fathers and sons

[bachelor tom]

I’m posting this as a warning: fathers, please love your sons, support them, encourage them, build up every scrap of self-esteem that you can.

My story is simple and probably common: my father hated his father, and he took it out on me. There was no overt abuse, nothing legally actionable, just neglect and passive-aggressive sabotage. My dad was always a responsible middle-class citizen, but to me he was a failure as a father. I had to learn how to be a man on my own. I still love him, he’s the only dad I’ll ever have, but I lost respect for him a long time ago.

I didn’t like myself, didn’t believe in myself, and surprise surprise the world never liked me much either. I wasn’t high maintenance, or special needs or learning disabled or whatever, not that parental love should be conditional on such. I’ve done talk therapy, I’ve done anti-depressants, I’ve read self-help books, and yes I’ve tried to talk to my dad (my mum’s gone, over twenty years ago).

I’ve survived into middle age more or less intact, I’ve never been in trouble with the law, I’ve never been on state assistance, I’m still mostly healthy; there’s not much else to celebrate for me. It’s possible I could become a statistic, many guys do. Without a foundation of self-repect it’s hard to get through the bad days.

I confess that one reason I come to this site and others like it is because I’m still searching for a father/mentor. It’s never too late for lost boys I hope.

Thanx
Tom

[Marx]

Well Tom, I relate somewhat, not that I hate my Father or anything. I simply didn't - and still don't - know the guy.
I was fortunate in some regards because I went into care (foster) when I was about 10. My time in care gave me a wonderful father-figure to learn from, and to this day we remain in touch and I have the utmost respect for him (and his wife).
I found also that my wife's Dad was the only sane one in that 'family', but I won't go into that other than to say I had a lot of respect for him due to the fact he had his head screwed on properly.
I don't know your situation, aside from what you've said, but the reason behind my Dad's disappearance was the dreaded divorce. After seeing what a joke marriage can be, I understand his POV.

[bachelor tom]

Thanks, I know there are a lot of horror stories out there, I don't claim any special victim status, just a heads up for dads who might take their kids for granted, though most visitors to this site probably wouldn't fit that description. God knows there's no such thing as perfect parenting, probably never was.

And I do get tired of middle-class folks being dismissed as boring and thick; along with being white and male there's nothing less 'cool' in the mainstream culture imo.

[bola]

My father had been married before, and he never really got over the divorce. Although his second marriage lasted much longer then the first, he never could let go of his attachments to the children of his first marriage. He lost contact with them (they were in a home) and was completely torn up about it. I didn't realize all this as a child. I just knew that he was very distant, unloving and as time went by more and more hostile. He made me feel like I had fallen from grace, and it was up to me to redeem myself. It didn't take long for me to give up on that, I could never do any good anyway.

Unfortunately my mother wasn't very loving either. So I ended up being estranged from both parents, which is particularly terrifying for a child.

[bachelor tom]

You know I had a feeling you'd have a connection with this bola, sorry to hear it

I didn't mention my mum because she was cold too, and being estranged from both parents was my reality also. Are you a dad now, or planning it?

[Marx]

I tried hard to avoid following my parent's footsteps. I regret to say though, I'm in a similar one to my own Dad now. My 1st ex (not wife, just long term relationship with 2 girls) has tried to alienate myself and our children, thankfully with only limited success. My marriage, however, is a different story. I've seen how my ex-wife & her 'mom' treat the children and how they talk about the fathers. I know there will never be a relationship between myself and my youngest daughter because they will make certain she only knows misinformation and half stories about me. Damn, I wasn't even 'allowed' to bring her over here to see her dying grandmother - but she's allowed to be in the company of Abby's child-beating mother as & when it suites.

[bola]

You know I had a feeling you'd have a connection with this bola, sorry to hear it

I didn't mention my mum because she was cold too, and being estranged from both parents was my reality also. Are you a dad now, or planning it?

I just take care of myself, stay out of trouble.

