Bad Dad or No Dad

My teenaged son brought a new friend home from school.  He introduced himself to me as “Jimmy” and immediately told me his dad abandoned him while he was a baby. Apparently he was the product of an affair; and his father had a family and six other children. The mother of his 6 children told Jimmy’s father that if he had any relationship with this son, then she would leave him. This father had to make a horrible choice.  Do I leave my 6 children for one? Or do I lose the one and keep the six.  I guess it’s a simple math equation.  Over the next two days as I got to know Jimmy, he jokingly mentioned several times that he didn’t have a dad.  This abandonment wound had become part of his identity.

 I have been spending a lot of time with teen boys recently, taking my son and his friends mountain biking, snowboarding, lots of outings for ice cream and many, many sleepovers at my house.  I have the endearing nickname “MommyChong”, and my home has also become known as a safe place for these boys.  They never hesitate to ask me when they can come over to spend the night and when can I take them biking.  They feel comfortable making themselves at home in my house, labeling their toothbrushes in zip lock bags for the next sleepover; and knowing exactly where to go to help themselves to snacks and drinks.  Yet I have a pretty strict bedtime policy. No phones after 9:30pm and lights out usually at 11pm, yet they keep coming back.  It’s that safety the boys want and feel in my home.

I, of course have never been a teen boy and this has been a unique opportunity for me to try and understand their world having fun and getting into their wildness.  It’s no lie, these boys are a blast. And if you can let go of the “Mom-hat”, that control, and the ego, you can have just as much fun as them.  Exploding carbonated beverages, digging holes in the ground and making bike jumps in the yard, winding the car window down and talking to whoever is in the next car over; playing and singing Katy Perry’s California Gurls while driving so loud the car is vibrating; and for me, the biking riding and snowboarding to keep me young and fit as well. You can laugh at their jokes, and allow them to safely push the boundaries, which they need to do as they take the necessary risks to grow up and discover who they are.  I laugh at some of their risk-taking, and truly love the ding-dong door ditching, and then toggle back to the mom-hat and say “Okay, that’s enough.”  For me, this has been an amazing opportunity to play and nourish my inner child.  And it’s really cool when you pull up to your kids and their friends on the slopes in your mask and ski googles and the friends say “Who’s that?” and your son proudly says, “That’s my mom”.

 Yet underneath all this fun, wildness and adventure, many of these boys suffer from deep, deep pain.  They joke commonly about their fathers going out for milk and not coming home, both boys with and without fathers.  They wear masks, and they joke, to hide that pain.

 The socialization of boys starts very young.  As infants, the labeling already starts with girls being soft and dainty, and boys are tough and strong.  Crying and feelings are often not allowed for young boys, and even at very young ages they are told to “man up” and “don’t act like a girl”  Somewhere around 7 or 8 years old, the boys learn not to cry and not to show their feelings, and by the time they are teenagers, they are wearing that mask that shows the rest of us, “I’m tough, I don’t need you or anybody”.  They have started the posturing.  As young adults, they have learned to be ruled by their egos, to dominate, lead, and control without love and compassion. 

Power, wealth and accumulation, colonization and competition, sometimes unscrupulous business ethics, and objectification of the feminine are traits of a successful man in our society.   This is the masculine wound.  It comes with its counterpart, the feminine wound which I will explain later.  Both are equally to blame for the mess in our society today. 

 As an obstetrician-gynecologist for 25 years now, I have taken care of thousands of women.  Some are still wounded girls, and others have come into their own power, and the whole mix in between those two extremes.  The stories are all unique, yet the wounds are the same.  So often, these women were coming in to see about their hormones, and when you got deep into their histories, they were often high functioning co-dependents, a term coined by Dr Terri Cole, trying to manage work and family and doing way too much.  The work distribution in the family was never equal.  This of course is a well-known fact, the invisible labor takes its toll on her body which originally had nothing to do with her hormones.  I would reflect to my patients that maybe their plate was too full, then the crying would start.  And yes, their hormones were off from adrenal fatigue.

 I had one colleague who simply referred to the father of the babies we delivered as sperm donors, because so often they were not in the delivery rooms, and if they were physically present, they were not energetically available to help their partners birth the babies.  It was often the aunts, grandmothers and sisters and nurses who were the ones holding space for the mother in labor while the father sat on the chair, paralyzed, so to speak, possibly from such intense, positive female energy coming from the others in the room.   

