It’s hard to talk about our fathers somehow. It’s a sore spot. It’s easy to love your mother. Mothers are like the earth under your feet and the rain that falls and gives you the water that makes life possible. Most of us would just die if we lost them. Fathers are different. Fathers are like the sun burning down on you overhead. There is a challenge, a fire, to the light they shed over your life. It can wither you, or you can take that fire and stand up to it, take it in, repurpose it, and use it to provoke growth and strength. Strength and steel in general are the result of adversity and challenge. You need to prove yourself to fathers. They stand over you. They judge you. They push you. They don’t understand you. They confront. They disagree. They discomfort. They call you out.

I know there seems to be some asymmetry among the sexes in this area. Daughters seem to struggle a bit more with their mothers while sons struggle a bit more with their fathers. And each might find it easier to simply be loved by their opposite sex parent. There’s less pressure, because you’re not directly living up to them and the example they provide.

As a son, there’s a way in which your father is almost a threat to your own manhood. You have to overcome your father to take your own place as a man. You have to separate yourself and dmestabkizh your own territory. You have to defeat him. But then you also have to rescue him and preserve him and his dignity, what he means for you and your family. There’s some deep instinct in there that isn’t easy to sort out.

When I think about my own father, there’s a touchiness to the subject, like I’m prodding a wound, an old resentment. There’s some aggression lurking under the surface of my feelings. And that’s strange, because by all accounts my dad is the greatest guy ever. He’s a virtual hero to so many people in my hometown. He’s adored by so many. And he’s humble and self-effacing and very self-sacrificial. He’s a truly great doctor. And he was an intensely involved and present father, despite working a very difficult and demanding job.

So to be honest, especially considering what I know about so many other people’s fathers, my father was an absolute gem and a puppy and a paragon. And yet I still have these complex feelings. So that tells me that those feeling might not be something specific to the performance of my father, but rather specific to the effect that the role of fatherhood itself has on us.

Somehow I can’t give my father all the credit he deserves. Because I’m not sure I could stand beside him if I did that. I have a need to resist the pressure of his presence in my life and reduce the shadow that he casts over me. There’s a power and security that comes from existing in the shade of his presence. When I was at home in my hometown, there were many doors that were open to me simply because of who my father was. He had such a reputation. And I could gain credit on it to my advantage. It was like an old-fashioned letter of introduction that had already been sent to everyone in town. But as nice as that was, I also resented it and didn’t want to live in his shadow. I wanted to overthrow him, to be better than him, more than him. Either by me becoming more or him becoming less.

I feel that there is some sense in which we are all born with a wound from our fathers. I don’t clearly know where it comes from, and I can see that people have many explanations for it and justifications for it. But there’s something else there that only finds expression or definition in these actual individual experiences. What is it about fathers that makes them so hard to accept? What is it that makes their absence or indifference so personal and painful? Why does their taking responsibility for us chafe so much, and their failure to take responsibility for us hurt so much? It’s a conundrum. There’s some part of ourselves that our fathers hold, some key to our life and our identity. And we resent them for giving it and resent them for withholding it.

I always felt a bit misunderstood by my father. And I always felt that he was a bit of an idiot. Despite being literally the smartest person I knew. And I knew he was the smartest person I knew. I resented his stubbornness and lack of insight, his lack of understanding of me, his backwardness, his authority. I was far more scared of my mom as a disciplinarian, so it wasn’t his being strict that bothered me. In fact I always thought of my dad as the easy parent to fall into jurisdiction of. He wasn’t as on top of the discipline game in the way my mom was.

I also resented my father for what I perceived as a kind of humiliating weakness. He always seemed to be apologizing and saying everything was his fault. And as an outside observer he often came off as pathetic and inept, a pushover. My mom was a very fierce and strong personality and hardly ever showed any kind of weakness. But my dad was always rolling over and showing his belly and parroting any criticism that anyone leveled against him as if it were some sort of moral victory to be a feckless worm. I often wished for him to have some human dignity and stand up for himself,or if not for himself for honesty and justice (to himself, I suppose) instead of letting people ride all over him. Including some truly awful people. He was always so ready to admit his faults.

I understand better now why he did this. It wasn’t his instinct. Deep down he doesn’t care much what other people think or think of him, and he is fairly confident that, at least in the areas that matter to him, he’s smarter and more competent than everybody else. So he’s willing to relax and be the buffoon in other areas. And he practices a kind of obiesant humility as a sort of spiritual discipline. I’ve never quite been able to make up my mind whether it’s idiocy or genius. It is a tactic, to some degree. A way of handling himself, but also a way of handling others. He knows that it disarms people when he does it. And partly that’s his way of being socially clever. And on the other hands its also his way of avoiding social conflict, which he finds genuinely difficult and distressing. He would rather admit defeat than have to go through talking about things and work them out. And even my mom has called him out for doing it as an evasive tactic.

