I think about parenting and fathering a lot. Obviously a lot right now, given what I'm going through. But it's been a big part of my work forever, long before I became a father myself. Lately I've been thinking a lot about fatherlessness and its cosenquences, and I do so wish I had no personal context for these thoughts. This is an extract from an unpublished essay:
Someday, I'll write a book about what fathers do. I think about it a lot, watching myself as I work through life with my children. I do a lot of mechanical, caretaker-like stuff for them--feeding them and doing their laundry and leaning on them to pick up their toys and brush their teeth--but this is not what I view as my job as a father. The important thing I do for my children is teaching them things. I don't mean instructing them in academic topics or helping them to master skills. We do a lot of that, and I enjoy it immensely. But my job as a father is to teach my children the principles by which I live. If you read my essays and my fiction, you can see me talking about this stuff all the time. Teaching my children how to live happy lives upholding inflexible principles of morality is my job as a father, and I like to think I'm pretty good at it.From there, you can see where Reunion comes from. I don't often provide an interpretive context for my fiction, but here it's rather hard to hide. There are other brews percolating within me right now, too. William Cheshire, a columnist I admire immensely, has recently written on the topic, as have others of note. And as a result of my Testimony and Censorship pages, I've been hearing from many, many people who have truly awful stories to tell. As a culture, we have made war on fathers. In so doing, we have made war on their children. And now their children are making war on us. What goes around, comes around...We read all the time about the crisis of fatherlessness, and this is the real crisis. Surely the children who are bastardized by indifference or bastardized by the welfare state or bastardized by the divorce courts could profit from a father's income, could benefit by a father's caretaking. But what the children of America are starving for is the fatherhood that I practice, that fatherhood that teaches children how to live without betraying the very principles that human life requires. The crisis of fatherlessness that ultimately erupts in gunfire in the midnight streets is not a crisis of cash, not a crisis of caretaking. It's a crisis of morality, whole generations of American youth who have cash and caretaking in sufficient quantities, but who are deprived of what I am old-fashioned enough to call upbringing. We have engineered our society such that many, many children are never brought up, and, lord!, aren't they tearing us down!
For many decades now, our culture has made war on men, on what men stand for, on what men believe. But I stand here proudly and firmly for the principles I learned from the men in my life. I believe in doing the right thing, the decent thing, even when the expedient course might work more to my advantage. I believe in telling the truth, and in challenging my listeners to check up on me, even when I might be more profited by deceit. I believe in rectitude, first, last, ever, and I don't believe that any good of mine can ever be served by betraying principles I know to be just. This is how I live. And this is what I strive to impart to my children.
I intend to write a lot more about this, although I don't know when just yet. Surely, though, there's enough here already to keep you reading for a while.
I meet and talk to children all the time, and it's one of the particular joys of my existence. In one way or another, I manage to convey to them the most important principle I know: Fight for your life. Discover what you want from life, then strive for it until it is yours. Don't cheat yourself with a feigned indifference, and don't let anyone rob you of what is rightfully yours. Fight for your destiny, and never surrender.
If I might presume now to hector the parents of those children, I will say this: Fight for your children. Divorce is hell, and the divorce courts seem to be designed by Mephistopheles himself to make divorce even more hellish. But as bad as divorce might be for you, it is far worse for your children. Please do nothing to add to their pain. There is nothing you can give your children that will replace you in their lives. There is nothing anyone can take from you that is more important to you than you are to your children. There is nothing that can justify making it impossible for your children to see their father or their mother, and you have no right to hope that your children will ever forgive you for inflicting permanent injuries upon them. Sometimes there are circumstances in which it is unavoidable that someone will be hurt; in those circumstances there can be no justice in the adult escaping injury by imposing it upon innocent children. Fight for your children. Be a grown-up, be a parent, be a man or woman your children can be proud of.
We live surrounded by tragedies of ignorance, of indifference, of black and bitter malice. The world will be just a little bit better if one family--your family, together or apart--is spared that awful fate. Fight for your children and never surrender...
Greg Swann
If you run a page concerned with parents' or father's rights, I'd appreciate it if you'd link to this page. And if your page is not listed here, please let me know.