Mercedes SUV1
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Day 14<br />
Write a Letter to Your Father<br />
The Old Man. Pops. Dad. Daddy. Father. Papa. By whichever named we<br />
call him, no matter whether he was a good dad or a horrible one, no man<br />
looms larger in a man’s life than his father. For better or worse, his influence<br />
is inescapable. He is our model for manhood. Thus few things elicit stronger<br />
feelings in a man than his father. It’s the reason why Cormac McCarthy’s<br />
The Road resonates so deeply with us and the reason we get teary eyed when<br />
we watch movies like Big Fish.<br />
Every boy wants a perfect father. He wants the man who acts as protector<br />
when things go bump in the night, who teaches him how to break in a<br />
baseball glove and how to shave, who gives him advice on women, and who<br />
becomes a friend and confidant later in life.<br />
Of course, every dad is human and lives up to our dreams of perfection<br />
to varying degrees. He may fall so short of the father we hoped for that we<br />
ache in disappointment for what might have been. Or he may be so close to<br />
the ideal that we still fear that we may never live up to the example he set.<br />
Either way, our relationship with our father shaped us as no other, and our<br />
feelings about that relationship run deep, whether we can even acknowledge<br />
them or not.<br />
The feelings that exist between father and son are rarely expressed. Many<br />
of us still think about that one time our father said, “Son, I’m proud of you.”<br />
And many dads still cherish the time their sons said, “Thank you, Dad.”<br />
Most of have never taken the time to really thank our dads for everything<br />
they’ve done for us and shown us or had the courage to acknowledge how<br />
much they’ve hurt us. Yet if we don’t understand how we feel about our<br />
dads, we can’t understand how they shaped us, and we can’t understand