Blog – Intentional Fathering

April 23, 2024April 23, 2024

Fence-Keeping

When I’m gone more than a couple of days, the youngest human being in the house tries to take charge. He’s seven years old—younger by minutes than even his twin. Call him Jackrabbit.

Brief digression: A few years back I started writing a book about parenthood, faith, the best way to plant potatoes, and the like. I gave my kids codenames to afford them a bit of anonymity. The names I chose were whimsical and, in retrospect, perhaps a bit silly. The thing is, much of that manuscript is in longhand, which makes changing the codenames a challenge. As several partially finished manuscripts and a shed full of non-functioning machinery can attest, any work that lands on my list must bide its time. And two sets of codenames for my kids would just be, well, weird.

So, Jackrabbit. The little alpha bear. Where his twin brother (Professor) is cerebral and calm, Jackrabbit is a man of action. The actions he takes, in my absence, are things he sees me doing when I’m home. He climbs onto the kitchen counter and stretches the sink hose to our Berkey filter when it needs refilling. He sits in my chair and tries to do my New Yorker crosswords. He tells his mother how things are going to be around here.

Ali Dark, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

(I don’t know where he gets that from; being a man who doesn’t want to wake up dead some morning, I am not in the habit of bossing Jackrabbit’s mother around.)

I read somewhere that children stay closer to their teachers when their schoolyards don’t have fences. Put in a fence, and the kids roam farther. Perhaps paradoxically, boundaries make children feel safe to explore. That seems to be physically true, and perhaps metaphorically as well. We’ve all met kids whose parents don’t set boundaries—for their children or themselves. Sometimes the kids are withdrawn. Other times they act out, as if to provoke a bit of fence-building. Because if your parents aren’t in charge, how can they protect you from what’s out there?

In my absence, Jackrabbit has concluded that fence maintenance falls to him. My return often evokes a transfer-of-authority crisis. Fortunately, these crises are easily remedied with living-room wrestling. Professor will join in, usually with a leap-from-the-turnbuckle sneak attack (said turnbuckle being a couch or chair or any other elevated space that gives him a clear shot at his old man’s back). We roll about the floor, growling, until the proper order of dominance is re-established.

I don’t know what will happen when I can no longer take them—as a pair or even individually—in a fair fight. Fight unfairly, I guess. But one day it’ll be them keeping fences—same as for your children. I hope we’re teaching them how.

May 27, 2022

In the hours

This website has been on quite the hiatus, but I want to share with you what came from this father’s heart in the darkened hours after the news broke in Uvalde, Texas that a boy murdered 19 elementary school children and two teachers. I think it has become too easy to put such a tragedy behind us. To click the next link, watch the next show, listen to the next song. There’s something to be said for broken-heartedness, especially for fathers. To sit with those who grieve, if only in spirit, and weep with them.

Imagine all of us, the whole earth, grieving together, if only for a few hours. How fitting that would be, given the mess we’ve made here.

Here’s the opening to a short meditation I wrote on the children of Uvalde:

In the hours after Salvador kills you, all the earth falls silent. The birds nestle their young and quiet them, our dogs tuck their tails and hide beneath furniture, the winds collapse to the ground. Waves cease their rumbling. Currents sink into the depths. All the seas become as an open and sightless eye.
In our cities, people lose interest in their shopping. Drivers park their buses, conductors step down from their trains. We parents leave our factories and fields and white-walled offices. We come home to sit in our den chairs and ponder our trembling hands. We do not turn on the television news.

The good people at Slant Books were kind enough to post the meditation, if you’d like to read the rest. No matter what you do, hug your children today. Pray for the parents who cannot.

June 27, 2021June 28, 2021

Eating an elephant

There’s a scene in Conspiracy Theory when Mel Gibson’s paranoid character, realizing bad guys are breaking into his apartment, triggers a string of self-destruction mechanisms while he and Julia Roberts make their getaway. Embedded fuses burn along the walls, flash-bangs go off in succession, and the whole place blows apart, piece by piece.

Sometimes I feel like that apartment. Overloaded and on the brink. One more intrusion, and I just might blow. I don’t suppose that’s an unusual feeling for fathers, for parents, for people. It’s probably not unusual, but I don’t think we’re supposed to feel this way.

