In Search of Fatherhood

A reader of my column in The Oregonian on Thursday Jan. 17 (http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2011/06/fathers_day_a_portland_father.html) shared her very personal story with me. I was so moved by it, I wanted to share it with you. Sadly, I am hearing so many stories like this these days. Here goes:

 
Kevin Renner’s article from The Oregonian caught my attention, and—along with some books I read earlier on the effect of fathers on their daughters—and led me to relate my own father’s ability to meet his only daughter’s (me) innate need for attention, affection and nurturing, a need with which is claimed daughters are born with. Kevin impelled me to respond to the title of his book: In Search of Fatherhood: Daughters Praising, Speaking Up, Talking Back.

Psychologist Charlene Kate Kavanagh introduces the article with the following quote: “Reading Kevin Renner’s memoir of fatherhood prompts me to say to women, regardless of age, culture or background: ‘Tell me if and how your father loved you as a child, and I’ll tell you whether or not you have found love as a woman.’” So here’s my telling:

I have a broken little finger on my right hand. My father shut the back of our station wagon on it, not noticing my hand was in the way. He didn’t take me to a doctor, leaving my finger permanently bent and scarred from the age of eight. Being a pianist, and later also an organist, it has always affected my range of reach on a keyboard. I don’t know for sure why he didn’t have it treated, but my hunch is that he was afraid what my mother would say and didn’t want to face her, regardless of what damage it did to me.

He also provided breakfast, lunch (including school bag lunches), and dinner all my growing up years, though he had a full-time professional job, and my mother was mostly unemployed and stayed home.

He taught me to drive with great patience and clarity, and no particular emotional affect. We never had conversations where he would ask me about my day, or tell me anything about his day or anything else about himself. Every night when I went to bed, he prayed formulaic prayers and sang “Jesus Loves Me,” unless he had a meeting or was away overnight. I hated the hug and kiss that came with it, and just endured the prayers.

He was House Punisher: When he came home from work, if my mother told him I had misbehaved and needed a spanking, he unquestioningly and immediately took me up to my bedroom and spanked me hard with his hand until I cried, then continued until I stopped crying. He never talked with me then or later, except to announce “it hurt him more than it hurt me.” (Yeah, right!) He never questioned nor contradicted whatever my mother said about anything, including about my behavior or me even when I myself knew she was lying. Never was I allowed to question either of them or explain myself.

Every Easter he gave my mother and me a carnation. And when I was in high school, we had a sailboat, which he and I sailed often on the weekends on the Columbia River. He worked very hard, both at his job, and at home—cooking, cleaning, yard work, maintaining our nut tree orchard, sheep, a dog, and sometimes chickens, a beef cow, and vegetable garden.

Neither of us was allowed by my mother to sit down and read, talk, play games, nor otherwise relax during any of our waking hours—except weekly swimming at the Columbia Athletic Club in downtown Portland, and a weekly card game of three- or four-person (if my brother was home) Solitaire. (An odd concept, eh?) My mother was definitely Martinet-in-Charge and I was aware that my father feared her as much as I did—in fact, no one I knew ever wanted to set her off, which was very easy to do! My father and I never discussed any of this, or anything else, for that matter. He just told me what my mother wanted, and I was to do it unquestioningly.

When my mother had her regular two-week periods of locking herself in the downstairs bathroom, and not speaking to us, coming out only when we were asleep or away at school and work, he endured the craziness and never even tried to explain to me what was going on, other than telling me whatever it was my fault. He always insisted that I needed to keep knocking on the bathroom door and apologize to my mother, even if I had no idea what I might have done to cause her behavior. He admitted he didn’t know either, but it was my fault and thus my duty to convince her I was sorry so she would come out of the bathroom, finally. It never worked, and she never would answer me, open the door, or come out—but he made me go through the charade. Then, when she suddenly one day, was no longer holed up in the bathroom, the invariable next stage was an hours-long harangue, for which my father seated me across the table from her to face by myself while he went to bed!

When my mother would take off on her usually solitary trips to Canada, my father and I had peace, but no special times together or conversations. That loneliness was not much better than the chaos, which reigned when my mother was home. The only time my father had any fun or laughed was when we had our occasional company, mostly relatives. He was then a totally different person, whom I hardly recognized.

