On their own: Boys growing up underfathered.
By Rex McCann
Sydney, Australia: Finch Publishing
Long-time Kiwi men’s group
facilitator Rex McCann has written an engaging study of boys who
grow up without present, involved fathers. Finch Publishing did its
usual superlative job in producing a handsome, attractively
formatted book.
The author helps ground the book
by including pertinent pieces of his own personal story at the
beginning of many of the chapters. Our generation, the author notes
with some concern and even alarm, is the first to consider writing
fathers out of the family script so extensively. Yet fathers are
essential to their sons’ (and daughters’) development, as McCann
expertly sketches out in eight well-conceived pages of his book (pp.
36-43). Whether fathers are unavailable due to death or physically
departure or rather because they are emotionally isolated from their
families, the toll on sons is undeniable. McCann writes that sons
depend on fathers to show them how to live a full life. When they
instead see Dad deny an interior life of feelings and imagination,
as most of us who are now middle-aged did as children, this is
nothing less than a betrayal. The father “betrays the son into life
as a half-man,” and all too often, unwittingly faithful to Dad’s
example, the son later as a father carries out a different yet
similar betrayal of his son(s).
What about boys who lack a
father of any sort? Five separate binds can arise between single
mothers and their fatherless boys: 1. problems in developing
appropriate love and discipline; 2. pushing the boy into the role of
“man of the house”; 3. mother becoming the gatekeeper of the boy’s
relationship with his absent father; 4. formation of an unconscious
sexual bond between Mom and son and other difficulties developing a
healthy sexual identity; 5. excessive conflict between mother and
son. McCann’s practical pointers for single mothers include
establishing a stable base in the community; meeting one’s own
emotional needs without need for “help” from one’s son; accepting
that the son needs men and fostering his relationships with them;
choose male role models for your son; asking for help raising him.
Such books all too often devolve
into enlightening and pleasurable experiences offering scant
practical help. What, for example, is a single mother aware of her
son’s need for a father to do when the biological father is not
available? One mother held a block party and invited all the
neighbors, then went so far as to announce at the party that she was
looking for men to help provide her son with good male role models
and asking if anyone could help. The response was overwhelming.
McCann theorizes that the
journey from boy to man involves four stages: 1. bonding with and
later separating from his mother; 2. bonding with and later
separating from his father; 3. finding himself a community of male
mentors; 4. experiencing a second birth by connecting heartfully
with other men and thereby accessing his own emotional self. For a
man to meet women fully, the author writes, he must first meet men.
Naturally, many fathers are not
absent by choice but by compulsion. Chapter 9 contains many sad yet
touching stories from such Dads.
McCann addresses boys’ needs for
formal initiation ceremonies to act as symbolic touchstones for
their own personal progression through the stages of their
development. Soulful masculinity has a unique power that can be
effectively accessed through ritual. Grief seems to be a doorway for
many men to reconnect with their inner lives and stop trying to
always be on top of everything. Grief allows them to feel, to fall
apart and crumble, to descend. Male spirituality is crucial to boys
and is different from female spirituality, focusing more on solitude
and aloneness.
So what do boys want from men?
Above all, they want to be acknowledged as who they are, to be
recognized, to have men reach past their defenses and assure them
that they are okay. Boys want men to spend time with them and kindle
their imaginations and do things with them that they enjoy and show
them how to be a man in this world. They want an introduction to
deeper levels of life lying below the surface.
For adult readers wishing to
work on some of their own unresolved issues, McCann offers some sage
thoughts on how to complete with your own father, whether or not he
is still alive. You can build a bridge to your own father by seeking
out his own story. How was life for him? What were his challenges? I
must admit I am astounded by how rarely we hear this advice.
The author has a very
interesting and detailed theory, repeated several times, that starts
with the notion that the son somehow hopes for a relationship with
his Dad that can be “as all-encompassing as his mother’s love, with
a male face.” Though the son feels betrayal when he realizes the
futility of this hope, nevertheless the father can introduce his son
to the masculine world of feelings and spirituality in a way that no
other man or woman can. Moreover, a father’s role includes mentoring
his son but also at some point letting down his son by not being
equal to new issues and challenges raised by the boy. The boy must
at some point redeem his father by going beyond him into the future
and surpassing him at some level.
My only quibble is a minor one,
with the author’s half-baked, eminently unrealistic suggestion on
page 200 that fathers seeking “financial acknowledgement for the
unpaid work of parenting” make common cause with feminists, who are
far from noted for their sympathy with fathers’ desires and needs.
Very frequently adult sons have
experiences raising their children that fill in what they missed
with their own father, and which eventually lead them to reconcile
with their own Dad. Near the close of his excellent book, Rex McCann
interestingly observes that personal work healing the father wound
parallels a similar process that is going on at the cultural level,
so that personal healing work becomes social change work. “The world
changes when we do.”
©2002 J. Steven Svoboda
