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Day 14
Write a Letter to Your Father
The Old Man. Pops. Dad. Daddy. Father. Papa. By whichever named we
call him, no matter whether he was a good dad or a horrible one, no man
looms larger in a man’s life than his father. For better or worse, his influence
is inescapable. He is our model for manhood. Thus few things elicit stronger
feelings in a man than his father. It’s the reason why Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road resonates so deeply with us and the reason we get teary eyed when
we watch movies like Big Fish.
Every boy wants a perfect father. He wants the man who acts as protector
when things go bump in the night, who teaches him how to break in a
baseball glove and how to shave, who gives him advice on women, and who
becomes a friend and confidant later in life.
Of course, every dad is human and lives up to our dreams of perfection
to varying degrees. He may fall so short of the father we hoped for that we
ache in disappointment for what might have been. Or he may be so close to
the ideal that we still fear that we may never live up to the example he set.
Either way, our relationship with our father shaped us as no other, and our
feelings about that relationship run deep, whether we can even acknowledge
them or not.
The feelings that exist between father and son are rarely expressed. Many
of us still think about that one time our father said, “Son, I’m proud of you.”
And many dads still cherish the time their sons said, “Thank you, Dad.”
Most of have never taken the time to really thank our dads for everything
they’ve done for us and shown us or had the courage to acknowledge how
much they’ve hurt us. Yet if we don’t understand how we feel about our
dads, we can’t understand how they shaped us, and we can’t understand