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By J. Steven Svoboda... |
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
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