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A MAN GLADLY WRAPPED AROUND A FINGER

CONFESSIONS OF A DAD

Confession Number One: I Don’t Have a Feminine Side

From the start I want to come clean on several matters. First and foremost, I am not a woman. Good. I’m glad that’s out of the way. I don’t think like a woman and I don’t really understand how women think. As is the case for most men, a woman’s mind is nearly a complete mystery to me. Which brings me to this point: I realize I am at a huge disadvantage writing a book to women. Women should be very skeptical. It would be just as legitimate for me to write a book on advanced trigonometry when I barely passed algebra. Some may question my qualifications (or any man for that matter) in addressing the various issues which women face. That’s a fair question. The honest answer is no. I’m not qualified. I’m certain I would not read a book on how to be a man if it were written by a woman. Which sounds like a strange admission to make at the outset of a 200-page book. But stick with me.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, or what it feels like to live life through her soul. So I won’t even pretend. Fact is, I’m still growing in my understanding of my wife, Robin, and my daughter, Lauren. I don’t have a feminine side, unless you’re counting my wife. This is the very reason my wife has partnered with me on this project. She does sympathize. I am cashing checks her credibility is writing.

But my aim is not to speak into the lives of women in places I’ve no clue about. I’m not really going there in my portions of this book. This book is about the frameworks of security and love a dad provides (or should) a daughter, allowing her the space of self-discovery and the freedom to grow in her femininity without fear or concern. Dad is a shelter. There are things he can say and do while he has that little girl under his care that help her take flight and stay airborne over the course of her life. It is advice a daughter needs that can only come from dear old dad. This book offers an understanding of the heart of a man, which a woman needs but can only get from the humble confession of a man. A man like dad.

Being a dad is not rocket science. It’s a scary responsibility, but it’s not complicated. Kids want to be loved. Daughters want to be cherished. I don’t want to be a reductionist here. Certainly there is more to it. Structure is important. But fundamentally, kids want their dads to love them and spend time with them. More importantly, they want their fathers near them and involved in their lives.

I have three children. Two boys and one girl. These three human beings know one thing for certain—their dad loves them. Desperately. Not only in word, but in deed and presence. I want to be near them. I love hanging out with them. There is a lot of living going down in our house. I invite myself to their lives. I am often uninvited, but I want to be in there with them nonetheless. Besides their mom, these three are my favorite people on the planet. My best friends. They know this. This makes all the difference.

Some dads are merely present. Other dads are engaged. The former might as well be absent. The compassionless father is a contradiction that is hard to fathom. But so many are. It is a sad neglect that happens rather constantly. There’s no measure of the damage that is done to a child’s soul by a dad simply not caring, or not paying attention. I cannot imagine abandoning my children to this culture. Leaving them to traverse this life alone is an unthinkable cruelty.

But dads do it all the time. Even those who think they aren’t are. They are around. They wield their authority. They provide. Their kids are in line. But their kids are pretty much on their own when it comes to self-discovery and life. The message is “Don’t mess up” or “Don’t be a nuisance.” But it should be “Let’s go figure out this journey called life. Let me help you find you and what you should be doing.” This is the real joy of being a dad. I have so much that my kids need. So many lessons. So much wisdom to offer. I need only to start talking. You start talking early enough, your kids will listen late. You start talking too late, and you’re nothing but white noise.

This book is predicated on this fundamental principle: The love and influence of a father is an amazingly powerful force in his daughter’s life. If he would but pay attention, show up, care, and start speaking into her life, he would spare her so many agonies in the future. He would infuse her with an untouchable confidence in who she is supposed to be and the courage to face life by faith. To dads I say, “She is right there. Stoop down, dad, and love that little creature. She will hang on your every word. What you tell her at twelve will save her enormous pain at twenty-two.” To her I say, “I’m praying your dad takes the time to stoop.”

There are so many things daughters—deep in life—wished their fathers had told them. So many lessons. There are so many daughters who wish their father had filled this space in their life. At the very moment daughters struggle against the gravity of their adolescence needing an abundance of compassion from the one man who knows them best, dads check out and leave their daughters to strive alone. Many dads have no patience for the complicated world of a teenage girl. Or they dismiss their daughter’s struggles as unimportant. More emotion than substance. This is a mistake. These are the headwaters of her life, where the stability of his life is most needed. She needs her father to step in at this moment most of all and not back away. She needs him to start talking.

