Father and Daughter (Paul Simon)If you leap awake in the mirror of a bad dream and for a fraction of a second you can’t remember where you are, just open your window and follow your memory upstream. To the meadow in the mountain where we counted every falling star. I believe the light that shines on you will shine on you forever (forever). And though I can’t guarantee there’s nothing scary hiding under your bed, I’m gonna stand guard like a postcard of a Golden Retriever. And never leave ‘til I leave you with a sweet dream in your head.
I’m gonna watch you shine, gonna watch you grow. Gonna paint a sign so you always know. As long as one and one is two.
There could never be a father who loved his daughter more than I loved you. Trust your intuition. It’s just like goin’ fishin’. You cast your line and hope you get a bite.
But you don’t need to waste your time worrying about the marketplace, try to help the human race. Struggling to survive its harshest night.
I’m gonna watch you shine, gonna watch you grow. Gonna paint a sign so you always know. As long as one and one is two.
There could never be a father who loved his daughter more than I love you.
I’m gonna watch you shine, gonna watch you grow. Gonna paint a sign so you always know. As lone as one and one is two.
There could never be a father who loved his daughter more than I loved you.
If there is a parent-child relationship that has been stereotyped beyond our imagination and to the point of utter silliness and unbelievableness, it is the father-daughter relationship. The myth of “daddy’s little girl” continues to pervade the literature with very little objective assessments of the obstacles and difficulties this particular parent-child relationship presents to both parties. Father’s are supposed to be “heroes”, “first loves”, “teachers of humility”, “teachers of pragmatism and grit”, “conveyors of religion and god.” Their function is to bring responsibility, patriotism, friendship and persistence to their daughters’ lives. And, of course, they’re supposed to protect them fiercely and let go of them just at the right time.
None of these in and of themselves would be offensive or raise concern, if, alongside them, we would also make attempts to understand what the factors are that allow or disallow men to provide some of these things. In the current mood of still believing that fathers can “choose” to leave, the general tone of the literature seems to be “get it together and do this, for your daughters.”
In other words, I do believe that men/fathers have indeed far-reaching functions in their daughters’ lives. However, we will not understand these functions well, nor will we be able to promote them sensibly, if we continue to stubbornly insist that a daughter should simply be seen by her father as daddy’s little girl or princess. Who a daughter is to a man, how he will treat her and how he will be able to respect her decisions (her loves, preferences, values, etc.) depends to a large extent on his experiences with women and men in his life. In this context, the gender difference between man and daughter can be both an obstacle and an opportunity. And it will be important to see how it always has potential to be both.
I mentioned during an earlier talk that the subtitle to today’s talk was not my idea, but that of my friend and colleague Michael Trout. I took this line from him, because it intrigued me and seemed to be intuitively right. Somehow men, fathers that is, are indispensable to daughters while, at the same time, completely useless. This paradoxical need and non-need for men must have something to do with gender and sex-roles. It is echoed, for example, in this short essay which I found on the internet:
Men need the contribution of women to nurture our daughters and connect with them. I have curled my daughter's hair and bought her feminine hygiene products, but I am still a man. My daughter needs a woman to show her how to be a woman.
The first female in your daughter's life is still her biological mother. Support their relationship through your words and actions. Don't play custody games or speak in anger.
If your daughter's mom isn't available, find someone — or several someones — who can become your daughter's surrogate mom(s). In addition, let your daughter choose a person to confide in and who will share with you appropriate information of her development. Confidentiality must guard this relationship or it will not function. Besides, the topics they discuss are not as important as their friendship, the key to developing that woman in your home.
But men are not unimportant at all. Compare this quote from the same essay:
Dreaming together opens a panorama of new horizons. Dreaming gives our daughters a kind of blessing. In The Blessing (Pocket Books), Gary Smalley and John Trent describe the five parts to a Jewish blessing: physical touch, spoken words, expression of value, a commitment to the person and a picture of a special future. Have you ever blessed your daughter in this way?