Recently I took my youngest children fishing. If this sounds relaxing, envision four year-old twins holding rods with very real hooks at the end of a very real dock. I instinctively went into manage-the-burdens mode, moving back and forth between them, baiting their hooks, helping them cast, making sure they locked their lines, and repeatedly pulling them back from the edge.

I began to feel like I needed someone to pull me back from the edge. Fishing is supposed to be fun, but there I stood with clenched jaw, laboring through another task on my never-ending list. I could feel my patience slipping as they yanked at their lines, swung their hooks too close to my head, and general behaved like, well, four year-olds fishing.

That’s when one of them said, apropos of nothing as he eyed his bobber: “Papa, do you know how to eat an elephant?”

“No,” I said. “How do you eat an elephant?”

“Bite by bite.” His brother nodded in agreement.

I’m not very good at eating elephants, and most days I don’t feel very good at fathering, but I’m learning that you don’t have to be heroic to accomplish big things. You just have to show up every day, and do what work you can with contentment and humility. Parenting often feels like trying to eat an elephant, but the good news is that you only have to do it one bite at a time.

I can only do so much. You can only do so much. The mercy and the grace of it is that all we can do is all our children need.

October 22, 2020

A father’s love

Just when I think political pundits can’t sink any lower, they excavate a fresh sub-basement beneath the Twitter hellscape. The post below, twisting as it does an imperfect father’s gesture of love for his tormented son into something perverse, turned my stomach:

You know the jokes: Biden the Groper. Creepy Uncle Joe. Personal destruction is, unfortunately, all of apiece in today’s political landscape, where a civil debate over differing principles is as antiquated as the horse-and-buggy. But this, my God. How did we come to this?

Many of you know I lean conservative in my politics. I’m not a Republican, but I do remember laughing out loud at Joe Biden’s comical attempt to appear like a legal scholar during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. The point is, I have no interest in defending him or any other politician.

What I do want to defend, however, is fatherly affection. We have embraced such a deep level of cynicism in this culture that our instinct is to assume a demonstrably affectionate man harbors sexual motivations. When I mentioned to a gathering of my sons’ teen friends that I was preparing a talk on Mister Rogers, one of them asked, without a shred of irony: “Wasn’t he a child molester?”

This is what we’ve taught our children: that there is nothing pure left in this world. That the love of men is inherently suspect. That men don’t kiss men unless they want to have sex with them. We’ve turned stranger danger into a blanket indictment not only of affection, but of fatherhood.

And it’s a goddamned lie. You don’t have to like the man in that picture, or emulate his politics or his business dealings or anything else. But do emulate his unabashed love for his son, because it’s too rare. Hug your children. Kiss them. Especially your sons. God knows we need more love in this world, not less.

August 14, 2020

Fathering in the ugly season

“Democracy,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

I’m pondering Mencken’s quip as we head into what will be an ugly political season in America, bringing what is perhaps a fitting close to one of the ugliest years any of us can remember. Of course our ancestors faced far worse; 430,000 WWI casualties and at least as many dead from Spanish flu over a two-year span led some to believe the 20th century’s first decade might well be its last. We’ve become conditioned, I suppose, to believe that plagues and wars and rumors of wars are a thing of the past, thanks to our superior science and diplomacy.

If nothing else, this year has illuminated what many of us have felt in our bones for some time, which is that the experts whose claim to our fealty has been the unprecedented peace and prosperity of modern times may not be as competent as we wanted to believe.

Like many of you, I worry about what the decisions of our fallible elites will mean for my children. As my teens were preparing for online schooling, I saw a popular educator un-self-consciously tweet his concerns about nosy parents listening in on his classes. “What does this do,” he fretted, “to our equity/inclusion work?” He went on to say that he’s always counted on the separation from parents to afford him room to work with kids in a “what happens here stays here” context. Thousands of people with the words teacher or educator in their Twitter bios expressed approval.

My oldest son, meanwhile, is a United States Marine. I watch uneasily as various hawks in think tanks pound the drum for military adventure in China, Russia, and elsewhere. I wonder how many of them have sons and daughters who will be expended for whatever new theory about vital American interests requires boots on distant soil.

