Preparing for Fathers' Day

Like most preachers, this week I'm preparing to preach a Fathers' Day sermon. For me, that means poking around in Scripture, but also reading some recently-published stuff about fathers, what they're supposed to be doing, what they mean to children and, consequently, to society, etc.

Last Saturday I was at a library booksale and happened upon David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It was first published ten years ago and made a big splash at the time as I remembered. I'd never read it. And now here was a good paperback copy for a buck. So I bought it and started reading.

I didn't expect this or any book to speak so truly and directly to my own situation as a divorced father. But it does. And now I can't decide between the pain it provokes and the insight it provides.

The hardest part for me has been the section, "Can Visitors Be Fathers?" A few excerpts:

On how children think and feel about visits with their fathers:

"From the child's perspective, paternal love without paternal capacity is primarily a reminder of loss. This fact, more than any other, explains why postdivorce visits between father and child are so frequently painful, even traumatic. For the child, those visit-sized doses of father-love do not serve as a vaccine, as a protection from anguish. Quite the opposite. . . . For the child, this well-intentioned, ritualized wounding--this every-other Saturday reminder of what has died--frequently becomes the central emotional dynamic of father-child visitation after divorce."

"Visiting Father" as a contradiction:

"Visitation unfathers men. This phenomenon gradually strangles the father-child relationship. Indeed, the ultimate result of such not-like-a-father visiting is nothing less than the ending of fatherhood. Faced with the inherent falseness of their situation, many of these fathers . . . start feeling like strangers to their children, like imposters."

The necessity of sharing a residence:

"To be a good-enough father--to sustain the dailiness of effective parenting--a man needs to live with his children. When he does not, he literally becomes an outsider. . . As with the rupture of the parental alliance, the father's physical absensce from the home makes postdivorce fatherhood a radically different--and much more problematic--idea than postdivorce motherhood. For this reason, fatherhood after divorce is not even remotely parallel to motherhood after divorce."

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That's all for now. I love and am thankful for my father. I also value my own fatherhood, and I'm trying to make the most of it. But this is going to be my toughest Fathers' Day so far.