Men Blessing Their Daughters
The idea that fathers can bless their daughters by dreaming with them is intriguing to me. Perhaps it is the absence of strong gender-specific suggestions that make this one different. This is not about appreciation of her femininity, it is not to model for her what a good man should look like. Rather, it is about the activity of envisioning, building a mental landscape of dreams and hopes that, perhaps, can create a kind of closeness between a father and his daughter that few other things can.
The idea of a blessing coming from the father is intriguing to me, too, because blessings are a kind of missive. A blessing is a gesture of “sending out”. When a father blesses his daughter he is sending her out, into the world, perhaps, into her new job, into her marriage and in so doing he is ritually freeing her to go and establish herself.
Does this mean she was his property up to this point? you may ask. That idea would certainly raise some people’s hairs regarding the usefulness or outdatedness of old stereotypes. I don’t think that a blessing implies previous ownership. Rather, I believe, that such a blessing only points to this notion of uselessness captured in today’s title. The blessing says,
“You’re different from me, you always have been. All I can do is wish you well and let you go. This is what I as your father have always felt and what has caused me pain and hurt, long before it was time to utter this blessing. I knew, that at some point, you would leave, would have to leave.”
Fathers, I believe, have to learn to set their daughters free, but not to neglect them. This is, perhaps, the crucial juncture, different from the one a father encounters with his sons. While the latter, by way of gender identity, still provides a kind of indelible connection, the former is dependent a different set of bonds, if it is to survive.
The Daughter’s Perspective
Yet, many daughters not only feel not blessed by their fathers, but they resent their fathers for having controlled them, put them down, treated them with disrespect and condescension. In my practice I see too many women who end up feeling their fathers did not even trust that they could manage their lives, that they could be in control of their lives, be successful and make things work.
It is rarely the case that I meet women who speak of their fathers with great affection. Let me give you one of those rare examples. A woman in her mid-thirties came to me for therapy regarding health-problems and, what she felt are missed relational opportunities in her life so far. She had been engaged to a man who treated her quite badly, however, she had felt unable to leave him. Yet, she didn’t know why she could not leave. A conversation with her father finally made the difference.
“Do you know the story of the little boy who played between piles of poop, he asked her during a particularly hard phone-conversation. No, she answered. Well, he said this boy was playing and playing. He looked so happy, even though he was playing between piles of poop. Someone came by and asked him about it. Well, the boy responded, this is horse-poop. And the other asked, why is that important? Well, the boy said, where there is horse-poop, there is a pony. My client described how her father went on to ask her “Where is your pony?” What are you hoping for?
This is not an affectionate moment that would be easy to understand. There is no gentle violin music in the back-ground that suggests that she is still daddy’s little girl. Fathers talking to their adult daughters about excrement, be that a horse’s or someone else’s, will not make it into the halls of fame of little girls’ daddies. It’s a tough moment, but this father is able to tell his daughter “you love too much.” “You hope too much.” “ You’re forgetting about respecting yourself.” “Save yourself, because I cannot do it.” “Get out, before it’s too late.”
What this father did, viz. act as a respectful mentor to his daughter, is overshadowed by the things that I often hear of other fathers of adult daughters. “It’s your own fault,” “you should have listened to me in the first place,” “I’m sure you’re making it worse,” “Talk to your mother about it,” or “you’ve always been difficult,” “Just put up with it.”
What is most palpable about such reactions to their daughters’ misfortune is the fathers’ anger. Through those words of abandonment and blame speaks a form of disenchantment and grief that can be missed easily. This grief, I believe, is the fruit of too much felt uselessness of the father in the life of his daughter. In effect it seems, the father feels abandoned by his daughter. And, as it turns out, this is an abandonment that started simply by her being a girl, i.e., someone who would not really resonate with him in deep, meaningful ways. For many men, becoming the father of a daughter sets the stage for a re-run of an already familiar drama: Being rejected by a woman. This drama was often enacted for the first time, when his mother didn’t feel comfortable having him really close anymore, it might have continued as a rejection by a girl in middle-or high-school and it begins again (if first only as an assumption) when such a man has a daughter.