Years ago I started investing in a relationship with my daughter in the hopes that when the time came it would pay off. From the very moment she was born I began working toward one outcome—I wanted her to trust me in such a way that she could turn to me in the folds of life. I wanted to live and relate to her in such a way that she would view me as a compassionate and constant sanctuary for her life. I wanted her to trust me even at those moments she could not understand me, or did not agree with my counsel. I prayed that when her desires collided with the counsel of her dad in a fog of youthful rebellion she would be persuaded by the constancy of my unconditional love to lay down her arms and rest in her dad. I have tried to be the type of man she could trust with her very life and soul even when on the face of things my counsel made little sense. So I set out building a friendship. Today she is among the closest friends I have. My investment of compassion and time has paid off in huge ways. She is among my greatest treasures.

It’s here that most dads blow it. They forget to like their kids, not just raise them. They forget they’re raising adults and not children. They forget to start talking. When they finally do speak up and begin the conversation with their children, it’s usually at the very moment they need to start walking on their own. Way too late. In a parent’s panic all that comes out are lectures, prohibitions, and “No.” Dads who should have been running beside their kids’ lives all along, are struggling to catch up. Rather than having guided their children to the gateway of adulthood, they left them to figure it out on their own. It’s a painful bit of irony when parents erupt in anger at the poor choices their teenagers make. The same human being who is frustrating them now had no alternative wisdom on which to lean.

I have refused to let my children alone. I have wedged my way into their lives from every possible angle. I have been talking nonstop—especially to my daughter. Through all of my conversations with her over the years (and they have been many), I have been laying a foundation of love and wisdom she could stand on as she came upon those transitional moments in her life. I always knew the time for significant input was limited, especially with her. There would come a time when what I had told her about life would have to suffice. A moment when she would have to make decisions on her own. Every parent knows this moment is coming with their children. When it does, we get down on our knees and pray that something sticks. We pray they listened. There are so many choices ahead of my sweet girl that she will have to make alone.

For me, one choice rises above them all. A man. The man she will devote her heart and life to. I have surrendered to the fact that I cannot choose the man my daughter will fall in love with and marry. But I have tried ever so diligently to shape her understanding of what that man should look like by exemplifying it in my own life. For this—and many other reasons—I have kept showing up in her world.

But despite all my many efforts, I knew the day was coming when she would pedal faster than I could run. I realized a gap between our genders would finally stretch beyond the innocence of her youth. There was always this inevitable threshold on the horizon moving toward our relationship where she would cease being a child and emerge as a young woman. I’ve known this season would require more of her mother’s insight and sympathy than mine. In the same way, a mother cannot give a son all he needs. There is a point at which the counsel a dad gives his daughter cannot possibly cover the totality of her life. Indeed, I do not speak teenage girl. Her mother is the only multilingual person in our house. She’s often my translator. There are certain conversations I cannot have with my daughter. This is not my role in her life. I respect the relationship she has with her mother. But I am still there just out of the corner of her life, watching things take shape.

More often than not I’ve no clue what she’s “feeling” or why she is feeling it. This is true for about almost anything. I usually don’t have a clue why she’s crying. Or how something I said to her in passing three months back has upset her in the last ten minutes. Or why the boy who pays her no attention at school upset her because although he has no clue, she wants him to pay attention to her. I don’t get any of this. Admittedly, there are so many things about this wonderful creature to which I cannot relate. She’s an enigma.

But she does not need me to understand it all. She simply needs me to accept her despite my inability to understand her. A dad doesn’t have to pretend to get everything that’s going through his daughter’s mind and heart. Because he doesn’t. But he cannot pretend to care. She needs him to care whether he understands or not. So much depends on a dad being sensitive and tender even when his daughter’s world is lost in translation.

You don’t treat girls like you do boys. Not exactly an original observation I know, but dads too often expect girls to react like sons do. Probably most dads would like it if they did. As it is, dads scratch their heads wondering why the tactics used on sons end up backfiring with daughters. There are different strategies for raising boys and girls. Girls don’t react to dad like boys do. Their respective needs are no less intense, but they are of a different quality. The dad who does not understand this will eventually pay for it.

So often I have seen dads treat their daughters like they would some common nuisance. Intolerant of the shifting emotions that accompany her adolescence, they tend to appease her more than engage her. To him she is a complicated bundle of emotions and feelings they’ve neither the time nor patience to unravel. There’s no way to measure the impact of this kind of neglect. It is the exact wrong thing to do with a young female heart.

Boys are like bent nails that you spend the majority of your life getting as straight as you can before they head off into the world. You apply pressure at various points in their life, give them a clear self-awareness, stay present, point them to Christ, and send them out to conquer the world. Dads are naturals with bent nails.

Not so with girls. Girls are more like precious vases placed in the hands of Neanderthals. “What do you do with this?” The wrong kind of pressure can be detrimental to a girl’s growth and development. Not that females are endowed with a fragile psyche, but daughters do require a certain delicacy. The pressure you apply to their lives has to be far more precise. Loving a daughter’s heart is a skill a dad has to learn.