So to sum up his role in giving me attention, affection and nurturing, I felt then and still know now that he hadn’t learned how to be a father to me, one who could provide for my innate needs, beyond the minimum basics of food, housing, and clothing. I am grateful for that, but yearned all my life for protection, acknowledgement, interest, pride, respect, regard and unqualified love from my father. He didn’t know how to be a father who could teach me to be a woman.

Even a wonderful grandfather and aunt could never replace the missing elements of parents, who a child looks up to unquestioningly as gods. I have done my best to manage, given the lifelong trajectory my father launched me on. And I’ve just told you something about if and how my father loved me as a child, and maybe you—or Charlene Kate Kavanagh–can tell me whether or not I have found love as a woman.

Re-posted from The Oregonian, Jan. 17, 2013

“Reading Kevin Renner’s memoir of fatherhood prompts me to say to women, regardless of age, culture, or background: ‘Tell me if and how your father loved you as a child, and I’ll tell you whether or not you have found love as a woman’.”

Charlene Kate Kavanagh, Ph.D., psychologist and author

Moms: Who taught your husbands or partners how to raise your daughters into womanhood? Who taught your own father?

Dads: Who showed you how to do it? Who taught me?

Unfortunately, no one instructed any of us as fathers in this enormously important work, the true work of our lives. Through their presence and even their absence fathers shape how daughters live, work, and love. But of the hundreds of things men learn growing up, how to nurture a girl into a woman isn’t one of them.

Who a daughter gets as the most important man in her life is pretty much the luck of the draw, for better or worse. That luck of the draw fills the heart of every woman with sadness, emptiness, anger and longing; or perhaps joy, confidence, compassion and empathy. Every woman is a daughter, and every woman’s emotional abundance or desperation usually has more to do with her father than any other man in her life.

As a dad with two girls, I wanted to better understand the lifelong impact that fathers have on daughters. I decided that if men really wanted to learn how to be better fathers, they should talk with women. That’s right; men need to learn fatherhood from women, at least if we’re raising daughters. That was my mid-life epiphany. So I took a year-long journey into the hearts and souls of 50 women from 17 countries, ages 29 to 92.

I asked all kinds of women−rich and poor, famous and anonymous, straight, lesbian, and transgender−if they would lock themselves in a private room with me for a long evening or weekend (I am not making this up), and then share with me the most intimate details of their lives and how they were shaped by their fathers.

These women were from Iran, Liberia, China, the U.S., Mexico, Germany, Korea, Saudi Arabia, India, and places in between. Among them were a doctor, a psychotherapist, professional athletes, former executives and the late Oregon Supreme Court justice Betty Roberts. I also met with current and former sex workers, drug addicts, unemployed and homeless women.

I heard stories that were heartwarming and heart breaking.  Among them were:

• Katie, whose father was violent and abusive. She lived in a fog of drug and alcohol addiction, working as a stripper, churning through five marriages, giving up her children and attempting suicide three times. Her story ends with a spiritual reconciliation that I never could have imagined.
• Blanca, the daughter of an agricultural worker from Mexico who brought his family to California to educate his daughters. Blanca honored his sacrifice by completing a law degree at Santa Clara University and an MBA at Berkeley. She cried for four hours as we spoke.
• Wendy, who loved her single father so dearly she proposed to him at age four. She cried at his rational explanation about why that wouldn’t work, “Because I could hear that there was a ‘no’ in there.”
• Kim, who is transgender and spent her childhood imprisoned in a boy’s body, and became best friends with her father in adulthood.
• Kara, a two-time member of the  U.S. Olympic team, whose father was killed by a drunk driver a week before she turned four.
• Courtney, whose father sexually abused her until age 12, when she turned his German Luger on him.
• Luna, who in her thirties earns her living as a sex worker while raising a daughter and going to school.

I told them that I’d listen until they dropped. Some did. One woman wrote to me later, “I went home and crashed and slept for 14 hours.”

The stories these women shared were essentially the same, regardless of where in the world they grew up or when: Daughters are born with an innate need for the attention, affection and nurturing of their fathers. Some women draw the long straw, getting heroic fathers. Others draw the short straw in their horrific fathers. And others get “the long and the short of it”, as I call it in my book, or those dads who are in between the terrific and tragic.

