My dad was a great father - so why did he let me down?

BY LEWIS KENDALL

Over Father’s Day weekend, my 62-year-old dad and I drove up to southern Virginia to take part in Hey Brother Co.’s father-son retreat. It was a whirlwind three days full of emotional vulnerability, difficult conversations, and lots of long walks around the working apple orchard where we were staying. Recently, I called my dad up to get his thoughts on the whole experience.

The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Me: What did you think when you first heard I was a part of Hey Brother Co.? What were your perceptions of men’s work, before you knew what it was? 

Dad: “Your involvement at the retreat last summer was the first I heard about men’s work. I always thought about it as being healthy and kind and not being mean. But it’s so much more than that. Now that I’ve been involved and been to two different retreats, it’s a lot deeper than that. It’s spiritual, it’s looking within. It’s recognizing that what’s inside is a whole person who’s experienced childhood through adulthood. Recognizing and embracing that.

Me: You saw that we were planning a father-son retreat early on. I want to put it on the record that you were the one who reached out to me about that, not vice versa. What made you want to ask me to do it with you?

Dad: “My own personal journey has been that late last summer I had a rage event. I’ve been doing my own work on this and rebuilding my relationship with my wife. And with that, my awareness of other relationships has been much more pronounced. The realization that the relationships with loved ones and community are what’s important.”

“When I saw there was a father-son retreat, I saw it as a great opportunity to put some rubber on the road and say: ‘It’s real. My journey and my improvement and my relationships in life matter the most to me.’ I saw this as being part of that journey. What a great chance I saw it could be for us to be together and work together on this.”

Me: Obviously that was months ago, and for me there’s been a lot of anticipatory fear around the retreat. How did you feel about it?

Dad: “When I saw the word ‘cuddling’ on the description, I’m thinking ‘What else is going to happen?’ I can hug my son and be close to him, but to cuddle him?”

“The other aspect to it is the fear of taking ownership of our relationship and the difficulties and struggles we’ve had. Or the lack of relationship. Now we have to face that and talk about it and be open and vulnerable about the fact that mistakes were made. To listen to each other, for me to listen to you, the fear of that was very acute.”

“I didn’t know what was going to come out of it. Was it going to make us have a better relationship or end in disaster? I didn’t think it was going to, but in the back of my mind I thought it could. If the father is not stepping in and taking ownership and being vulnerable and being part of it, the son could really be hurt by that. So you really have to go in with an open heart, an open mind. But absolutely, the fear was huge.”

Me: That fear of confronting the reality of relationships holds a lot of men back. It’s like by doing this you’re admitting to the difficulties of these relationships, where a lot of people would rather pretend they are fine.

Dad: “It’s a lot easier to ignore it and gloss over it than to dive right in and confront it.”

Me: A lot of the things we talked about were me describing ways I had felt let down by you in the past as a father. And those are really hard things to hear. I was so proud of you for really listening and holding space for me to talk about those things. I don’t see them as an indictment of your parenting but rather the reality of what we both lived through.

Dad: “It was important for me to be present when that was happening. To not be defensive or offensive or offended. It’s reality. Let’s just confront reality and talk about reality. That was a great way to make us closer.”

“I appreciate you being honest and open about what you experienced, because that was also brave of you to face me and say those things. That took a lot of courage from both of us.”

Me: It was a shared vulnerability, for sure. We talked a lot about your anger on the retreat. What did you learn about anger and your own use of it over the course of your life?

Dad: “So much of anger feels like it’s coming from a place of a lack of empathy toward the person who’s ‘creating’ that anger. For me it comes from defensiveness or a feeling of being attacked or criticized. But why does it result in anger? Why not just say: ‘That’s how somebody is feeling and their reality’ and accept it, rather than tending to take it personally? Just listening instead of raising your blood pressure. Taking a breath and turning it around and saying: ‘What is the perspective of this person? What are they saying?’ That’s a big part of what I have to work on.”

Me: We talked, too, about how anger was modeled to you by your mother. You were taught anger was a way to achieve a goal. A means to an end.

Dad: “She did model that. Now that I’ve harnessed the rage a little bit, when you peel back the onion, it’s about getting to a point of kindness and empathy and loving your partner or son or whoever. For me, I need to work on finding that emotion and that place of kindness. Rage is one thing, but kindness is another. I need to keep going.”

Me: You demonstrated a model of emotional repression for me. I wanted to be you, and to be you required suppressing all my feelings—something I’m now unlearning alongside you. How are you attempting to do that unlearning in your day to day life?

Dad: “I’m trying to recognize the feelings and define them better by stepping back and saying ‘How am I feeling right now? What is the feeling?’ What I need more of is a list of feelings. Happiness, anger, rage, frustration, joy—but there’s so many other emotions. And I’m starting to bring those words into my vocabulary. That’s part of my next step that I need to take, to better define how I’m feeling and know what the words might be.”

Me: It’s amazing how just having the language is such a huge part of the process of identifying and talking about how you feel. It’s definitely an underappreciated idea when we talk about teaching these skills.

Dad: “At work, I’m the same as I was. How much of an emotional being can I be at the workplace? It’s hard to go there. But I think I still feel the emotions, it’s just showing them.”

Me: One moment I’ll never forget from the weekend is you reading your father’s eulogy. In talking about him so much throughout this process, it’s really felt like he’s been a part of it—here with us. What was that like for you?

Dad: “When I wrote that eulogy, it was one of those moments that I haven’t experienced very often in my life where what was in my brain went right onto the paper. It was really meaningful how my emotions went directly onto the paper. Had you read it since the funeral?”

Me: No, that was the first time since the funeral. I remembered it really well though.

Dad: “It was really a special moment for me. I felt his presence when we were sitting there together and reading that. We talked about the gifts he gave me and that I shared with you and how they were so meaningful. That moment was shared by the three of us.”

“Thinking about my dad and talking about him over the weekend, it was helpful for me to build more clarity around how he was as a father to me. It made me realize what he gave me. The mentoring and modeling he shared with me was how I learned and how I was a father with you. I remember very few times where he was present with me in a positive fatherly way, in a loving and open way. It was hard to come to that reality because he was a great man. I loved him so much and he gave me so much.”

Me: It’s hard sometimes for our brains to see the nuance in these relationships. We want to see them as black and white, all good or all bad. The reality is that’s not how the human experience works. Your dad was a great father in many respects, AND he let you down and didn’t show up for you in some ways. It doesn’t make him a bad man or a bad person or even a bad dad. That’s just how it goes. I think accepting that and the nuance helps you see your parents and these relationships as more real and whole and kind of beautiful in a way.

Dad: “Complex and meaningful, yeah. It’s great that we’re able to do this work together now. I’ve been thinking about some of the guys out there who can’t do this. They don’t have the opportunity. It’s wonderful that we can. I want to embrace the complexity and embrace the future that we can make together.”

Me: Was there anything else you took away from the weekend?

Dad: “It’s hard for me to have this flame inside me now and hold all the pain from seeing all the people who could benefit from it.” 

“The other thing is that I really appreciate you. Your intention and bravery and honesty and openness, it’s really wonderful. I’m really grateful to have you as my son. I’m really lucky.”

I’m pretty lucky, too.