And my youngest, meanwhile, still have so far to go. What will schools look like, for them? Will they completely forget what church was like, back when they could wander about unmasked, being picked up by one adoring adult or another, the liturgy infusing their little hearts? Will they be forced to take a vaccine? Will they grow up with war being more than a rumor, and local industry a distant memory?

I used to have confidence the people above us will step into the gap when the hard times come. That’s how our history books read. War begins, depression strikes, and a strong, noble—albeit imperfect—leader comes forward to guide the way. I’m not so sure anymore. You read the news. You see how the people who’ve set themselves up as our leaders and would-be leaders behave.

I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, and what strikes me is how from the very beginning, politics were ugly. Republicans accused George Washington of being a closet monarchist, or at best a doddering old man getting duped into allowing the Brits to retake America. Federalists accused Jefferson of being a bloodthirsty radical plotting to erect guillotines rise over the streets of Philadelphia. Monroe, entrusted with papers revealing Hamilton’s adultery, handed them over to a journalist after Hamilton threatened to expose Jefferson’s dalliances with his slaves.

My point is: Though we’ve taken peace and prosperity for granted, maybe we should marvel at the fact that our species has managed to get along for as many years as we have.

Which brings me to my real and final point, which is that I believe we fathers have a vital role that is being put to the test now more than ever. Our communities will hold together not because of some great man or woman in Washington, D.C., but because of the decency we cultivate in our sons and daughters. Our communities will come apart to the extent we let them become like the people we see shouting at us from our cable news programs.

The people who will save what we love, in other words, aren’t running for office this fall. They’re looking at us across the breakfast table. Which means we—you and I—have a part to play that’s just as important, in the futures of thousands we’ll never meet, as any Founding Father. So keep doing the work of intentionally fathering. It matters. You’ll never win a medal for it, or a chapter in a history book, and that’s okay. Let the people at the top have all the glory. The rest of us have work to do.

June 19, 2020

The death grip

Yesterday we piled onto a motorboat to cruise around the inlet near my father’s home. The more anxious of our three year-old twins clung to his mother, while the daredevil twin instructed his grandfather—who hadn’t even started the outboard motor yet—to go fast.

I am temperamentally more aligned with the anxious toddler, so I kept a tight grip on them both as we boarded. Even though the boat was anchored and floating in three feet of water, you just never know what might happen.

On board, my wife and I put the twins on our laps. The anxious one made sure his mother had a strong grip with both arms. The daredevil strained to get away from me so he could sit at the very front of the boat. He shouted at his grandfather to rev it up.

The truth is I hate boat rides with my children. I always have. If you dig into the Woodlief family archives, you’ll find a video shot on this same inlet 15 years ago. I’m on a jet ski with my now 20 year-old perched between my knees. We’re doing about half a mile an hour and getting passed by seagulls. Because, well, you just never know.

When we got to the waterway, my father picked up speed. I gritted my teeth and estimated how long we would have to be out. The sun was low in the sky and shimmering on the water, the weather was perfect, and all I could think about was turning around. My wife pointed at a gunship circling above. She wondered aloud to the twins whether their oldest brother the Marine might be on board.

“Ow,” my daredevil complained. “It hurts.” I realized I was clenching him so hard the buckles of my life vest were leaving indentions in his back. I tried to relax. I thought about my Marine at five years-old, putting along with me on that jet ski, absorbing all my tension.

My daredevil, his spirit deflating, turned and asked his grandfather to slow down. His anxious brother echoed the sentiment. We weren’t really going that fast.

It occurred to me that delighting in my children—in life, really—isn’t so much for my sake as for theirs. I want my children to embrace their lives, but they learn how to hold on from me, don’t they?

I eased my daredevil onto the boat floor, so that he stood between my knees. I pointed out a pelican gliding low over the water. I loosened my death grip. Soon he and his brother were pointing at birds, at the sun, at funny-shaped clouds. They asked an interminable string of questions. They laughed—even the anxious one—when we bounced over another boat’s wake.

I couldn’t bring myself to laugh, and I breathed easier when the boat turned and headed for home. But I’d loosened my death grip. Because who wants to hold on to death? In many ways that’s what I’ve done for 21 years, since the night I held my daughter and listened to the last breath rattle out of her throat.