[chevalier]

I am one of those dads that gave up too soon and now have no contact with my older children. Before my first wife and I got a divorce we went through a time with CPS in California my foster dad had spilled some motor oil on the walk outside the house changing the oil in the mower. As we were leaving from visiting my foster parents she slipped in the oil while carrying our oldest son he was 4 Month's old at the time when she slipped she dropped the baby, which was an accident and not her fault. But the county saw fit to take him away from us and blame me for it because I must have been defective from just returning from Desert Storm. Needless to say they thought the story was made up by me and forced on her regardless of the eyewitnesses we had to the accident. Well it was decided by the powers that be that I had something to do with the accident though they didn't know how or in what way I had anything to do with it. The blame was squarely placed on me and it stayed there. In the process of all this my ex and I had another child by the time he was born we had already split up; my grandmother had to call and beg my ex to let me see our new baby two months after he was born, for half an hour. Now the reason we split up is because a social worker told us we would never get him back {the elder child} as long as I lived in the house with them. When she filed for divorce I fought to get visitations with the kids but since the elder son was not my biological child I lost all rights to both as it would be too confusing to the elder son to think I was his dad but not his dad. And since I had no more rights and feared that more legal fighting would just make matters worse, I gave up and moved back home to Arkansas. Only to have another woman try the same thing. This time I fought and so far had some success. The point being after this long tale is I regret not fighting more for my other kids and losing contact with them. I will always regret that until my dying day.

[myce]

Tragic, Chev. It is my understanding that CPS is so corrupt because they get their federal grants based upon how many families they bust up, so they will look for (or invent) any excuse to do so. That system needs some major reforms.

[Percy]

I wonder just how many of us can possibly understand our fathers. Or our fathers understand us. Mothers too.

We are too young to grasp the nature of what being human is all about when we are small, even teens, - our experience even of ourselves is just too lacking - and our parents are seen as knowing but in reality just as confused.

We unfold our genes throughout life and by 40 we are just getting to discern the similarities with our parents - and we find in ourselves the 40 year old parents we couldn't understand when we were 15.

My dad was a decent bloke. My mum too. But there was always 'something' that separated them. Some resentment on her part and something I can now see was pain on his part. Both always treated me well, as well as could be expected. We had our disagreements of course.

My dad spent an awful lot of time in his shed. He made things. He tinkered. He was there but not there. My childhood was spent just after WW2 finished (yeh, I am an old git now) and try as I might it is difficult to even imagine the horror of that time. I was born in a house which had the next three in the street blown to bits by bombs. My dad was away in the fighting and my mum was raising my older Bro and me alone. Rationing. Bombs. An adult woman of 23, alone with two babies. A twenty three year old girl today can barely wipe her own bum, let alone babies' bums and today she has an army of zozhial verkers to help her. Not back then.

The war changed, or set, a lot of people back then. I may as a kid and teen had issues with my parents, but frankly I was wet behind the ears when it came to understanding just what privation, hardship, family-raising was all about. I had no idea. Few people today, below the age of twenty do either.

Was it a complete disillusionment that had set in? Were they so scarred by the horror of the war around them, following so close on the heels of their own teenage idealisms and hopes and seemingly bright futures? Many of my relatives were killed in the war. People who should have been guiding uncles and aunties and helpful friends to my parents in their later years. Both my parents were from large families - he one of 7; she one of 9 children. By war's end half their siblings had been harvested by the grim reaper. One aunty carried the bones of her son embedded in her after a bomb blast drove his remains into her flesh.

What was it between my parents? Was it more personal? Who betrayed whom? Or thought they has. Had my dad had a daliance while away? Had my mum? I don't know. But they never forgave each other. What a friggin' waste. Sadness was the main mode of my family.

I find today (in my sixties) that I understand my dad a whole lot better. He died some twenty five years ago. About the same age as I am now. He never seemed to have the loyalty and commitment of my mother although God knows - and I do too - that he tried his damnest to earn it. He worked his butt off to provide for his family.