After hundreds of hours of laughter and tears, their stories and mine became a book, which got me in front of radio, television, and live audiences around the country, where I got to hear from even more women. I learned profoundly important lessons from women about how to be a father. I’ll write about those lessons in future columns.

Most fathers have no idea how deeply they shape their daughters. Through the way they live their day-to-day lives, fathers set their daughters on lifelong trajectories. The woman next to you on the bus, or in front of you at the checkout line, or working with, for or above you became who she is through the luck of a draw.

I wish the world were full of nothing but long straw stories. It’s not. But there’s also a world of potential for fathers to do a better job of influencing the course of their daughters’ lives.

Of the world’s 3.6 billion daughters, perhaps 3 billion of them are old enough to talk. Every one of them has something to say about fatherhood. For the good of fathers and daughters everywhere it’s time for dads to open their hearts and minds to what women can teach them about fatherhood.

Kevin Renner is a public speaker and author of “In Search of Fatherhood: Daughters Praising, Speaking Up, Talking Back.” He invites readers to submit questions for future columns, which run on the 3^rd  Thursday of each month. He can be reached at www.kevin-renner.com, or at InSearchofFatherhood@yahoo.com. Follow him on Twitter @kevinrenner, or on Facebook at Kevin Renner In Search of Fatherhood.

When the snow starts to fly in the Cascade Mountains, I think of Joie Smith. Joie started a towing business more than 40 years ago at the base of Mt. Hood, and has rescued thousands of unfortunate drivers and their vehicles all around the mountain and the surrounding countryside. Prior to that, she owned and operated a ski shop at Mt. Hood. I interviewed Joie in July of 2009 when she was 81 years old. Joie’s biological father was killed in a boating accident when she was around eight years old, and her mother remarried. During our interview, Joie referred to her biological father as “Father” and her stepfather as “Dad.”

What are your earliest memories of your father?

We had property on Sauvie Island and I remember being in an old Franklin car, fording the streams. You would put newspaper in front of the radiator to try to get through the stream without getting the ignition wet. I remember once when the car stalled in the middle of the stream and he had to get a team of horses to pull the car out.

He was strict. I wasn’t allowed downstairs until I was called from my room, both in the morning and after dinner. It was very much like an Old Country upbringing for a youngster. There was music in the house. He loved to sing, and my mother would accompany him. They entertained, dinners and that sort of thing, until the Depression hit. They were better off than most, though, and I remember men coming to the door and asking if there was any work they could do for a meal. Myour y mom never refused them, which makes an impression on a child.

Did he spend much time with you?

He always reserved a time before I went to bed to either talk or read to me. Maybe not for long, but I’d sit in his lap and it was a little time together that I looked forward to. I loved it. He was openly affectionate.

What’s the most fun thing you remember doing with your father?

Probably going fishing. He was an avid outdoorsman. I would get to hold a fishing pole in a rowboat. I remember I caught a fish and it almost pulled the pole out of my hand, but I landed it! My mother would come along. Things were pretty much done as a family unit. He had lots of friend that he fished with and hunted with, but also he included my mother and me a great deal of the time.

In those years when you were growing up with him, and being included by him, did you feel loved by your father?

Yes, definitely. One of the major things is that I was included. Because in the next go-round I was excluded. But I carried the included part with me throughout my life.

Being included conveyed to you some sense that you’re worthy, you’re important.

Yes, and that made me want to do things as good as I possibly could.

So let’s talk about your dad: what did he value and how did those things become evident to you?

Well, he could not have been more different than my father. He was a fun-loving, two-fisted drinking, product of the Roaring 20s. And my mother loved this, because we had lived a far more formal, restricted life before.

He was a very capable person. He believed in being ready, being there on time, and doing a good job when you went to work. And when you’re on your own time, why, play as hard as you want to, but be ready to go back to work the next morning. And not to whimper and cry about things or be a bellyacher. He had many skills, both in business and in physical ability.

When my mother was dating him, I told her I thought I’d like to have him as a dad. He was a horseman, among other things, and within a very few months after he and my mom were together, I got a pony. The back of our block was a 20-acre hay field. I kept the pony in town part of the time, and part of the time out on an 83-acre farm Dad bought in Clackamas. I never cared for household activities. My interests have always been more outdoors, be it animals or equipment. And so with a farm, why, I learned how to drive a Cat and clear fields and cut wood, and I could burn off energy with these things.