 I think about my own father. We did a lot of fun things together. We played tennis and golf; we went camping and fishing.  He liked to do road trips with us.  Yet he was not available emotionally. The story my mother tells is hard to believe.  He was once tied to a tree in the middle of his rural town on the East Coast of Jamaica, by his father, beaten and then left tied to that tree. He was beaten by his father many times and the stories from other family members is one of my grandfather being a ruthless tyrant.  His brother, my uncle, had a nervous breakdown as a teenager because of my grandfather’s tyranny. 

 My father was volatile and easy to anger, yet also a deep, sensitive soul that no one understood. He became an alcoholic and chain smoker and died from cancer related to his addictions, from the hungry ghost that he never learned how to feed.  My co-dependent mother spent her days just trying to prevent his emotional explosions; and trying to shield us three kids. Her heart also hardened over time as the energy of the wounded male took up so much space in our home.  Thus, my imprint was to find a partner who was like my father and to do what my mother did as well.  The cycle perpetuates, until it no longer does.

 As a highly functioning co-dependent with a big father wound, I ended up with a narcissistic partner. Narcissism and alcoholism often co-exist and overlap.   He was just as loud and obnoxious as my dad, and of course, he was emotionally unavailable.  There were other similarities too, such as the chaos of being disorganized, yet were able to run their own businesses.  My father was a civil engineer and owned a plumbing shop, and my Ex is a design and build plumber.   The unconscious re-creation of your childhood is what is being presented to you for healing.  We all suffer from the emotional abuse of both the male and female wounds,  handed down for generations. 

 And the children are left to try and pick up the pieces.  I started picking up my pieces when I was almost 50 years old, so that my own children have less pieces to pick up as they make their way through their life journeys.  We suffered from an extremely abusive situation where the wounded masculine was out of control and my own wounded feminine couldn’t come into her own power fast enough to help prevent some of the trauma inflicted on the kids; thus, the separation happened and the court battle that followed.

 I went to court, requesting majority custody.  I had been the primary caretaker of the children for their entire lives.  Their father didn’t know much at all about their lives, who their teachers were, their doctors, their schedules and activities, likes and dislikes.  At their age of 11 when we finally separated, I think I added up the number of times he had ever picked them up from school, and it was around ten times.  He couldn’t tell me what time pick up or drop off was. I took them on multiple family trips without their father for cultural enrichment. He wasn’t interested in going unless his friends were present.

 He was the fun dad, around on Sundays. Saturday was reserved for his friends and biking, a way to nurse his own hungry ghost from his own childhood trauma as well.  He did have some great qualities, teaching the children to bike and snowboard, which despite being reflections of his own ego, are in fact generally things that fathers do well at.  The risk taking involved sometimes is too much for mothers to handle. 

 Several trusted advisors had told me the reason why many fathers want 50% custody is so they don’t have to pay child support.  Prior to the custody issue he didn’t spend any time with the children. In fact, he hadn’t lived with us for several years, and the times we were together, if he got mad, he would leave us and go back to the city where he was working.   

 Now he wants 50/50 custody?  In fact, from my recollection, the fight over custody only surfaced after the truth of his love affair came out, and this love affair was with a girl who used to babysit the kids, whose mother was my close friend.  This girl has her own wounds from childhood trauma.  She lost her father as a child, and now she seeks comfort from a man 36 years her senior, perhaps seeking out a family in mine.  Before that, my Ex was happy to come and see the children every other weekend. 

 The court came back stating that the father should have 50/50 with some parameters involved, including a special masters and coparenting therapist.  What seemed like a big blow to my ego, I am now glad that he has 50% custody. It has allowed my nervous system to heal over the last year from a lifetime of being in survival mode so that I can show up fully for myself.  Prior, I had been working full time and taking care of the kids, paying all the bills while the father of my children was making his own money, sleeping around and not contributing to our household at all.   This was the unconscious outcome of my unresolved childhood story of sexual abuse, emotional neglect and growing up in an alcoholic household. It’s been a rocky ride to healing, but a journey well worth taking.  With this healing of my nervous system, I have been granted the ability to drop into more presence.  It has allowed me to have the space to even contemplate these questions; and more time to spend with my children and their friends.

