Fatherhood

[resonant]

A recent conversation reminded me of a strange pattern in my friendships, which I'll discuss further under the cut. But first, a poll:

Edited to add: When I say "an addiction," I mean other than tobacco.

Poll #1296 Fatherhood

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 248

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I am ...

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45-up
42 (16.9%)

25-45
174 (70.2%)

under 25
32 (12.9%)

For a significant portion of my childhood, my father was ...

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Married to or living with my mother
201 (81.0%)

Not married to or living with my mother
48 (19.4%)

Dead
7 (2.8%)

Other, which I might or might not comment on below
9 (3.6%)

For a significant portion of my childhood, my father ...

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Had an addiction that was not satisfactorily treated
40 (46.5%)

Had a mental illness that was not satisfactorily treated
33 (38.4%)

Was completely absent from my life
28 (32.6%)

Was abusive to me or others in my family
26 (30.2%)

My father was ...

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A great dad
93 (37.5%)

A pretty good dad
92 (37.1%)

A so-so dad
39 (15.7%)

A nonentity as a dad
24 (9.7%)

A brute
13 (5.2%)

Absent or dead
14 (5.6%)

Other
16 (6.5%)

I was talking to the mother of one of the kidlet's friends -- someone I feel a sort of unexplored kinship to, the way you do with some people for reasons you can't quite explain -- and she mentioned that her father had been suffering from untreated bipolar disorder throughout her childhood.

I haven't really explored this pattern in a while, but when I was in college, I counted up all the people that I felt closest to, and all of them, growing up, had had fathers who were either dead, addicted to something, mentally ill, or absent in a really profound way, far beyond what was becoming normal with divorce.

My father is still alive, still married to my mother, and quite a lot like me. He was about as active as fathers were in those days; he's a pretty good dad. So it isn't that I'm seeking out people whose experiences are like mine.

I said to my college roommate, "I wonder why I'm choosing all these radically fatherless people," and she said, "Maybe we're choosing you."

So I'm wondering what the pattern might be in this community.

Comments

[bkwyrm]

My dad was my sole parent after my mother died when I was 12. Prior to that, my parents were married and lived together, but my dad didn't do much parenting. He'd been a Catholic priest for 17 years and never felt equipped to parent a daughter. Still, he did a pretty good job, looking back on it.

[resonant]

Wow -- I don't think I've ever met anyone who was (even partly) raised by a dad alone. That's pretty unusual.

[isis]

I once noted that all of my really serious boyfriends (including the man I eventually married) had parents that were (apparently) happily married to each other, just as my parents were (are). It wasn't a conscious criterion, but I wondered whether people who grew up in a stable family with overtly in-love parents brought something different to a relationship than children of divorced or unhappy parents that maybe I responded to.

I've been married for 18 years to this guy, by the way, and it's a first/only marriage for both of us. But then again, his brother and sister have each been married three times (and his brother has been divorced three times) so conclusions are murky.

[resonant]

Wow, that's very similar to the spouse's siblings; I tell him that on average he already has two divorces.

And his parents are still married, too, but his father was a bit of a brute when he was a kid. He's mellowed considerably since then, but I saw him stand up and threaten to punch the spouse's nephew in a restaurant. (The nephew was 25 at the time.)

[starfish]

I am wavering on the addiction thing - he smoked a pack a day (Pall Mall reds), but it's not like it was heroin or something ...

[resonant]

Oh, dear, I probably should have specified mind-altering or something -- because I've never known anyone whose smoking actually made them a worse parent, aside from the secondhand nicotine thing.

[rickey_a]

my dad is awesome and next year will be 50 years w/mom
I mused about him a few years back on father's day if you're curious
http://rickey-a.livejournal.com/78070.html

I think we often focus on the news or even personal stories of bad or absent fathers and we really should remember how wonderful so many of them are.

I'll be curious to check back and see how this poll turns out.

[krossero]

I could go on for a *really* long time about my dad; instead, I'll just say that he had/has untreated depression.

[azurelunatic]

Mine only got diagnosed and treated after I had left the ancestral home.

[princessofgeeks]

my dad .... Wow. I don't know what to say. I'm sure I've idealized my childhood memories of him, since he was actually quite absent because of his mental illness and the demands of his job.