But I think it’s safe to say that I was disgusted at times with my father and his humiliating compliance. It seemed unjust and subhuman to simply give in to whatever people said to him or asked of him. I wanted him to defend himself. To defend what needed defending, to develop some teeth. And he always seemed so toothless. Again, I think this was partly a form of laziness and evasive was on his part, but I think it was also the product of effort and design. I think he had deliberately given up some of his normal toothiness as a moral development, and also in hopes of placing his faith in a different kind of power, a different kind of practice. The power of humility and kindness and not grasping to hold on to what he had and not defending himself and leaving that to God.

I could never quite come to terms with it myself. But I never openly criticized him but simply obersved him and got a very interesting example of a very different approach to what is typical. There was a kind of deep strength and deliberateness to it that was confusing. He didn’t do it because he had to. It seemed to be a choice, a discipline. I’ve always felt that I understood how my father thought, and so I never criticized him much. Less than my siblings did. I probably had more and deeper criticisms internally, but less to say about them. In part because I could understand why he did what he did, that it came from deep things central to who he was, and didn’t feel I could really change who he was.

My dad, for his part, told me he had always felt that he could be more himself around me than around anyone expect my mom. And it was hard for him when I got married and that introduced some distance. And I’m busy with my own life and talk to him less about mine and about his, and I can only imagine now that I’m a dad how hard that must be. I think he felt that he could be pretty free and open with me. But as much as my ability to understand him opened up discussion between us, it was also a problem. If you’re someone who doesn’t like examining or sharing their personal feelings, which my dad very much doesn’t, there’s a risk in talking to someone who can actually understand you.

Because I can see through my dad’s typical tactics and won’t let him surrender to me to evade me, and because he can’t hide his own thoughts and feelings from me effectively, and because he can’t distract me by turning the focus on me and examining me (another favorite tactic of his, keep the focus on the other person, explore their deep feelings), I’m kind of his kryptonite. I don’t know if my siblings have ever seen or heard my dad cry. I have, several times. And I have won several arguments with him. Not in the way someone usually wins with him, with him surrendering voluntarily or withdrawing and giving up, or winning because some simple missing fact or mistake is exposed. I’ve genuinely won arguments with him, where I broke him down bit by bit until he admitted that I had been right all along and changed his whole tune and perspective. Thos kind of victories come very rarely with my dad.

My father has a remarkable ability to ask oenetrstinf questions and draw people out. It’s a skill he’s really developed, and not one that I share. He is very interested in learning what other people might have to share. And he more comfortable exploring them than being explored himself. So he asks lots of questions and doesn’t answer many. And most people really enjoy that. I’m far more interested in the contents of my own mind than anyone else’s. On the other hand, I’m much better at hiding my thoughts and feelings than my father, but probably less socially anxious about discussinf myself than he is. In fact I like talking about me a little too much. But then I’ve never had to worry about anyone seeing any further than I wanted them to see.

Arguing with my father has always been frustrating. His lines of thought aren’t always easy to follow. And he forgets what he has said in the heat of the moment and doesn’t keep track of his own arguements very well. He says things and then says that he never said them, makes claims and then forgets he made them. He often has some very specific and obscure idea in the back of his mind that is driving his thinking of a subject, and it’s very hard to dig out what it is. Some picture, some conception that is driving his whole discussion.

But often even he doesn’t seem to know what that central idea is. I’ve had my wife hand me a card covered with a wandering scrawl of text and stories and verses with no clear connection or point, and she’s asked me, “What is this about?” And I look it through and say “He thinks you’re a mother who sets a good personal example for her children and is trying to communicate that he appreciates that about you. He doesn’t say so anywhere, the thesis is never stated. But all of these stories and references are all meant to serve as supporting arguments and examples for his unstated thesis.” He’s not great at expressing feelings. But they’re there. You just have to learn to intuit them from the scattered evidence.

As a youth, my father and I often didn’t see eye to eye. To me he seemed to lack imagination. He couldn’t understand my perspective but was locked into his own. And I made a habit out of trying to prove him wrong. And he’s gone through some of our big disagreements with me and talked about how he was proved wrong again and again. He’s always seemed a bit amused by it, even. There have been several times where he told me I was on the wrong path and what I was trying to do wouldn’t work and was impossible. But it never bothered me that much that he disagreed with me, because it didn’t make me doubt myself or my direction in the slightest. And he seemed to realize ersly on that I couldn’t be overcome by force. Instead he usually just tried to direct me toward good resources for making my decisions. The main thing that bothered me about my dad disagreeing was my inability to convince him I was right purely on argumentary grounds. I liked winning arguments.

