“I want my daddy back!”
I remember this scene as if it were yesterday. My oldest daughter
Julia was two.
We were vacationing with another couple. I had a back injury and
couldn’t lift her. So my friend Brian held her, a few feet away from me, and
she didn’t like that. She wanted her daddy back, not some other girl’s.
And she let everyone know.
In the course of writing this book I got to hear how strongly
daughters want their fathers back. It’s buried deeply for some; it’s right at
the surface for others. But you can’t talk with 50 women who are baring their
souls and not feel their longing for the fathers they wanted more of, or
something different from.
Julia is seventeen now. The years have blown by, in a blur of
responsibility and stress and the busy-making that distracts us all. We’re now
on a road trip, visiting colleges in New England and Chicago, before she starts
her senior year of high school. I know it’s a cliché, but where did the time
go? I want my little girl back.
Before she could walk, Julia used to crawl to our front door at
about six o’clock every night and wait for me to get home from work. Like every
little girl everywhere, she wanted her daddy. Some girls get their daddies;
some don’t. And some have their lives violated and ruined by them, the men
whose job it is to protect and nurture the lives they played a role in
creating.
When she was twelve, I got to watch her compete in The National
Science Bowl for middle school students. I remember how, when she first saw me
on the college campus in Denver where the competition was hosted, she ran
toward me screaming, “Daaaddiieee!!!!” The magical moments with her, and with her
sister, have been abundant, filling my heart and soul.
Katherine—or Kat as she’s known—is four years younger. When she
was almost two, Kat used to greet me at our front door as well when I arrived
home from work. For some reason known only to her, she began licking my hand
when I walked in. “What am I now,” I asked one night, “your personal salt
lick?” The next evening, and then for several months, she greeted me by running
to the front door and shouting, “Salt lick!” and then licking my hand.
When she was four we invented a game called “Get Me.” I’d sit on
the living room floor, and she’d run circles around me yelling, “Get me, get
me, get me!” Then I’d strike like a cobra and grab her with my arms or legs,
wrestle her to the ground, and tickle her. A few years later, I made up “Fish
Story,” a bedtime tale about a small fish that befriends a leaf that fell on
its mountain stream. They spend a lifetime together, migrating to the ocean,
swimming to warmer water during the winter, then finding their way back three
years later to the small stream where the story began. For months, I would lie
down on Kat’s bed with her, and tell her that story every night as she fell
asleep.
Julia was in eighth grade and Kat was in fourth when I began this
journey to understand daughterhood, and how fathers—through their presence or
absence—shape daughters into women. For better or worse.
As I began reflecting on how fathers shape their daughters, it
struck me as odd that there are trainers, teachers, and coaches everywhere for
everything—how to drive, get fit, write employee performance appraisals, learn
software, play music, you name it. And over the course of our lives, men get
instructed in dozens, if not hundreds, of areas—how to swim, camp, play
baseball, drive, police the streets, manage a business, take care of patients.
But who’s training the world’s dads on how to father their daughters? And do we
have any more important job in our lives?
Just about anyone responsible for children faces training and
certification requirements—teachers, therapists, doctors. Yet fathers can be
utterly inept from their child’s birth until their legal entry into adulthood.
There are no requirements whatsoever for fatherhood, beyond the ability to
fertilize an egg. Can’t fruit flies do that?
I wrote this book for fathers who wanted to be more than that. And
for daughters who want to better understand the context for their lives. I
stumbled upon an idea—a good one actually—that became this book. And then as I
saw the impact in had on audiences I spoke with, and readers I heard from, I
knew this was more than just an idea, or even a book. It had become my life’s
work.