 My son has several friends, in fact, who don’t know their fathers.  He has one friend “Leo” as the story goes, his father is in jail for breaking his arm. He has another friend, “Jayden” whose father lives on the other side of the country ever since he was born and has no relationship to him. The one friend who has been an inspiration to me to write this post, is a friend “Huck” whose father left when he was five years old, a father very similar to my EX.  Since our custody agreement, the number of incidents in the “bad dad” category have increased.  I have had to hold space for my son having to go the neighbor to call me and tell me his dad left him, and his father yelling and calling him a fuck up;  or his dad not showing up to family therapy or meetings with the school when our son was struggling.  For my daughter, it’s a father who refused to support her ballet and extra-curricular activities because it interfered with his weekend plans.  It’s a father whose stinging words and intimidating posturing caused our son to hurt himself and daughter to once say, “I want to kill myself”.  It's the father who openly had an affair in front of the kids during the last year of our relationship.

 So, I would ask myself, are my kids better off with having their father around? Is no dad better than a bad dad?  I often wished their dad would just go away like Huck’s dad. I’ve posed this question to my mother’s group, to my friends and to professionals.  Which is worse? Having a bad dad who is emotionally abusive and who uses you to fulfill his own wounded ego; whose actions come from selfishness, reactivity and anger; or having no dad which comes with it that huge abandonment wound that says, “my dad didn’t love me enough to stay”.  

 I’ve been deliberating this question for about a year now, often with Huck’s mother.  She says one year the father, who now lives in another state and sees his kids once a year, bought shoes for only one of the kids.  And they now joke about who is going get shoes this year. 

 One mom told me that she chose to go the route of NO dad, because the father was so unreliable showing up for his parenting time she couldn’t watch her child go through heartbreak repeatedly.

 Another story is of a woman whose father left her as a baby, and even though her mother physically abused her, she tells her father after they re-united as adults: at least my mother was there to abuse me, rather than abandonment.  At least my mother showed up.

 This is not a male hating post.  For every bad dad, there is also a bad mom, and the feminine wound is as much to blame for the damage we have done to our kids.  For me, like many mothers, it came in the form of lack of boundaries for our children and ourselves; it’s co-dependency and being over- controlling.  It is not being able to differentiate where you end, and your children begin.  It’s  thinking you are responsible for your children’s happiness  and thinking you can control the outcome.  

 This is the feminine wound.   It is needy, insecure and co-dependent.  She is unable to express her authentic self because she doesn’t really know who she is. Playing victim is second nature.    These wounds are centuries old, passed down through the distortion of love and an imbalance of feminine and masculine power.  And while there is the dichotomy of the masculine and feminine wounds, it is fluid and we all can suffer from either of these wounds. 

 So, is a bad dad better than no dad? I wish I had the answer.  We don’t really get to make the choice, so why am I pondering this question?  It’s whatever cards we end up with and how we play those cards that end up mattering for our own liberation.  Wanting something different for yourself may end up on that slippery slope to victimhood.  

 What I do know, is that the first step to healing either of these wounds is to work on yourself.  It’s to break the unconscious patterns that are holding us back from our own authenticity so that we can show up for our families and our children with full presence and love.  The world is in chaos right now, and if we don’t heal ourselves, heal both the wounded masculine and wounded feminine parts of our own selves, a bad dad or no dad is not going to matter because everybody will be suffering.  By doing our own work, our children will start to heal, and the next generation will have less bad mom and dads and more good moms and good dads.

 Our boys need help to grow into good partners and fathers.  Dr Shefali Tsabury, a well-known psychologist who writes on conscious parenting, says our boys need to be seen, loved, and felt, not fixed. They do not need punishment.  Their anger, toughness, wildness, and their softness and sensitivity need to be felt, seen and honored. They need firm boundaries but without connection, presence and warmth, discipline breeds rebellion.  Their masculinity needs to be reclaimed, not unlearned.

My dear friend Priya has been an integral support and inspiration for this post.  She reminds me, it’s
never too late to repair.  Her father was a single dad of two, her mother died tragically when they were young.  Her dad could have been placed in the “bad dad” category.  And when she was in her mid-40s, they went to therapy together and repaired their relationship.  Her father was doing the best he could given the resources he had at the time. 

 It’s important for us to remember that.  We can get so easily angered and hurt by what we might have felt was the robbery of our childhood innocence.  And regardless of whether we have a good  or bad dad or mom, we all love our parents.  Trauma is unavoidable in our human form and while it’s important to acknowledge our anger and hurt, it’s also important to remember both mothers and fathers are always trying the best they can even when it doesn’t seem that way.  And if you think you are a bad dad or bad mom, offer yourself compassion and remember you are doing the best you can.

 For all the dads out there, who are doing their part to heal their wounds to become better dads, and for all the dads who still yet could parent from a conscious place, Happy Father’s Day to you.