But somehow it came through that he was a lovely gentle person who was doing his best for his family despite many obstacles. Perhaps that was what my mom thought of him and I simply believed it.

I'm sure I've retrofitted my data, but I feel very close to him now. He found some meds that worked when I was in my twenties, and literally Everything Changed. But clearly, as I look back, his ilness was one of the Central Things about my childhood.

Fascinating question. Thanks for the thinky.

[amalthia]

When I was 11 my dad got custody of the four of us and we were raised by my dad until I graduated high school. We still saw our mother quite a bit though.

I think the only mental illness he has is that he remarried my mom for the 4th time! :(

[giglet]

I think the only mental illness he has is that he remarried my mom for the 4th time!

Wow! Hope springs eternal, doesn't it?

(Then again, the two couples I know who married, divorced, and remarried their original partners are both doing quite well together now. I wonder if it was a change of expectations in the second marriage?)

[kriscat]

I had a hard time answering this poll since there were no options that really fitted.

For a significant portion of my childhood, my father was having joint custody of me. Until my mother became too ill (she had ms) I spent one week with her and the next with my father and so on. That arrangement began when I was six months old and continued until I was about 13. Then I lived with my father full time. My parents where never living together as a couple.

I didn't answer question three. A none of the above option would've been nice.

[swordage]

My parents divorced when I was 5, and my dad got custody, thank god. He's always been an amazing dad, and I'm so lucky to have him. I am, however, motherless - I even went to court and had her parental rights removed, so it's official. She had/has some kind of undiagnosed mental illness, and she never was very interested in being a mother anyway. I don't have any positive memories of her. Dad, on the other hand, makes wonderful new memories almost every day. :) I love living in a home where bursting into song is always an appropriate action.

[toft]

All my boyfriends had very dominating, problematic fathers; I was definitely seeking them out, or they me. But all my very close friends had Aspie fathers, weirdly, which was also my mother's experience, and mine in the sense that before my dad was very problematic, he was emotionally distant. So, certainly I think I was at that time in my life seeking people out with similar/complementary paternal experiences to me.

[ariadne83]

My mother more-or-less raised us on her own - my Dad was living with us, but wasn't all that involved. He's (and was) a varyingly-functional alcoholic. It's his only real hobby. I have a lot of respect for him, and I worked for him for years, but now that he's heading towards retirement I'm gripped by fear as to what he'll do with his free time. That he'll drink himself into an early grave, and never live to see me have kids.

[jelazakazone]

My dad grew up fatherless, but he was around a lot when I was growing up. He has a temper (like me), but we always knew we were loved and he didn't often get very angry with us. He's on beta blockers now and hardly ever gets mad any more:) I don't feel that he abused us or was distant. None of your answers for #2 fit me.

DH had a father who was essentially absent for a while. They are close now. I think that FIL being from a different country/culture plus starting parenthood at age 40 was hard for him. Age has mellowed him.

For the record, both our parents have marriages that have just hit the 40 year mark. From my perspective, I would say that my parents have a qualitatively better marriage, but they are both successful marriages.

[overnighter]

My dad was (and is) an awesome dad, and he's been married to my mother for going-on-40 years now, in what I think they'd both describe as a pretty happy marriage.

However, my mom's her own unique snowflake, even though she's also pretty great. She's got some unique mental and physical health issues which make her something of a handful, but if you put her on a continuum with the rest of her family, she's the sane one, so make of that what you will.

[celandineb]

My parents divorced when I was 15, so I ticked the "married to/living with" box. My dad probably drank a little too much when I was a kid, and definitely too much when he was married to his second wife, but I wouldn't say "untreated addiction" would be an accurate description, so I ticked nothing in the third question. I'd say he was a great dad; he also did more of the child care than my mom when my sister and I were little as he's a professor and had a more flexible schedule, whereas my mom's job was more the 8-5 sort.

One of the things that attracted me to my spouse, I think, was that his parents were still married when we got together. They divorced after we'd been married several years though. *eyeroll* Conversely, the fact that I have a large and friendly and "normal" (whatever that means) family was, he says, something that attracted him.

[stultiloquentia]

Best dad ever. No, really. Friends' dads extremely mixed bag ranging from lovely to criminal.

