The Beginnings of This Journey

Lying in a hospital bed near the end of his ninety years, my German grandfather told his youngest son, “I’ve had a hard life.”

“Yes,” my father replied, “you have.”

My grandfather lost his corner drug store and all of his money during The Great Depression. He moved from South Dakota to a rural Oregon community with his wife and eleven children, and began farming. During World War II, he moved his family to Portland and worked in the shipyards. After retiring, he would walk several miles downtown to pay his utility bills so he could save the cost of postage stamps.

My father has lived a hard life, too. He worked two jobs to put himself through college, sleeping four hours a night. When he and my mother were in their early twenties, they had no money and three children in diapers. My father watched his parents die. He watched his first and only wife, my mother, die. He watched ten siblings die.

As I’ve gotten to know my father better as an adult, it’s become clear that he has mixed feelings about his father. He admires his refusal to succumb to adversity; when his father lost everything, he could have walked away from his family and the overwhelming responsibility. He raised and supported eleven children as best he could. But like many of his generation, and like many fathers in this book, he was harsh, distant, and often critical. And his children resented him for that. Many left home as early as they could.

I am my parents’ first son, and the second of three children. I certainly didn’t grow up deprived, but my life hasn’t been easy, either. Starting the summer that I was ten, I got up at five o’clock in the morning to catch a bus taking kids to work in the berry fields. I made between two and three dollars a day. As a teenager, I slogged through jobs in agriculture, construction, and restaurants. A few years later I put myself through college and then through graduate school five years after that.

My greatest challenges, though, have come during the past fifteen years, as a father raising two rather spirited daughters. I have loved it and struggled with it. Like fathers everywhere, I have no experience whatsoever as a daughter, no idea what it means to be a girl in a relationship with her dad. Two years ago that realization struck me like a hammer in the head.

I woke up one day—and I mean really woke up—with some startling questions running through my mind: “What do you have left to teach your daughters? What’s it like to be a daughter, anyway? To be your daughter? What will your daughters long for as women that they didn’t get from you? What do you have left to learn as a father?” Past the halfway point of my life, I felt like I was stumbling around in the dark while my daughters had blown through childhood into adolescence.

They were nine and thirteen at the time. How did that happen? I traveled a fair amount for my job, but even when I was home, I realized, I wasn’t really there. I was semi-conscious, living in my little cocoon of work and stress. At 52, I still felt like a beta version of fatherware. But there I was, thirteen years into fatherhood. It was too late for a recall on DadWare 1.0.

I woke up with these questions and self-doubts swirling through my head on a remarkable winter day shortly after Christmas. I live in Portland, Oregon, and the entire city was buried under two feet of snow, more than had ever fallen at once in my lifetime. Two inches of snow is a big deal here. Schools were closed for the holiday break, and my office was closed for days.

My world went quiet. For the first time in years, my agitated mind went idle. And I do mean agitated. I dreamed once that I checked into a doctor’s office, and when the receptionist asked me to sign in I wrote my name as “To Do.” So when the weather kept me from going to work, from going anywhere for that matter, it really was a profound change for my mind to be still. This is when the questions began coming to me, about how fathers shape daughters, for better or worse, through their presence or absence in their daughters’ lives.

I wanted to better understand what daughters take in from their fathers and how that happens. I wondered about myself: How much had been passed down to me through what my father internalized from his harsh, critical, and distant father? I was struck by how I’d never given thought to these questions.

I also felt that time was so short. My girls had grown up so quickly. Maybe another dad would have meditated on it or something. Not me. I decided to do something. That’s who I am: To Do.

Just like my questions had hit me head-on, I wanted my answers to do the same. One of my martial arts teachers used to say, “If you want to slay the dragon, you have to go into the dragon’s den.” So with a sense of urgency, and fears of all sorts, I decided to find my dragon’s den and venture inside. I wanted to understand fatherhood and daughterhood from a place I had never been and could never directly experience myself: The heart and soul of a woman, one grown-up daughter after another.

I decided to meet women and ask them to identify what they had absorbed from their fathers, and what they didn’t get that they yearned for. I wanted to find out about this special relationship, and how it set their lives on the trajectories that they’d traveled, so that I could do a better job as the first man in my daughters’ lives.

I’m not a psychotherapist. Nor do I consider myself a writer. I’m a dad, and a businessman. This was something I was simply compelled to do. So I began my journey in search of fatherhood.