Fatherhood | Themes (Part 4.6)
This is part 4 of the series “The Place Where Conviction and Insecurity Collide”. See original post here.
COLLISION: Themes
Fatherhood
While it was planned that Book 3 would spotlight a reunion with Luscia and her father, it was never intended to be an ode to mine. Yet, here we are, celebrating him in the subtext. As much as I would like to take all the credit, I must admit that he was there all along.
My father was the chisel God used to carve my sharpest angles.
It’s sad that such a statement is now controversial to say. Yet anthropologically, we cannot get away from it. Fathers are crucial to society. They protect; they provide; they direct; they instruct; they discipline; they rescue; and they preserve. We carry their legacy within us, whether we like it or not. We carry their absence even more.
In June of 2008, President Barak Obama gave a speech in Chicago. He didn’t shy away from the unavoidable fact that the presence of fathers directly impacts the statistical outcomes of childhood development. Thankfully people are not numbers, and outliers can and do override their preset conditions. But the numbers are staggering nonetheless.
The study President Obama cited revealed the following:
Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.
The really astonishing part is that these studies did not find the same in single-parent homes absent of a mother.
At present, 70% of youth in state operated facilities come from fatherless homes. Data during the late 1990’s even suggests that 75% of adolescent patients in substance abuse centers were reared without a father as well. That was over twenty years ago; the epidemic has only worsened.
If I am to ever be called ‘privileged’ it should be for this singular blessing in my life. It was not earned, nor deserved, but a blessing I was given to pass on. A blessing we see inherited by Luscia.
There are demons that she faces upon returning to her highland home. In my heart, I could not formulate for Luscia a path to healing without first granting her the foundation of my own. I touched on this in HOBL’s acknowledgements, but he deserves more adequate attention in this forum.
“The righteous man walks in his integrity; His children are blessed after him.”
~Proverbs 20:7
Each month, for roughly nine years, my husband and I spend an evening with the young men currently enrolled in that aforementioned program. And about every eight months, we end up facilitating a teaching around a particular subject—the six men who’ve influenced me the most.
It is not a happy discussion. At least not for the initial half. We begin by telling the students a tale about a young girl who loved goodness very much. How that girl encountered her primary villain during her formative years; the man who took advantage of her, who defiled boundaries, and who cinched his status like a noose. Then how that girl grew up and met another she thought was safe. How he deceived her, endangered her, and betrayed her for his own destruction. How two different men scored her early adulthood with their weaponry and terror. How they held her captive. How they threatened her life. Yet, when stripped of their armament, how very akin they were to the men who’d come before.
But then we explain how that was not the end of the girl’s story, not even when she eventually met a kinder man. In fact, the end had started back at the beginning with the one she already knew.
We call this lesson: The Power of One Good Man
Time and again, my father proved to be my resting place as much as my monument of integrity. He didn’t coddle me—not even during the worst storms. He held fast to truth. To justice. And to grace. No man is perfect, for he too is evidence of that. But it was from my father that I learned what a man really is. It wasn’t taught in lectures, though he hosted them at the dinner table. Not in arguments, which were surely shared. Nor in grand gestures, the kind he made on my behalf and for my wellbeing. No, he taught me by how he lived.
“My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived and let me watch him do it.”
~Clarence Budington Kelland
The worst damage from trauma isn’t the scarring. It’s the infection taking hold beneath the tissue.
After so much heartache, I could have easily demonized all men—elevating womanhood to some impervious, incorruptible kind of sainthood instead. But that wouldn’t solve the issue. The issue was embedded in me. “Bitterness is the root of defilement,” Dmitri tells Luscia in Book 3. Were bitterness to take root in my story, then it would discolor everyone I saw on the street, in the office, in my neighborhood, everywhere. I could walk away from trauma deciding that men cannot help their inevitable depravity. That they could never be trusted. That they will never be safe.
That there is no hope for their redemption.
I was brought to a crossroads by my twenty-fifth birthday. It was then I realized that none of that could be universally true of men. Because evidence of the opposite had raised me. And it was my father, not my monsters, who set that standard.
This is why I couldn’t fathom Luscia’s recovery, her overcoming such wickedly devastating sorrow, without a dad. Not just any dad… but one like mine. The best of men.
Monsters are the exception.
He is the rule.
Experience these themes in House of Boreal by embarking on your journey through Orynthia today!