(Note* Both my ex-wives accused me of having affairs. I was totally faithful. I suffer from the same sadness as my dad. I 'know' it now. I know him now)

But BT encourages us:

I’m posting this as a warning: fathers, please love your sons, support them, encourage them, build up every scrap of self-esteem that you can.

Did my dad encourage me? He never discouraged me. I was always a bit of a loner, perhaps because of the mood of the family. And he sent me to a good school - an opportunity that I frankly wasted, apallingly. He was never cruel or heartless but what does a kid know about the heart of a grown man? He did his best is what I can say of him.

He was a Lance Corporal in the Army during the war. He did not rise through the ranks. No promotions that I ever heard of. Makes one wonder. My brother joined the Army and I joined the Air Force. He didn't do anything in 9 years either. A troop. A driver. I was Commissioned after a while. I was as proud as punch when my dad watched me graduate as an Officer. I told him at the time. "This is for you Dad".

I love him and miss him.

[Timocrat]

I’m posting this as a warning: fathers, please love your sons, support them, encourage them, build up every scrap of self-esteem that you can.

Yes a noble calling!

My story is simple and probably common: my father hated his father, and he took it out on me.

I had to learn how to be a man on my own. I still love him, he’s the only dad I’ll ever have, but I lost respect for him a long time ago.

Sounds like many young men these days.

I confess that one reason I come to this site and others like it is because I’m still searching for a father/mentor. It’s never too late for lost boys I hope.

Well Tom,
In my case my mother was the one more prone to violence. She tended to almost have more male traits than my dad. She was a cowgirl and along with this upfront trait for hitting she had other straight shooting traits too, that I later found men to do little to hide. My dad was an Englishman and had effeminate traits like too much concern with what the neighbors think, obsession with outward appearance and approaching issues indirectly. My parents had 3 daughters before me and these 60s women took to my dad’s ways for they rationalized it in many individual cowardly ways.

Yet I discovered that there were too many effeminate traits going around in general. I saw in one of our neighbor’s house how the father tried to have some kind of discipline in the home to see him indirectly undermined by his wife who endlessly played the nice cop and would call out the husband to be the bad cop to then only banish him to the den after she got her way by pulling strings. She prized having everyone need her and like her over what was best for the kid’s future. This was the standard that I found the most common in my experience in seeing the western world, and fathers beating those who didn’t deserve it come in are distant 4th or 5th.
No matter where you turn there are many versions of dysfunctional relationships to get effeminately obsessed with. The need to rehash what went wrong and look inwardly is pure effeminacy. For a man looking over the problem to find a way to fix it is OK, and if it doesn’t work adjust or try a who new method is totally rational too. But do not emotionally obsess about spilt milk in a way that simply satisfies or legitimizes not getting on with living a decisive life. Shrinks need money and will drag out these issues endlessly, as psychology took so much from a Frenchman studying hysteria in women (as he tried to bed them). Shrinks don’t judge their patients after they come to see what has gone wrong, they try to get them to see it for themselves. Sounds good, but looking around the western world it seems many have either not dealt with what they have discovered to be wrong, weren’t pointed strongly enough by their shrinks in what was wrong and what they should do to be a brave person (as they wanted to be sensitive or profitable), or preferred to only chat endlessly with shrinks about their problems or are looking to prove Tolstoy wrong.

Tolstoy said, “All good families have some things in common and all bad ones are individually different in their own way.” So to study small & medium failures too much is pointless and will not help you deal with life! Big failures, like when they affect culture and states must be studied, but the small ones lead nowhere. All the women in my family, and most of women I’ve met, just love sitting around and talking about all this dysfunctional stuff, for it gives interest to their non-risking lives more than helps. They explore the inside in dreams, feelings and more inside junk, for they can’t explore the outside for real (tempist in a teapot doesn’t count). Like the German word for taking pleasure in how badly others are doing, they want to look at relationship like car crashes. Hollywood is all about this.