I suppose while we fathers have to be on guard for the worst, we needn’t expect it, even after we’ve endured it. What’s the point of living if your eyes are always on the grave? Better to grip life, I think, even if I’m not always sure how. It’s been pried from my hands before, and I know one day it will be again. But not this day, and probably not tomorrow.

You know what my daughter said to me, the day the doctors filed into her hospital room to tell us she was going to die? She was three years old, the same age as these brothers who don’t know her. “God,” she said, as if delivering a personal message, “says do not worry about tomorrow.”

Kids, man. There’s so much we can learn from them, if we’ll only listen.

June 12, 2020

The other side

Surveying the increasing tendency of people to assume the worst of one another when arguing over politics, or religion, or pretty much anything else, I’m convicted that we fathers have to do our part to break this cycle of societal self-destruction.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s investment partner, once said: “I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.” Likewise, Willmoore Kendall, a largely forgotten political philosopher, used to say that one should strive to understand one’s interlocutor as he understands himself.

Both admonitions reflect a sentiment that responsible citizenship—be it in one’s country, neighborhood, or family—requires empathy. An effort to see the world as my neighbor sees it. Not necessarily to agree with him, or to compromise my principles, but to understand him. Even if this never leads me to change my mind, it inclines me to see through his eyes, which in turn humanizes him in mine. It’s harder to hate your neighbor when you understand why he sees the world the way he does.

One of my sons is in conflict with someone right now, and he occasionally comes to me with complaints about how that person is being unreasonable and unfair. When he does this, I always ask him the same thing: “Tell me how she would explain her point of view.”

He hates this, and I understand why, because I’ve been there myself. It’s so much easier—and at some level more pleasurable—to write someone off as irrational, or stupid, or just plain evil. Read any thread on politics and you’ll find 99% of the comments about opponents fit one or more of those buckets. Heck, it’s probably more like 99.999%.

What if most of the people who disagree with us aren’t evil, stupid, or crazy? What if they just see the world differently? And what could the world be if our children spread that small grace—the grace that lets people disagree without becoming devils in each other’s eyes?

I don’t know, but shouldn’t we try to find out while there’s still time?

June 5, 2020June 5, 2020

To change the world

My 15 year-old son heard about George Floyd’s killing and found it online and watched it. Afterward he came to me and asked why it happened. Why that police officer knelt on his neck while he begged, while he called for his mama, stayed there even after he stopped moving. “Are they allowed to do that to somebody?” he asked.

I told him I don’t know the rules in Minneapolis, but that we should ask not whether something is allowed, but whether it’s right.

“That wasn’t right,” he said.

Being wrestlers, we agreed a man ought to know how to control another man who’s handcuffed without kneeling on his neck for nine minutes. We agreed a man ought not be indifferent to another man calling for his mama.

Watching that killing, and seeing the subsequent violence—a man guarding his store beaten until he’s trembling in a pool of blood, a 77 year-old retired police chief shot dead trying to dissuade looters—all I can think is: Where were your fathers? Was no one there to teach you that a man doesn’t punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty? That he doesn’t steal in the name of justice? That he has mercy when a man says he can’t breathe?

I suspect in too many cases we already know the answer: There was no father worth a damn to teach them anything.

Now people rush in with plans to change the world, to fix the system, to correct the hearts of men. I used to have all those answers myself, but somehow I’ve gotten dumber as I’ve aged. I don’t have all the answers I used to have.

All I know is that my world-changing work begins right here, in this father’s heart. As it does in yours. We can’t raise our children to seek justice and give mercy if our own hearts are turned inward. The world is tormented by men with closed hearts.

So be intentional today, fathers. Be open-hearted toward your children. This is our world-changing work, and though any day’s portion may seem small and insignificant, it’s the most important work we’ll ever do.

If you doubt that, just look at what happens when fathers don’t teach their children to choose what’s right over what’s allowed: People die. Cities burn. All while our children are watching.

May 15, 2020

Creators vs consumers

I’ve been convicted repeatedly this week how deeply the desire for significant work is wired into our children. A few weeks back, inspired by a whole lot of scrap wood, I built a dual workbench for my youngest children. I did this because they’re always underfoot whenever I want to use my workbench.