One summer I spent splitting wood, and at the end of the summer, Dad said, “I’ll give you four cords of wood for your summer’s efforts.” I was 12, and shortly before that I’d decided I wanted a car. I’d learned to drive when I was ten, in the hayfield out there with an old International Truck, pulling a buck rake. I could hardly see out of it to reach the pedals! Anyway, I traded my four cords of wood for a Model A Roadster. It wasn’t running real well, and this began my learning of auto mechanics. Dad’s distant cousin was a service manager at Francis Ford down on Hawthorne and Grand Avenue, so I went down there with my engine and learned how to pour the bearings and rebuild the engine, and I brought it home and we put it back in the Model A. Dad spent the time to help me with these things. Kids learn quickly, you know, they really do.

At 14 I got my learner’s permit and the minute I had that, I was driving all the time. He stressed that driving is a privilege, and if I’d been caught doing something illegal, I’d have lost that privilege. By the time I was 15, I had a regular drivers’ license and my folks told me, “As long as we know where you are and what you’re doing, you can go.” I had complete freedom. And I always valued that.

Your dad and your mother had children after they got married.

I was nine years older than my little brother, and ten or eleven years older than my little sister. The two of them could gang up against me, so when something went haywire, they’d say, “Well, she did it.” Sometimes the folks would see through that. But the worst of it was I was a built-in babysitter. And that wasn’t good for us three kids and I made up my mind at a tender age I was not gonna have any children. I knew what taking care of diapers and bringing up kids was all about and it wasn’t my cup of tea.

What would you say were the really big lessons that you took into your life from your father and your dad?

Well, I learned that things are always changing, and you’d better learn to accept change, not fight it, not be an obstructionist. It’s easy to fall back and say “No” or “I don’t want” or “I won’t” or “I can’t.” You have to learn to bend. Also, have fun! Try to do the best you can. And observe, because there’s always something to see. There’s always something to learn. Keep your mind open. Retain what you can. Help when you can.

You’ve done things that not very many women have done: ski racing, running the ski shop, then running a towing business for 40 years now. You’ve still got your health and strength. You’ve got a real toughness about you, a physical strength and toughness of character. Did that come from your dad or your father?

Both. I inherited my physical strength from my biological father and certainly used it with the stepfather. I’ve always enjoyed a fair degree of strength and I’ve been very physically active, which has helped me keep it. Horseback riding is a lot more exercise than most people realize. This is big country up here, and you just don’t go for an hour, you go out for the day and you cover miles.

Any last thing you’d like to add?

From both men, I learned to appreciate learning. They both would explain things to me. People have no idea the responsibility that should go with parenting. I’ve seen the consequences today of kids that haven’t had help from their parents, and the parents haven’t given of themselves to their children. I feel for kids that haven’t had love and discipline at home. I really do.

Dads, hug your daughters starting at day 1, and then until they can’t stand it anymore. A real important contribution to fatherhood and parenthood generally from Nicholas Kristof at the NY Times…http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/opinion/sunday/kristof-cuddle-your-kid.html?ref=nicholasdkristof

Emotions often run high during presidential elections, especially around issues of civil rights. 2012 is no exception. Women’s issues and marriage equality are front and center, but the underlying belief in human dignity and fairness come from the same passion for justice that drove the early civil rights movement.

Anne Schneider met with me for an interview as I was writing my book. Hers was among the interviews that was not included due to the book’s length. Below is an excerpt from that conversation.

Ann’s father was born in North Dakota in 1909 into a very small farming community. His father, grandfather, and many of his relatives had homesteaded in the area and remained there, and he grew up surrounded by a warm, loving network of relatives. His mother died when he was four; his stepmother died when he was ten. His extended family made sure he and his siblings were loved, cared for, and secure during his entire childhood. Out of that close-knit community, he formed ideas and values about family and community that he passed along to his only child. In this excerpt from our May, 2009 interview, Ann talks about how her father truly lived his values:

My dad’s insurance agency was right on what is now Martin Luther King Avenue when we moved to Portland. Many of his customers were African-American.  That was a turning point in his life of understanding the real situation for those families and the amount of prejudice there was, which was reflected in even the insurance rates and blatant racism.