Confession Number Two: There Is a Double Standard

Second, there is a double standard when it comes to raising girls. I realize I’m outing dads everywhere in admitting this, but it is true. Girls have it tougher when it comes to dad and the rules that govern her life. My own daughter has come to realize this and has pointed it out on numerous occasions. But there is a good reason for the inequity.

The world is a dangerous place, and she is an especially threatened species. My job—the bulk of it—is to protect her. (My job with her brothers is to protect girls from them until they are ready to protect girls themselves.) Honestly, this would be true whether I were a Christian father or not. This is because it’s built into a dad’s DNA.

There’s a saying. It’s crude, but it’s true. When you have a son you only have to worry about one penis. When you have a daughter you have to worry about all of them. A faithful dad works tirelessly to preserve an innocence around his daughter’s life and then fills his days walking the parameter of that innocence prepared to fend off interlopers. In certain ways my daughter has as much freedom and/or restrictions as her two brothers do. But I watch over her life with a much greater diligence.

A dad who fails to surround his daughter’s life with his love and watch over its boundary inevitably exposes her to the cruelty of a world in which there are many who view her as nothing more than recreational equipment for sex. That’s brutal, but that’s the truth. Dads who can’t imagine intentionally handing their daughters over to such wickedness do it indirectly. They toss their daughters into the gristmill of the culture simply by neglecting them.

So yes there is a double standard. And it has been hard on my daughter at times. But hopefully one day my daughter will thank me for the very moments in her life she most resented me. And no, I do not apologize for it. I am her champion.

Confession Number Three: All Young Men Are My Enemies

Third, in my opinion, a lot of young men are perverts. I can hear moms and dads objecting on behalf of their sons. “My son is different.” Yeah, and a unicorn just ran through my backyard as I was writing this. As far as I am concerned, most adolescent boys are the embodiment of evil intent on harming my daughter by taking advantage of her. I don’t like them.

Obviously there are exceptions. I’m sure there are some. But on the whole, I loathe them. They are my mortal enemy. Even the more decent ones. Even those who attend church with their mothers. I live in constant suspicion of them all. I have to. No self-respecting dad would do otherwise. They are the bane of my existence. The contempt I have for them is hard to describe. Let’s just say part of my research for this book was viewing the Taken films with Liam Neeson. My favorite scene is the phone call. For fathers of daughters, it’s our Knute Rockne speech. Neeson warns his adversary that he has skills. They’re special. And that if his daughter is not let go, he will pursue, find, and kill the captor. I usually black out from excitement at this point.

I can’t believe Neeson did not get an Oscar for that. It makes me cry every time I see it. I dream of picking up the phone one day as some unsuspecting suitor calls to ask my daughter out on a date and quoting it verbatim. Man! That’s going to be awesome.

I feel this way about young men because I was once one of them. I was once one of these creatures I despise—a teenage boy. So I know what lurks in their hearts. It ain’t always good. And this makes me very angry.

I remember talking to my daughter as she had just begun to discover boys. Just about the time they were discovering her. She was so innocent and naïve. A lamb to the slaughter. I sat her down at our kitchen table and had a rather direct conversation with her. “Lauren, you need to know that boys are perverted and only want one thing.” She looked at me for a second and asked, “What? What do they want?” For the next five minutes I filled her in. It was Liam Neesonesque.

When I finished, the look on her face was one of sheer horror. Like when you tell some unsuspecting person with a mouth full of hot dog what they are really made of. In my opinion it’s one of the best talks we’ve ever had. In her opinion it’s one she wished she could erase from her memory bank. Regardless, it had to be done.

Lest I be unclear, I am not a big fan of the male species. I don’t speak highly of them in this volume. And this puts me in somewhat of a tough spot since I wrote a book on men (the companion to this one) in which part of my argument was a refusal to buy into the stereotype laid upon men by the culture. The stereotype that says men are lazy slugs who think only about sex and waste their lives playing video games.

I actually have a lot of hope for men. God can do great things with them. I know many honorable men. But, honestly, there is a little bit of truth in every stereotype. There is a part of me that wants to apologize to my daughter for the condition of men in our culture. I spend much of my time with her making sure none of them get near her. Fact is, there aren’t many mature godly young men out there. They are hard to find. It’s difficult to say, but it’s the truth.

Without the cross of Christ dominating our lives, we men are capable of fulfilling every stereotype for which we are known. Generally, men are completely unprepared to handle the heart and life of a woman. We do go into marriage and relationships thinking primarily about sex and not much else. We do have a tendency to neglect our responsibilities as we escape into recreation or video games. We do mature much later than women. It’s all true on a certain level. I hate to admit it, but it is. We have not done our gender any favors.