Forethoughts on Fatherhood
Ponderings & Preparation
Any day now, my first child is due to be born. It's exciting, it's daunting, and it's completely unpredictable. That all considered, while talking with a friend recently, I was posed this question: "How are you preparing for fatherhood?"
I didn't really have a competent answer at the time, to be fully honest. You'd think I would be able to explain all the things my wife and I were doing to get the house and ourselves ready for this baby's arrival. Yet in that moment, the actual depth of the question hit me. How do you prepare for fatherhood?
I don't think there's much of a definitive answer for me to give. After all, I've never done this before. But I have been thinking about it on repeat since, and have some rough ideas.1
As All Good Things Begin and End
Perhaps I've mentioned it before, but I've often heard it said that all good things begin and end in prayer. I'll admit that in the period of transition and reorganising for a new arrival in the home my usual prayer routine has been a bit in-flux. But, as we discussed in the last post, I'm still trying to do some good prayer every day, even if I can't pray as well as I usually would.
In some sense, this is the most vital preparation I feel able to do on the path to parenthood. To learn to be a good dad requires that I go back to my primary identity as a son of the perfect Father. That very process will hearken back to when I received my baptism, as many things do in the spiritual life. To pray is to acknowledge that the the work of good parenthood is one deeply rooted in dependence upon the providence my own heavenly Father.
Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
— Matthew 7:9-11
Talking About Telos
While we're talking about the beginnings and endings of things, I'm reminded of the philosophical concept of the telos, the end or goal of any endeavour. What is the goal of our upcoming parenting?
Some may argue it is to help form a reasonable and decent person by the time they take their own path in this life. Certainly, I think this is an aspect of the responsibility my wife and I have partaken of. But I don't think that's the goal. You can be reasonable and even decent in behaviour, yet carnal, hateful, and miserable interiorly.
As a Catholic, my calling is to be a saint: one who, through grace and obedience to grace, achieves the Beatific Vision. While this is good for me, it's not solely a selfish undertaking. I am called in this life to saintliness also for the sake of others. That they may see, hear, and answer their own call to "...complete in their lives this holiness they have received."2
As a father, through my behaviour, counsel, and reception of those I share my daily life with, I am called to help my newborn understand and pursue their own call to sainthood. I am to be like a signpost for them on their own pilgrimage to the City of God.
Lumen Gentium summarises the point like this:
Furthermore, married couples and Christian parents should follow their own proper path to holiness by faithful love. They should sustain one another in grace throughout the entire length of their lives. They should embue their offspring, lovingly welcomed as God's gift, with Christian doctrine and the evangelical virtues. In this manner, they offer all men the example of unwearying and generous love; in this way they build up the brotherhood of charity; in doing so, they stand as the witnesses and cooperators in the fruitfulness of Holy Mother Church; by such lives, they are a sign and a participation in that very love, with which Christ loved His Bride and for which He delivered Himself up for her.3
Leading by Listening
I think if there's one thing that's frustrated many of us growing up, it's probably feeling unheard in some way. Not necessarily via malice or neglect, however. Sometimes communication between persons is just tricky, making the act of actually listening to each other more difficult in the first place.
But if there's one thing I'd like my children to feel assured of, it's that their dad will always make the time and effort to listen to them when they need him to.4
Listening is a struggle, especially for chatterboxes like myself. There's a knack to truly hearing someone out which isn't innate to my brain. part of that knack includes hearing what's being meant as distinct to what is said. Another part is not always needing to know answers. Sometimes a person wants to be heard, and not told afterwards. Perhaps they already know what to do about such and such a thing or how to navigate their way with so and so, they just need someone to hear them in order that they can hear themselves.
Those are some of the listening I'm not naturally skilled at. But I'm growing in this.
It takes patience and a radical vulnerability to really listen. Just like it takes patience and radical vulnerability to lead people on a journey. I once heard it said that managers boss, but leaders listen.5 Good parents listen, too. Sometimes they may even answer, if it's a moment for it.
You seek, though you lack nothing.
You love, but your love is not possessive.
You watch over us, but without anxiety. — St. Augustine.
this snippet of the Confessions embody a listening leadership well when St. Augustine describes the faithfulness of God. As He leads, may we each also lead as parents, spiritual and physical, as siblings, in blood and in Christ, and as children, of the Lord and of Holy Mother Church, a royal family in the new Promised Land.
Footnotes
Maybe time will prove these thoughts completely uninformed and naive, that's yet to be seen. But nonetheless, here they are.
Lumen Gentium, 40
ibid, 41
That's not an easy bar to live up to, admittedly, but there it is
It sounds like one of those insufferable business aphorisms that the exact middle-managers it's bemoaning will have on a sticky note under their monitor, but it stuck with me.