He was a very trustworthy person, with real integrity. He developed close relationships in the African-American community that then transformed my parents’ view of what needed to happen in society.  And that’s how they got involved in civil rights.

I really respected the way they spent their time trying to improve relationships in the community.  My dad sponsored a Little League baseball team. My parents went to the games and were intimately involved with those kids and those families. It’s interesting to me that he put a lot of his hope in young people. I think he really felt called to give kids a chance.

What did you learn from him with respect to his investing himself with children and with kids in the black community and being a social activist?  Do you feel like you learned that from your father?

Yes, and from my mom, too. Okay, here they are: They’re just North Dakota, goodhearted, basic folks, decent people; they believed in American values of equal opportunity and that education was important.

And then, here they have customers who are sharing some pretty tough stories.  They talked at home about what they heard from folks who had come from the South and how they’d been treated there. There were some poignant things.

I think there was some understanding, because there’d been pain in his own life and unfairness. He could relate to those stories and felt that he could contribute or do something.

Do you have any recollection of one of the specific stories that he shared?

Customers talked about people in their family had been tarred and feathered. My parents were close to an older African-American woman who talked about the lack of education and not having literacy skills. They heard stories about kids who hadn’t had an equal opportunity.  The school I attended was probably a third black, and my parents gave me very strong messages of inclusivity.  When I had a birthday party in about fifth grade, we invited the whole class, everybody.  And it was not that common, I think, that some of those kids had been in a white family’s home.  But I just remember them as just kids in our class.

When I went to Brazil as a college student, I got involved in the African-Brazilian community.  And I’ve been very interested in the African heritage of this country. I feel like it was really because my parents embraced that and it impacted me positively.

In some ways, they were more radical than I was; my father wrote scathing letters to various congressmen and they ended up leaving the Lutheran church that they’d been part of because they felt the church community was not living their Christian beliefs and was way too passive in speaking out against injustice.

When we’d get together with family, my dad was always much more radical, much more left than anyone else in the family. So, if they started talking politics, it would always be challenging.

Those experiences with his customers really changed my dad’s life, and he supported my mom as she started a reading project.  She had supported him in his business and then he supported her as she, in her late fifties and sixties, started to come into her own. He was right there with her helping her with her project, kind of quiet, behind the scenes, but acting out what his values were.

Those values meant that when I was growing up, I was really interested in other cultures and other people.  I had these experiences where in that elementary school, I had friends later who were of my generation, of the same age who were African-American.  I distinctly remember one young woman who said to me, “Ann, I remember that you were not prejudiced.”  That was her memory of our seventh grade class.  I didn’t have any memory of that.  I know I was just living out my family values, to look at people for who they are.

What are the really big things you took from your relationship with him?

Living in a community and being connected in family was really important.  Having integrity and treating others as you’d have them treat you–that went across cultures.  He really believed in this sense of being a good citizen, and that meant being involved in your community and speaking up and participating at that level.

He challenged me to think in the bigger sphere of things, where to speak up.  For example, on the civil rights thing, those were issues that involved social change and a lot of it was political fighting, so to speak.  And it isn’t easy and it’s not comfortable.

Knowing my father’s quiet personality, it’s interesting that he was willing to make such strong statements and to speak up about important things that he felt really deeply about.  It challenges me to step up and speak out about things that are really important.

We all have our disappointments and pain and different things that happen.  But I think, in my dad’s life, he healed much of that pain. He made a difference in a lot of people’s lives.  In his own quiet way, he really worked for the benefit of others.

OK, so I have another Father’s Day story. Not long ago, I’m shopping at Nordstrom. A nice young woman, maybe in her mid 20s, is helping me.

I buy some stuff. She rings up the charges. As I open my wallet to pay, she sees a recent picture of my daughters. And then she says, “Oh, they’re so cute. Are those your grand daughters?”

: (

OK. With Father’s Day coming up, I have a story to share.

I took a really great class about 10 years ago, from someone who’d done her PhD at the Harvard Business School. Sitting next to me was a younger woman, who was in the first trimester of her pregnancy. We talked a lot.

We talked about parenting and kids. I showed her pictures of my daughters. She fixated on a picture one of them. And then she looked at me. Then she looked back at the picture, and then again back at me.

Finally, with a puzzled look on her face, she turned to me and said, “Your wife must be very beautiful.”