In the book Men are from Mars Women are from Venus (not too highly recommended for he has written 10 books all saying the same thing). Women just want you to sit and listen to their problems and not be judged on them, and they think they will then figure it out by themselves, and your job is to be supportive and agree with their moves and above all talk to them and make them feel good. Freud turned this into an industry, and the feminists have turned this into a culture. They have a super strong tendency to rearrange facts so they look good and others look terrible, so it is very easy at these talkfest to be supportive on all their moves. If they are pretty and you are horny you are doomed for a couple more years of your life in not getting control of your emotional side.

Philosophic questioning, that should makes people uncomfortable, is not polite or PC and is taboo now as even debate is now marginalized on most news services (for, like, it is all too angry and stuff like you know, right?). The western culture is now one huge mess.

Take the good traits you parents might have had, even if they are few, and dump the bad ones. Don’t glorify mom or dad if they died early, for that’s has nothing to do with truth but desire. It is as easy as that (taking the good logical stuff where you find it).
If you don’t have the desire to rehash until the cows come home, which most seem to have these days, you are set to slowly improve. If not, and you want to whine about past real pain, then no matter what I say you will head due south for endless talk and there is nothing I can say for your desire for this empathy over the male (and occasional female) trait to give advise to fit the problem with trump it.

Following emotions is too powerful for many to most and instead of giving up there addiction to use their emotions to deal with everything some even commit suicide for that too is escape and emotional satisfying verses overcoming their desire to wing in by following their emotions.

You will unlikely find father figures that you can talk too, for even if you find one they won’t tell you things you want to hear, and so look to great men in history and look to how they overcame there problems. Don’t let others tell you who is great, use your logic to see if they were great in over coming fear and illogic. Then use these lessons in your life. This way you know you won’t be following some charismatic person with bad advise, or some person who wants to listen to your problems endlessly and not be judgmental.

Men who are violent are not hiding there bad traits very well and this make them easy to hate and see their dysfunctions, while effeminate dysfunctions are surrounded by an endless set of layers of veils and it will take you along time (life is short) to find out under most of these veils are not a better sex or simply a better person but a cowardly, indirect, self-absorbed attention getter that has no true skills to make the world a better place, but only a way to sound like they can make the world a better place. You are on a site like this because you see this, but can you cross the Rubicon?

[FFFF]

Its a shame my dad died 5 years ago, if he had lived, he would no doubt have started to see reality as it was unfolding in front of his eyes..

He had all his life swallowed so much bullshit.

He never had a good word to say about me and was forever more interested in wasting his energies in the labour party when not working huge hours in a job he claimed to hate than anything much else..

Yet, I helped him achieve his own personal ambitions and had respect for him as my father and as a man who may have been a bit dim and certainly over-aggresive, usually at the wrong folk..

The few conversations we ever had were completely one-sided, usually him bollocking me for one reason or another and blaming me for everything that was ultimately his own problem to deal with..

Was he a good dad?

Much as I respect his memory and recognise that much of what he was trying to do was protective and in his mind perhaps well intended, I have to say no, he was immature and created a very bad atmosphere in a family that on the outside may have seemed to be pretty stable..

But, he was my dad and I would always help him out, even if most of my memories and dealings with him involved the fact that he was very dissapointed that I cared not two shakes for socialism, not two shakes for hypocrisy and did not care to be subjected to pointless beatings for no fucking reason that could not have been better sorted out via a proper conversation and a bit of understanding..

I have of course ensured that I treat my sons better, but the problem is, because of the activities of the sort of tossers my father was associating with and promoting decades ago it has been difficult to be father..

Women like my mother are few and far between these days, no doubt had the old man had to live my life, he would find himself in a situation where physical strength and the ability to violently enforce compliance are no longer regarded as acceptable..

