Imperfectly Fine Fathers
Lets take a moment, ladies and gentlemen, to honour the imperfectly fine fathers of the world. This isn’t about the bumbling and the fumbling, the buffoons that are overused and abused in sitcom television - the idiots set up in apology for centuries of violence and aggression. This is about the lost and the damned. The dads with demons. The broken and patchwork fathers who pull themselves together enough to raise their kids with a strength and a verve that others may lack.
As fathers, naturally, most of us want our children to see the best in us: the virtue, the discipline, the compassion, the humility, the fidelity (have you ever read Wristwatches and Radios by the way?). But there is so much to be gained by our progeny witnessing the scars and the scourges that we grapple with. They need to understand and to grasp that all of us, no matter what, are fallible and fallen. They need to see that greatness has little to do with inherent, effortless virtues and dispositions that come naturally and easily.
As fathers, we are critically positioned to teach our children, often without a single word spoken or scripted, the virtue of fighting our own worst habits and instincts. They need to see us grappling with our demons, working daily and diligently to become better men. It lies in the toil and the tension of the given moment, where we make our missteps and set ourselves right again. They need to see us in our moments of simple, humble triumph and service, but in the context of a life that has been human and flawed to make sense of it all.
We do ourselves and our families a disservice when we present virtue and victory as neatly packaged ideals that have little to do with struggle and sacrifice. They are straw men to be torn down as unrealistic and impossible standards to reach for, with the possibility of alienating us and our kids instead of inspiring them. We should revere heroic virtue, not only for its endpoint, but the journey that takes us beyond the limitations and vices that held us back to build a new way of being, day by day.
My own kids have seen me struggle with a range of challenges. These have included focus, anger, presence, and diligence. They’ve seen me strive to grow and change making both incremental changes in my day to day life, as well as difficult life decisions to be able to give more time to my wife and children. They’ve seen me struggling with finding a balance between my work and my responsibilities here at home, eventually making a decision to step away from a leadership role and cut down to a four day work week. They’ve seen me striving to fulfil a spiritual vocation that often demands time away from them. They’ve seen me walk away from an argument when I know I’m becoming too angry to be rational. They’ve come down in the mornings to find me worn and weary, with my hands upon the keyboard because the early mornings are the only time I can find to write. They’ve seen me apologise, rebuild, restore and repair, time and time again. They’ve seen me distracted and distempered by art, music or the struggle to make time for physical disciplines.
They see these things and they know that it matters to push, fight, focus and create a life around the work, the faith, the meaning and purpose you seek to bring to your life and the world around you. Nobody reaches fatherhood and sanctity at the same time. Ever. But nor are the two mutually exclusive. What I believe, or rather what I know through personal experience, is that fatherhood gives us the opportunity, the strength, the greatest reason we could ever have to be better men.
We bring our scars, our distractions, our obsessions and our failures. But we bring them to a new fight, a new way of living that recognises that the greatest things we could ever accomplish are often the simplest, the humblest day to day sacrifices we make for the ones we love. The greatest accomplishment any man can make is to live with his scars, his flaws and his fears, but bear them with a spirit of service, gratitude and continual repentance and a process of redemption that makes us true men, true fathers, rather than the men we’ve otherwise been. This, is when broken dads are best.