Many girls and women repeat the trite and quite formulaic version of “I know my father loves me, but I rarely really felt it.” The women and girls I meet (in my practice and privately) mostly talk about t heir fathers as distant and judgmental, unable really to perceive and feel their way into the daughter’s world. It is odd but also telling that many of the women I have spoken to about their fathers have very little sense that their fathers thought of them as their princess. Sometimes there is a memory of having been daddy’s little girl, but that is old and faded. Growing up got in the way and that put any sense of affection that might have been their between father and daughter to rest. No woman I have spoken to has expressed having received a blessing (in the above sense) from her father. Many remember criticism, teasing and general awkwardness, however. Some even felt that they had moved from daddy’s little girl to daddy’s slave, i.e., controlled by what daddy wants them to do.
Case Study:
The young female is sitting in front of me. Her name is Melanie. She is at that age when I don’t feel sure anymore, if I should call her “girl” or “young woman”. Both sound oddly condescending, to my ears. She is restless, grabs her long blond hair and pulls it through her hands in an attempt to make it as straight as possible. She is almost pulling it down like a curtain. Does she want to hide her face? She is 12 years old, tall and skinny. She plays basketball for her school. Her legs are moving constantly, she often reaches up with both arms, stretching, perhaps in hopes of calming down a bit.
Her mother is sitting next to her. She is looking away from her daughter. I keep remembering a line from my first phone-conversation with her. She said about Melanie: “I wouldn’t want to be her.” I was taken aback by this statement because it showed so much distance. Almost as if her daughter was a character on television, someone whose life she could choose to experience vicariously.
Melanie’s mother and father divorced when she was 3. Her father remarried, her mother is living with a boy-friend. Melanie goes back and forth between their houses.
Melanie is having trouble in school. Her grades have been dropping and it is clear that she is controlling it. She speaks well and with nuance. I don’t have single doubt in my mind that she could be a stellar student, even in math (the subject in which she received 5 Fs last week for missed assignments, sloppy work, etc.
So, I say, how does your dad feel about your problems in school?
Oh, he doesn’t care, Melanie says. He really isn’t home most of the time.
(As it turns out, her dad has two jobs one of which is being the janitor at the very school Melanie is going.)
My step-mother is making fun of me, Melanie confides. When I told them about the math-grades, she said, to everyone else, look at her, there is the stupid one. She won’t make it.
What did your father say, I asked.
He laughed, she said. He made fun of me too, he said when I have kids they’ll be the dumbest kids in town. But, Melanie hastens to explain, he’s only joking. I understand what he means.
What does he mean, I ask.
Melanie is silent, she doesn’t know. He really doesn’t want to hurt me, she whispers.
I turn to her mother and ask “what can you do about this?”
She throws up her hands. “Nothing,” she says, “this is why I got divorced from him. You just can’t talk to him. Besides, Melanie has told me she doesn’t want me to talk to him about this. So, there is nothing I can do. She has to figure it out on her own.”
As I was listening to Melanie describe this situation, it became clear to me that she was protecting her father from the obvious conclusion one had to draw from her descriptions: He is weak, he is clueless, he treats women with less power badly and women with more power with servility. Melanie knows this, but she won’t stop protecting him. Her eyes were asking me, pleading with me, as if she was saying “I’m telling you this only, because I am hoping you won’t think badly of him. I need my dad, even though he is so utterly useless to me right now. Even though he is hurting me right now.
It has taken me a while to understand this point. But I think Melanie is right. She knows intuitively what I and others might only know empirically and cognitively: for a girl to really give up her father is equal to throwing herself to the wolves. Even in the weakened and condescending role that her father has assumed, his mere presence is more likely to ensure that Melanie will be relatively successful in her life than if he were not present at all. Relatively successful means that she will not get involved in romantic relationships too early, that she will not get pregnant as a teen, that she will have some confidence about her potential, will be able to make solid moral decisions and that she will feel a sense of confidence about her future.
Melanie’s father is not outright rejecting her or not caring for her. This is what Melanie is holding on to almost desperately. He doesn’t want to hurt me” she said. And what she means is, it could be worse. And if it were worse, than I would not have any hope whatsoever. So, Martin, don’t be overly critical and take him away from me.
Melanie, in other words, is in the very peculiar position of wanting to avoid identifying the pain her father is causing her for fear of losing the anchor function he has for her, teasing and condescension not withstanding. And yet, it is clear that Melanie will not progress easily without identifying the ways in which her father is failing her.