I remember my father told me, when I told him I wasn’t going to apply to Walmart one summer, that a high school kid like me woukd never be able to get a decent job anywhere other than Walmart. And he certainly could have been right. Walmart was a big source of jobs for high schoolers. And there weren’t a lot of options in a small town. But I wanted something different. And I could easily have wasted the summer away wishing for something different I never found. But I did find a job. And within a short time I was basically the head reporter for our local daily newspaper. Who could have predicted that? I always felt that my father lacked the ability to make good arguments about me because he never properly grasped how I was different from him, how my different capabilities made me able to do things he couldn’t imagine doing (as well, why there were some things he could do that I couldn’t).

My dad told me once that my mom had explained to him that he had shown a real weakness in understanding and supporting me. And he called me up to have me evaluate if that were true. I was a little ambivalent. My dad had supported me. Not in many of the key choices I made. Those had been arguements in which I had never surrendered and had generally been proved right by history. My dad did think I could get a job outside Walmart. He didn’t think I could start a business. There were a number of other major important ones, but one of the gifts the past gives us if a the gift of forgetting conflicts that have been long resolved. I’ve forgotten the other examples. As I explained to my dad I. That discussion, I never really expected him to understand or support me. I expected some challenge. And I probably needed it so I took my endeavor seriously and really tried hard to make it work to prove myself before him (and against him). He was a friendly adversary who inspired me to prove him wrong. And the fact that we remained friendly and that he was always ready to help gave me a lot of insight and wisdom that transcended the shallow victory of merely proving someone wrong. I didn’t just want to prove him wrong, I wanted to show him what I was capable of, and how I could exceed his expectations. And his willingness to be proven wrong with gold grace and congratulate me, as well as support me when I did experience failure, was transformational in how it let me complete the circle of return to the father.

This is something I mentioned earlier. Your father protect you as you live under his shadow. But in order to take your place you kind of have to challenge him and defeat him. You need to prove yourself. But you don’t destroy the father. You return to him, you resurrect him and restore him to his position, you show how you exceeded his expectations and renew him as he acknowledges your victory. And he’s still there to protect you if you fail. You can still go back if you do turn out to be wrong.

Fathers challenge you, and so they invite challenge. But it’s not just a battle. It’s a relationship. It’s a productive struggle. It’s a calling forth and a return. There’s an almost mystical element to it. Some elemental process that is being enacted and rehearsed and performed again and again. And it can be painful and dangerous. But it’s also part of life. It’s something we need, maybe even long for. It’s a pain and burden and struggle we desire and require and loathe and resent and reject and embrace and treasure.

The only thing worse than a father that fights you and challenges you and weighs down on you is one that can’t be bothered to do any of that. That doesn’t care enough to bother, that presents no challenge, struggle, no judge, nothing to measure up to or surpass or prove yourself against. Even a dead father can leave an example to chase. An absent father is like an open wound. You can’t shelter in his strength or be tested by it. You were called forth and left, as if it wasn’t even worth finding out what the point of your living was. As if you weren’t worth the trouble. And what called you forth wasn’t anything great enough to bother measuring yourself against. There is no great challenge to surpass or measure up to. No great villain or hero. A good father is a bit of both, and makes the story of your life richer by playing both roles in a way that makes you grow without destroying you, as the burning of the sun invigorates and does not consume.

I wish it were easier for me to be unequivocally delighted by my father, proud of him, thankful for him. He deserves that kind of response. He deserves to be his son’s hero. He really was a wonderful father. Playful almost to a fault. Wise and full of useful knowledge. Humble and absurdly hard working and earnest and honest and almost painfully generous. And I would wish for my own children to feel that way about me. But there’s a burden to being a good father, and that burden is in the role you play as a father. It is a role of challenge, of demands, of representing the harsh truths of the world, the pain of the judgment of our ideals, of playing the opponent that draws out our heroism.

It isn’t always a role we savor. But we do it so our children will survive. So they will be able to endure the pain, meet the demands, lift the weight, survive and learn from the judgments, and rise above and overcome our opponents. It would surely be more pleasant to reject that responsibility, because it is a responsibility we know will rest as a heavy and troublesome yoke on our children, one they will be eager to cast off. But it is our calling, our sacrifice. Our particular honor or dishonor.

Learning to love and accept the gift that our fathers give us is a difficult skill. It’s a process. It’s a thorny rose that they offer. Its sweetness always draws a drop of blood. But I’m thankful for it. I don’t know who I would be without it. And for this and more I thank heaven for my father and all the other fathers in my family.