psychoanalyst, but I'm not above offering advice and suggestion.) In the end, however, what mattered was that Gary was able to be himself in a way that both he and his son could feel, and use.

I raise the question of authenticity right at the start because it speaks to one of the central premises of this book: Fatherhood, like motherhood, indeed like most truly meaningful human endeavors, must be built from the inside out. If a man is to forge a solid relationship with his authority, indeed with any and all aspects of his fathering, he must learn to act from deep within his own self, that is, from all of the bedrock elements of his history, his psychology, and his constitution (including those parts of him that are relatively, and even distinctly, male). The advice literature can help with this in only a very limited way. "Answers," whether they be to simple and mundane dilemmas like how to get a child to leave a game of knights for the task of homework, or to those urgent and complex life crises that inevitably occur in family life, must be deeply personal and hard-earned; one arrives at them only by making the quite often painful journey of getting to know oneself, warts and all.

This book, therefore, aims less to "advise" than to begin a conversation.

For my part, I'll speak from a number of vantage points.

One is that of twenty years' experience talking, as a psychologist and a psychoanalyst, with fathers and mothers, indeed with all manner of men, women, and children. Throughout the book I will relate the stories and the struggles of my patients. When possible I've shared what I've written with my patients, not only to get permission to use their stories, but also for the sake of accuracy. When such interchange was not possible, I did my best to capture the essence of the persons, the relationships, and the issues involved. In all cases, the people and situations portrayed in these stories are heavily disguised.

I will also draw on the popular and academic literature on fatherhood and the myriad topics that relate: motherhood, gender, biology and neurobiology, discipline, authority, violence, aggression, sexuality, and more. I'll summarize the relevant debates. I have my own biases, and, to be sure, these biases will influence my distillations and interpretations of the literature. Nevertheless, I'll do my best to acquaint you with the field such that you can decide for yourself what you wish to reject, examine further, or embrace. Please keep in mind that theories of human behavior, from the most simplistic self-help formulas to the most thoughtful academic treatises, are always limited and imperfect. Such theories, mine included, are inevitably sculpted from the psychology of their authors.

And still another vantage point is my own struggle with authority, in particular my efforts to be a better father, a better husband, a better teacher and therapist, and a better man. In telling you about myself I don't mean to hold out my solutions as a beacon for you to follow. Rather I'll tell you about myself so that you can evaluate what I offer critically and objectively. And I'll tell you this right up front: Every thought that follows is shaped, in ways both obvious and not, by my own imperfect efforts to heal the fault lines and to fill the void created by my own father's death when I was five.

I'll end this opening chapter by recounting a conversation I had that involved a father and son who had come to see me after years of uneasy estrangement. The father, David, was a successful man, somewhat cautious and overly fastidious, but well meaning. His son, Zach, was seventeen, and he also did quite well — academically, athletically, and socially, but in other ways he was the opposite of his father: gregarious, charismatic, and a bit impulsive. He had gotten into some minor scrapes toward the end of his senior year in high school, and his parents were concerned that the prestigious college to which he had been admitted would rescind its acceptance.

At first Zach and I met individually. During these meetings his complaints centered on his father. "I'm about to move out for college," he said, "and after seventeen years I feel like I hardly know the guy. We never horsed around when I was a kid, he never gets mad, everything is nice, neat, and in its place. You can't accuse the guy of anything, he's done his job. But who is he? Jesus, you'd think with me getting in trouble he could at least freak out a little. My mom is all worried, but my dad, it seems like just another opportunity to 'do the right thing.'"

Zach and I decided to invite his father to our individual sessions, and in these Zach spoke, in a direct but kind way, about how distant he felt from his father. His father, in turn, tried dutifully to respond. He asked Zach what was missing, he wondered what he could do, he wasn't angry, indeed he was hardly even defensive. It was clear that he cared, and that he wanted to do right by his son. But it seemed that the harder he tried to do the "right thing" the more frustrated Zach became, and the more frustrated Zach became the more guilty the boy felt about being upset at this man, his father, who was obviously trying so very hard.

Eventually, however, David spoke of having been aware of the distance for some time. He recalled that when Zach was fourteen he had talked with a local expert in the field of parenting, a man who had prescribed a series of exercises for him to do with his son. Father and son were supposed to share their feelings with each other, to write down what each thought of the other, to communicate what each liked about the other, what each disliked, and so on. "When that didn't work," David said, "I think I sort of gave up. I didn't know how to reach you."

Zach, finally exasperated, now shook free of his guilt and inhibition with full-throated anger: "Christ, Dad, I didn't give a shit about that stuff. You just hid behind it. Don't you know what I want?"

"What?" his father asked.

"You. I want a relationship with you. I want a father."

Copyright © 2005 by Mark O'Connell, Ph.D.

About the Author

Dr. Mark O'Connell received his doctorate in psychology from Boston University and his postdoctoral training in psychoanalysis from the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Alison, and their three children. He has a psychotherapy practice of adults, adolescents, and couples, and serves on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and the Harvard Medical School. He writes and speaks about fatherhood, family life, and masculinity.