They loved it for a few days. But eventually they realized their workbenches aren’t where they action is. Papa’s workbench is where wood gets cut and screws get driven.

Because their birthdays were upon us, we also got them miniature versions of their favorite tool: my Husqvarna chainsaw. These toys likewise took their attention for a few days, until they realized their saws were never going to cut anything, nor would their little weed eater do anything other than give the weeds a massage.

“Use your chainsaw, Papa,” they tell me, even though I was so sloppy with the last tree I took down that it yanked my chainsaw out of my hand when it fell, driving it blade-first into the dirt. I had to get one of my older sons to help me jack up the end of the tree and use a wedge and hatchet to free it. I felt literally unmanned. My kids of all ages thought it was a hoot.

I read an essay recently that’s stuck with me, in which the writer drew a distinction between the model of man our economists like to use, and the model of humanity most of us recognize as more genuine. The economists’ man is a lazy being who wants more and more stuff, at a lower and lower price, for as little work as possible. Maybe that describes too many of our teenagers, but it doesn’t describe our little ones, does it?

No, they come to us ready to work. They’re so primed for work that they won’t be sidetracked by phoniness. No little work benches and plastic chainsaws for them. No baby dolls and kitchen sets. They want to drive real nails, feed real babies, make real bread.

The benefit of teaching your child how to use an ax is that then you don’t have to use the ax.

Which means so much more work for you and I, doesn’t it? And why does that discourage us? Ironically, because we’re so intent on getting real work done. It took me literally five times longer than normal to build two 8 x 4 garden boxes last month, because I had toddlers helping me saw the boards, paint them with linseed oil, stack and dry them, then cart them to the garden, level and square them, screw them together, fill them in. Anyone who’s ever supervised a three year-old driving a 3-inch deck screw understands how limited can be the patience of man.

But they are our work of creation, aren’t they? More than gardens or cleaning, home repairs or day jobs. And what a cruel trick we let the world play, when we pacify them with trinkets and distractions, all so we can get “real work” done. And then, when they’re 17, we marvel at how lazy teenagers are, as if we had no hand in that.

One of the habits we focus on during every Intentional Fathering cycle is bringing our children alongside us. Engaging them in our work. It’s so important, and the good news is that it yields fruit no matter what their ages. Our children—even our oldest ones—want work that matters. (It’s why so many of them hate school, but that’s a separate discussion.)

Our hearts rightly go out to adults who find themselves without work, or who get stuck in jobs with no visible connection to the creation of meaningful value in the world. That instinct for mercy is right. Let’s extend it to our children. Engage them in the work of our lives while there’s still time.

Fathers, this is our work: showing our children how to be creators, not just consumers.

Little brothers want to do what big brothers do.

April 29, 2020

Literary inoculation

I’ve been thinking about how divided our country is right now, and how our children are watching. I wish we could inoculate them against the anger, and the zeal with which we assume the worst of one another.

I wrote something about this elsewhere, and about how maybe we can give our children the empathy so many adults are lacking right now, by encouraging them to read good books. Essentially what I’m getting at is that a good book—be it a novel, a biography, or person-focused history—humbles heroes and humanizes villains. They remind us that we, who are almost always the heroes in our life narratives, are fallible. And that our enemies love their mothers too.

Though I wrote that essay for a book publisher, we know it’s not just books that cultivate empathy; good movies, documentaries, comics—anything with a well-told story can help a child empathize with the flaws and humanity in others. We need more of all these. Less formulaic stuff where the heroes are perfect and the bad guys irredeemable. More stuff that reminds us even the worst of us is human.

I want to illustrate this idea to my older kids and, in all transparency, to a lot of my adult friends who’ve lost interest in reading anything challenging a long time ago. I’ve been trying to recall stories where the hero is so flawed you cringe, or where you feel at least a flash of genuine empathy for the bad guy you’d rather just hate without reservation. Here’s a teen-friendly sample of what I’ve come up with so far:

True Grit
3:10 to Yuma
The Book Thief
Les Miserables
Anne of Green Gables
The Penderwicks
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I’m curious how other parents think about this, and in particular what books or movies got you to empathize with characters you were inclined to hate. What, if anything, can our kids read and watch that will grow them beyond the devil/saint mindset that has seized so many politicians and talking heads?