The Father’s Perspective
It is often said that having a son is difficult for a man because he sees in the son not only an heir to his name, but also a competitor in the making. The assumption, therefore, is that it is easier for a man to have a daughter, because issues of competition simply fall by the wayside. I question this based mainly on my experiences with men who have daughters. While competition is not the first point on the list of difficulties men have with their daughters, the list is certainly quite comprehensive. Here are some things men say about having daughters:
When they’re babies
I don’t want to change her diapers or give her bath or dress her/undress her. What if I touch her in inappropriate ways? What if I get aroused?
I don’t like holding her, I feel too rough for her.
Her mother knows better how to handle her.
When they’re toddlers
I don’t know what to play with her. She wouldn’t like the games I know.
She is avoiding me.
There is nothing she can learn from me.
I hate girl-stuff.
When they’re school-aged to middle-school
She is too girly.
Other mothers look at me weird when I show up with her.
Her friends are more important than I.
My wife tells me I don’t know the first thing about girls.
I worry about turning her into a Tom-boy.
When they’re teenagers
She is too old now for us to hang out.
She is too critical of me.
She believes I’m not cool.
I worry that I’d be attracted to her.
Her values are so different.
Men, so it seems, often have a sizable crisis of confidence when it comes to having daughters. This causes them to give up on their daughters, surrender their care to their mothers and literally give up their own voice when it comes to deciding how their daughters should be raised.
Unfortunately, the literature about fathers and daughters is very unclear and possibly unaware of this issue. While there are many books that describe how fathers should be and act, there is hardly anything that tries to understand or even just describe how it is that fathers have difficulties with the imperative to love their daughters. I would like to propose a few possible perspectives for how to understand men’s difficulties with raising daughters:
a) Men who have such difficulties have themselves experienced a crisis in self-formation stemming from a lack of either maternal or paternal affection or a combination of both. Men who know how to take care of their daughters will either have had a nurturing and loving bond with their mother and/or they will have had a bond with their father that stressed respect and love for females (mothers, sisters, etc.) When neither is the case, men struggle and, often, repeat the crisis of their own upbringing in the relationship with their daughters. Such crisis could result in:
b) Loss of confidence in his own power/skill to nurture
Such loss of confidence in men often looks like anger, but it could also be a strong sense of passivity on the man’s part. He might still play some with his son and engage in some rough-housing and horsing around with him.
c) Lack of affection for females and resulting misogyny.
An example of an experience of missing maternal affection in childhood and its results in a man’s adult relationship with his daughter will be given below. I would like to add here, that, often, such anger and misogyny is actually part of the “daddy’s little girl” syndrome. The little girl is the only stage of female development that some men can relate to without fear. They cling to it desperately and react with strong feelings of anger as their powers to hold their “girl” there are waning.
d) Sense of not being loved by his daughter.
Many men are hoping to be loved by their daughters in ways they weren’t loved or didn’t feel loved by their mothers or sisters or wives. This expectation of being loved can take quite childlike forms: intense jealousy at boy-friends and fiancées the daughter might bring home, discouraging her from taking risks and trying out new things, etc. The male childhood trauma of maternal abandonment can result in strong narcissistic tendencies when such a man is faced with raising daughters.
e) Fear of loving the daughter too much and become sexually abusive/attracted to her.
Having learned that it was not “okay” to be close to his mother, meant that the young male learned his first lessons of fear of incest. This is a particularly strong and resilient issue, because so many men have learned this and fear closeness with their daughters in the same way that their parents feared that being close to his mother would pamper him and make him soft. The distance that is thus created between fathers and daughters can hurt this relationship when it needs comfortable emotional and physical closeness.
f) Men with such difficulties cannot identify sufficiently with this female that is, supposedly, a part of them.
For many men troubles with their relationship to their daughter boil down to incomprehension: How could I, a male, partake in the making of a female? Men struggle with identity issues, in other words. This is not, of course, only a question of x/y chromosomes. Rather, it is an often insurmountable seeming difficulty to understand his own feminine side.
g) Men with such difficulties are embattled by a gate-keeping spouse who won’t let them near their daughter.