[Yan Yan]

This is an interesting place to reflect on an important subject. Every month or so I exchange newsletters with an ex-colleague in the UK - an intelligent and open woman, a bit like myce.

Last year we discussed funerals because I'd just attended the funeral of my Filipino father-in-law:
The number of people at the wake and the huge crowd at next day’s burial was a bit surprising. Papa was an irascible and argumentative individual all his life. He wasn't especially liked but he was sure as hell well known. I’d reckoned without the power of Filipino kinship ways. Papa had seven legitimate children, fourteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren to date. Add the in-laws, the uncles, aunts and cousins, and it starts to mount up. Then there are the secondary wives and children and the same went for his own father, so his ageing half-brothers and sisters and their own offspring were there to add their pennyworth. Add in the relatives of relatives of relatives and the result is a tribal dynasty. The two or three hundred that filled the church could even be considered a poor turnout.

Versus my own father:
I couldn’t help but remember my own father’s funeral. 'L' (ex-wife) and I were already separated then, but we turned up en-famille (the kids loved their grandad) to what we assumed would be a perfunctory ceremony at the crematorium. 'Family' constituted no more than a dozen people. But to my surprise there was a large contingent of ageing veterans from the Burma Star Association and some younger men that I assumed were their military-minded sons. The old men sported medals and uniforms and carried the regimental flags. There was even a young bugler to sound 'the last post'.
Dad was accorded more dignity in death than he’d ever experienced in a single day of his life.

This is a very serious thread. By what criteria do we judge our parents?

God knows there's no such thing as perfect parenting, probably never was.

Spot on bachelor tom!

If our progeny have good things to say about us, it's a sweet reward.

[bachelor tom]

thanks everyone, lots of thoughtful and heartfelt comments, not bad for a bunch of chauvinistic brutes eh?

I worry about boys, there's so much negativity about males, at least in the West, I worry that we are slowly ghettoizing the culture by removing fathers, embracing primitivism - and I do feel gratitude and pride for my Western 'fathers', the men who created and built up this part of the world, and yes those who fought and sometimes died to protect it

I never thought the nuclear family was the answer, just one parent of each sex, I think boys and girls need all the role models and teachers they can get, uncles, grandfathers et al - and when I hear stories like on this thread it adds to my anger at spoiled and ignorant feminist bitches who are deaf and blind to men's feelings and sacrifices

It's possible the traditional family was sentimentalized in the past, maybe there was a politically correct whitewashing of the sins of our fathers and mothers, but I think a Brave New World of impersonal rearing by the state is a nightmare scenario

[43burnt]

I have bit the same as some people in here...
meaning that my father is a complete stranger to me ...

Actually im not even interested getting to know him. I dont actually even know how an dont really care.
Same with my mother.

My parents didnt really teach me even basic life skills and stuff..... they didnt really raise me at all....
its almost the same if they never existed.

I remember when I was really young, that I wanted attention from my mother, but she never gave hardly any attention. My father was angry as hell all the time. He was on the edge every second that I can remember from my early childhood. I feared him a bit.

He also hit my mother once... really hard.
After that my mother and father together decided to break up, just because they simply couldnt get along with each other.
They have been friends since then, even though my father hit her once..
My father is a good man after all, he's 100% honest that he did it, and he is sorry for it....
And my mother even refuses to believe that he did it, simply beacause she dont believe he is like that...

After the break-up, I hadn't seen my father in a month..
After I got to see him, he was like totally different person.
He wasnt angry at all, he was really sweet and nice person.

My mother found another man, and I didnt like him very much....for no reason really.
Maybe thats the reason why I wanted to be in my father's place all the time tough.

Hmm, here was something about my life.... I dont know if I went off-topic a bit or something.

A bit confusing post, I'm still figuring out this all myself. I'm pretty young.. please don't quote this, I might want to edit this post away someday..

ps. My father has told about his father too.... He's father was an alcoholic who never talked to him and when he 'talked', he just shouted, etc.