I’m not much on giving advice. You have to inhabit a kind of expertise to do that, and I consider myself a neophyte in most things. I’d tend to agree with President Truman, who suggested, “I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want, and then advise them to do it.” Just so. And perhaps the same with adults. So these aren’t imperatives, just some observations and beliefs about fatherhood that I appropriated for myself while working on “The Book Of Dads.”
1. The job never gets easier. My daughter is almost 4, and I suppose I had some notion (or hope) that it would. But while fatherhood’s physical demands may wane—sleepless nights, a tired back from horsey rides—the emotional and psychological stuff gets harder.
2. We are lucky if we had good fatherly examples, but only slightly luckier than those who didn’t. Because even if you had a good model, your child is not you, and therefore it will be different to be a father to your child than it was for your own dad to be a father to you.
3. Fatherhood connects you into the never-ending chain of life more deeply than anything else you do. We understand the ferociousness of animals when we have children. The scientist Stephen Jay Gould even posited that children are cute and round and have big eyes for a biological reason; they make us feel warm and fuzzy and protective of them, thereby guarding the ongoing existence of the species.
4. I will make mistakes, many of them, and some of them will cause lasting damage to my daughter. At some point—if indeed it hasn’t already happened—I will say something very stupid and thoughtless and hurtful to her, and she will remember it for years and years, recalling minute details of the scene (how she could see dust motes in the afternoon shaft of light coming into the room), and the pain of this memory will diminish for her only slightly with time. But the wound will slowly scab over, and if I keep doing my fatherly best, she may forgive me eventually. Chances of this will increase dramatically if she ever has children of her own.
5. Pretty soon in life you need to let your children know that things are very often gray and seldom black and white. For instance, you want to teach your child to be honest, to never lie. Yet the ongoing peacefulness of the entire human social system depends upon unimportant lies—“Did you have a good time at the birthday party, Lucy?” “Yes, Mrs. ______, it was wonderful.” Etc.
6. The closeness of your kids’ relationship to you will probably ebb and flow as with most relationships in life. Sometimes they’ll be passionate about you. Sometimes less so. With luck and patience, they come back around.
7. Don’t read Philip Roth’s novel “American Pastoral” until your children are grown. Pondering the evil your children may be capable of despite your best efforts will scare the bejesus out of you. Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” on the other hand—despite its bleaker-than-bleak post-apocalyptic setting—may be the most affirming novel of fatherhood ever written.
8. Tragedy strikes with aweinspiring alacrity. The mind avoids contemplating it, but we all know our children can be taken from us, or we can be taken from our children too soon. I don’t like the admonition to live each day as if it’s your last. Our lives would be frenzied pieces of bric-a-brac if we all did that. But don’t be foolish, either. Life won’t go on forever. Say the things to your children that need saying.
9. Your children aren’t you. They’re their own beings. They have their own predilections, their own disdains. It’s sometimes a hard fact to bear in mind. You’ve done everything for them, you’ve witnessed their whole development into a person. No wonder it’s hard to let go and quit being insistent with them.
10. You’ll never understand the mystery. It will never quite make sense to you why your heart swells when you look at your child. It’s like grasping infinity for a split second. One thing’s true: When I look into my daughter’s blue eyes, that moment is as close as I come to seeing into the universe.
Ben George is the editor of the literary journal “Ecotone.” He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter, and teaches at UNC Wilmington.