But I do often ponder other interesting patterns in my friendships. Wherever I go, f'rinstance, a distinct majority of the people I become closest to turn out to be queer. Even though I'm not. Even if I don't even know it for months and months, because we're too busy talking about completely unrelated things -- school or hiking or Buffy/Spike or whatever. And this DOES hold true online. *hands*

[delphi]

In my case, it was my mother who was addicted/mentally ill, but I have the absent father thing down. My biological father was a test tube and my dad...well, maybe he has untreated depression too, but for most of my life he's existed in two states: away at work, or home sleeping. There's a deceptive third state in which he appears present and awake, but believe me, he's sleeping.

The pattern is interesting though, because for a long time I thought there simply wasn't anyone who had any kind of positive relationship with their parents - then I discovered that I just tend to befriend people who come from dysfunctional families, even before I'm aware of the fact.

[malnpudl]

I find it interesting that so far I'm the only person to check both "A pretty good dad" and "A brute" -- in his case, the first when sober, the latter when drunk. Which more or less corresponded with morning & early afternoon vs late afternoon & evening.

He was an alcoholic from pretty much the time I was born through his death, and every member of our household -- mother, father, brother, and myself -- was an undiagnosed (and, obviously, untreated) chronic depressive, never better than mild and at times extremely severe.

I have a lot of wonderful memories of him, and now remember him with love and gratitude. But that doesn't mean I've forgotten the hellish times, and there were many.

[azurelunatic]

I could have checked that; instead I picked 'other' too. My father has a temper on him, and was suffering from untreated, undiagnosed depression. He would fly into rages over inconsequential things that annoyed him, without overt warning. We feared this. Even after he stopped beating us, I feared for my life from him, even though we had never required medical attention from his temper. When he wasn't in a rage he was for the most part a kindly, attentive, excellent father, and a lovely teacher and mentor.

(There were also mortal sins I did not find out about until many years too late to do anything, but for that the past can bury its dead; no further harm will come or I'd raise all kinds of hell.)

[marks]

My parents divorced when I was 9, so I hit about halvsies on the "childhood with dad in the house" and "childhood without dad in the house". I'm closer to my mom, but he's a good dad and stayed close by when he moved out.

[livrelibre]

My dad's awesome and my parents have been married for 40 years with mild issues but I've noticed that nearly all my close friends have absent dads or problematic relationships with their fathers, varying from mild to severe.

[bead]

Does emotionally distant count? And often physically unavailable, though he lived with us. He was the minister of a very large congregation and consquently, we shared him with a lot of people. A great deal of the time, it seemed that those other people were more interesting than we were.

Oh, and due to some family history we weren't privy to until after his death, he had some very overprotective views about sex and dating. Explained so much later, but were really quite miserable in the moment.

Also, his opinion was clearly the correct one, and there was something wrong with you if you didn't agree.

[grey_bard]

"For a significant portion of my childhood, my father ..." didn't have a "none of the above" option so I didn't check it at all. My dad was very much present, although he, like my mother, was often very, very confused by this loud messy alien living in his life.

[florahart]

Regarding the addiction/illness/absence question, I can't actually tick any of those boxes to mean what I think you mean by them (that is, I am pretty sure my dad hasn't spent a day without three beers in decades, but I don't think this has impeded his capacity to do anything else except possibly not spend a lot of money on beer, so I dunno that I think it needs treated), but I would if there were one for "was/is suffering from a trauma that crippled his ability to engage in relationships normally."

[thefourthvine]

When I say my father was not married to or living with my mother for part of my childhood - during that part, I was living with him. (She left. There was never any question that I would go with her.) So I was raised by my father and mother (with my father doing the majority of the parenting) during the first part of my life and then by my father alone.

[tevere]

I think I understand more now why my father was the way he was. He wasn't a bad person, really, but I didn't like him -- and were he alive today, I'm not sure I would. He was just very shaped by his own negative life experiences and his frustrations with where he was in life. He lied, and cheated on my mother, and spent all her money without her realising it (and never made any of his own). Shitty though they are, even those actions are understandable to some degree, given his personal unhappiness. But he never had my respect.

And hell, me and my mother and sister all turned out pretty good, and in the end -- well, he died the same person he always was, unhappy and frustrated and maybe feeling like his life never went the way he wanted, so I guess he's the one we should pity.

[par_avion]

My father wasn't addicted or absent, but he was chronically (and at times, seriously) ill, from the time he was nine years old.