Growing up fatherless

Let me start by saying I know my father, and I speak to him on a pretty consistent basis. With that being said, it took me a long time to understand that for one reason or another he was not in my life like he could have been. To make this less about me and more about a lifestyle, my parents divorced at an early age because of my father’s lack of drive. He was intelligent and charming, almost to a fault. He never followed through with plans or aspirations, which is why all of his brothers and sisters are engineers and government officials, and he well, isn’t.

We moved away at an early age, so seeing my father wasn’t something that happened often. The problem was that when I did come around, there would always be another obligation he had, whether it was working this job or that job. Isn’t that what vacation times for? But I digress. The hardest thing about growing up without a father is watching the strain it puts on everyone else. My paternal grandparents and my mother did everything they could to make up for his absence, almost to a fault. My stepfather and I didn’t get along till, well, I graduated college, and when I finally asked him what our problem was, he explained that he thought it was affront to him that he had to go through so many channels to communicate with me, and that the relationship I had with my fathers side of the family made me coddled and pampered. Well, that’s bullshit, but again, let’s focus.

In most situations where a father is absent, as it was in mine, mothers have to assume the role of mother and father, usually to strange results. Women can try their damndest, but it does take a man to raise a man properly. There are things that women don’t understand about how we work, and without that knowledge we cannot be complete. I’ve got the war wounds to prove it. The biggest problem this creates is how we respond to other women. There is a certain amount of control we all need, and when those boundaries are tested by the opposite sex, those of us who never had that man around to temper our behavior don't respond well. To paraphrase the modern classic “Fight Club”, “we’re men raised by a generation of women. Why would we want to grow up to repeat that cycle?” (NHJIC). When fathers are absent, it leads to the same situation repeating over and over. I mean, we all think we turned out ok, right?