This is what all the insecurities and questions that men might have about having a daughter finally bump into: a mother who says You have no idea how to do this right. She is a girl. Let me handle this. Far too few men fight this and end up being far removed from their daughters’ lives.
To sum up this point:
The developmental crises that precede father-daughter difficulties can be traced back to the father’s early childhood and upbringing. These crises often take place in the form of some kind of early childhood abandonment or break with mother and can be reinforced by an absent or uncaring father. While these factors also contribute to men’s inability or unwillingness to care for their sons, they seem to be significant in particular as men get ready to care for their daughters. Maternal abandonment of a son without a strong father who actively counteracts such abandonment with care and nurturing and positive messages about women can result in disastrous results for the son as he is becoming a man and, possibly, the father of daughters.
Case Study II:
Burt a man in his sixties was one of two children; his two years younger brother remains the person he feels closest to. Burt describes his upbringing as cold and without care. His father was frequently on business trips, though sometimes, Burt says, he made breakfasts for him and his brother. His mother, a concert pianist, had hardly any time for her children and got the information she needed about raising her sons from a book on child-care which was prominently displayed on the mantel in the living room. Burt has become increasingly aware of his anger, hurt and pain about his loneliness as a boy. Burt has been through three marriages. He has two children a son and a daughter, from his first marriage. Ten years ago the daughter committed suicide. Here is what Burt said about her:
I don’t care. That bitch, she was a burden on me the whole time. I gave her a quarter million. Burned every single dime I gave her, just wanted to get her drugs and hang out with boys. She didn’t care about me, so I don’t care about her. I’m glad she’s dead. (Turning directly to me to look at me in defiance) I feel better she’s gone. She was nothing but a careless, fucking bitch. She is just like my mom. She didn’t care about me either, just wanted to play that fucking piano and be with Jesus all the time. When she was dying she was lying on her bed, just yelling “I’m coming Jesus, I’m coming.” She didn’t care I was sitting right next to her. I hate them, I just hate them.
Yes, this is an extreme case. But, perhaps, its extremeness does not so much lie in what happened to Burt but rather in the raw and sometimes volatile need to express his anger about his mother and his daughter (and, of course, the other women in his life).
As we listen to Burt, we get a good sense, I believe, of the “uselessness” he is confronted with. He was of no use to his mother. His sense of being important to a female was broken very early. Later he was of no use to his daughter (though he would say he had no use for her), he couldn’t even save her. Neither could the money he gave her. Burt is also obsessed with helping people with money, especially women.
Conclusion:
I have no daughter. I only have sons. In my family that makes me an outsider.
My grandparents have two daughters and one son, my parents, have myself and my sister, my mother’s brother has a son and a daughter. My cousin, son of my mother’s sister has a daughter and a son, the daughter of my mother’s brother also has a son and a daughter.
I never imagined I would not have a daughter. Imagine my surprise. Whoever determines those things must have had the idea that I need to figure out something about boys before I can move on. I am not disappointed. But I wish I knew. Some people tell me I should be glad I didn’t have daughters. Daughters, they say, are simple only until they reach puberty. Then they get complicated in ways that make a father feel rejected and dejected. Perhaps. I have always thought that developmental rejection of parents by their children is more about the children’s attempts to reach out for freedom and independence. It is not, I believe, about the rejection itself.
But it wouldn’t surprise me, if research could show that daughters have to struggle harder for freedom than do sons. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that parents, especially fathers, still have quite strong (not to say conservative) ideas about how daughters should behave, what could happen to them, and how to protect them.
If I had a daughter here is what I would like for her to know:
I’d like her to know the world in as much detail as possible.
I’d like for her to love nature and be comfortable in it.
I like for her to be strong both emotionally and physically.
I’d like for her to understand men.
I’d like for her to value especially those men who can be in touch with both their masculine and feminine sides.
I would like for her to be compassionate towards others.
I’d like for her to be honest.
I’d like for her to be courageous.
I’d like for her to know that her good looks come from within.
I’d like for her to be passionate about something.
I’d like for her to feel respected and respect others.
I’d like for her to be confident.
I’d like for her to love being a woman.
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