“Someone once said that every man is trying either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.” Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope
More than anything else, my (J) life is shaped by my relationship with my father. He is a central character in the vast majority of my most favored and most painful childhood memories. As a child, I was acutely aware that my father was a trendsetting man who was achieving many things, his friends and colleagues often pulling me aside to relate some tale of his greatness. As a teen, I found his legacy somewhat oppressive, smothering who I was, a challenge to my own individual identity. Now, as an adult, having learned that the past is nothing but a precursor to the future, with a son of my own to raise, I appreciate the lessons he taught me and the life he has led more than ever. I couldn’t have asked for a better model of intelligence, wisdom, decency, action and compassion.
For better or worse, the life of a father is the pathway for his son. Consciously and subconsciously, sons use their fathers’ lives as guideposts for their own. On the good side, we often compare our lives to our fathers’: are we doing enough? why did he do that? what must he have feeling at that time? what should I do now? On the bad side, we observe our fathers’ perceived mistakes and we swear not to make them ourselves, which, in a sense, would be a doubly disappointing act-both a slap to him and to us. No son ever wants to see his father defeated, and our avoidance of his mistakes is an effort to protect him from harm, to restore him to our earliest image of him: the strong, unbeatable champion.
Fathers must affirm their sons. Oscar de la Hoya once said that he would do anything just to hear his father say, “Son, you’re good enough.” I don’t see the mother-daughter or the father-daughter relationship unfolding quite this way. Certainly, there is something within the male human being, maybe the pressure to provide and survive, that makes him eye his father with a complex mix of admiration and protection.
Filed under: Family
