From Father to Friend

Reforging the Bonds of Fathers and Sons

By guest contributor Ryan Howard.

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

– Mark Twain

In the articles I’ve written for the Old Glory Club, my relationship with my father has been something of a recurring theme. It may be my life as a young father and the similarities between myself and my father when he was of a similar age and stage. It may be that I’ve recently moved back to Charlotte, the city in which I was raised, which puts me in close proximity to my parents again. Another possible source of these thoughts is that almost a year and a half ago, I nearly lost my father due to an unexpected health crisis. That last one in particular still haunts me, as I was the first person to hear that my dad was on life support a thousand miles from his family, and the onus was on me to make sure that my mother and sisters knew what was going on. I was still in Tennessee, watching over my young family and trapped in my house due to a snow storm. My mom was flying out to be with Dad, and I was contemplating the possibility of doing the same, especially if things took a turn for the worse. Things worked out, though, and my father is once again healthy and able to spend time with his wife, son, daughters, and granddaughter.

All of the above contribute in some way to my introspection on the topic of my relationship with my father. The Twain quote at the start of this article was a particular favorite of my father’s when I was growing up. I cannot tell you how often he used that one on me when I was arguing with him about something stupid. The length of my hair was something of a recurring issue. Jealousy on his part, perhaps. Nevertheless, Samuel Clemens’s read on the relationship between fathers and sons as they age rings true. In my adolescence, all I could see was the chasm between myself and him. My father is a very intelligent man, especially in the realm of science and mathematics. He’s a very calm person, slow and deliberate in his actions and seemingly always running calculations in his head about what consequences will come from his choices. I am more like my mother in outlook and temperament. I’m a man of words, not numbers, I’m very passionate about things, I’m obstinate, and I have a tendency to be impetuous, especially when I believe myself to be correct. To make matters worse, I was spiraling into a teenage crisis of self-confidence fueled by a breakup at age 15 and a series of issues within my church and youth group. I was basically giving up on all things good for me, including sports, academics, and exercise. I stopped working out, stopped playing football, and took to eating junk food and bingeing YouTube videos after school. My father, himself one of my football coaches, definitely noticed this and tried to intervene. As a famous National Socialist once said, though, “Excuse me, was you sayin’ somethin’? Uh-uh, can’t tell me nothin’!”

I had to spend seven years dealing with the consequences of my own stupidity and learning to live with myself. Fortunately, my father was patient with me. By the time I was 21, I was getting engaged, preparing for my last year of college, and stepping out into the real world… though not without a brief detour into trying to become a professional wrestler. Wisdom is hard-earned and harder-earned for some of us. Even still, I was noticing a shift in my relationship with my father before he outright stated it to me one day. A couple months before my wedding, my father pulled me aside and said to me that our relationship was changing. I was a man, so he was no longer raising me but giving me advice as an older man who had been where I was before. In those days, I felt closer to my dad, but there would be another separation caused by my moving to another state. We remained on good terms and saw each other multiple times a year, but the physical separation was an emotional one for me, too. We were distant, physically and emotionally. Fortunately, that changed after my daughter was born and then especially after we moved back to North Carolina.

I had two conversations with my parents that really threw me for a loop in the time between my father’s health scare and my moving back to Charlotte. The first was with my mother while my father was still in the hospital. We were discussing how we would help Dad get things back on track following this scare, and she lamented the fact that Dad didn’t have any interests or hobbies or friends. All he seemed to do was work and then watch sports on TV. He needed to get out there and do stuff. Then, just over a month ago, I had a conversation with my father while he was helping me move. In the course of that conversation, my dad asked me if he could watch WWE events with me, complimented me on my D&D-related articles, and told me that in the mid-’90s when I was a baby, he was part of a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) with some of his co-workers. This was a mind-blowing revelation to me. I got into wrestling as an adult, much to the chagrin of my mother who thought it was trashy and stupid. My dad had introduced me to, at the very least, the concept of professional wrestling when I was a young kid, though, and always seemed to know a little something about who was popular and what was going on in the world of wrestling when I was growing up. Similarly, my mom balked at the idea of me playing D&D when I first expressed interest around the age of 17 and probably even thought I was going to be sacrificed to a demon when I went to play D&D for the first time at age 19. I never got any pushback from Dad, though, who also introduced me to the world of mass-market paperback fantasy. It’s because of him that I even know who Jim Butcher and Larry Correia are. Wheels were turning, gears were spinning, and I was starting to draw conclusions. A concept was cemented in my mind, and that’s what made me want to write this article today. My father had interests, and many of them were similar to mine at one point in his life. However, he had set them aside for a number of reasons. I can share these things with him now, though, and I should.

My kneejerk reaction upon finding out that my dad was on MUDs in the ’90s was that my mother had longhoused my dad out of spending time on those things. My mom has a tendency to decry as stupid things she doesn’t understand, and there were a great many things that were banned from the house because my mom failed to see the value in them. We weren’t allowed to watch Power Rangers or SpongeBob, we couldn’t play Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh! Anything that was excessively silly or frivolous was promptly shut down. She might have had a point on some of those things, but it definitely put the kibosh on things that I would have enjoyed, especially with my dad. It would have been fun to go to Monday Night Raw with my dad at the age of 10. It would have been awesome to have my dad introduce me to D&D. It wouldn’t be accurate to lay this all at the feet of my mom, though. After all, my wife supports my gaming and grudgingly accepts the fact that I love professional wrestling, and I still find myself with less and less time to devote to these things because I have a full-time job and a kid. There never seems to be enough time for all the things I want to do, and a lot of culture seems to be built around shaming men out of having hobbies that are separate from their responsibilities. This comes from the progressive side, who demand that all spaces be open to all people, even those who don’t care for the hobby space, but it also comes from the people who present themselves as being on our side.

How many times do we have to endure the discourse, usually led by a female self-styled “trad influencer,” lambasting men for being interested in fantasy, Warhammer, or other similarly nerdy things? From all sides in every venue, it seems that the loudest voices are telling men that they must work their 40 hours, come home, and continue laboring endlessly around the house. There’s a culture of self-care and mental wellness and treating yourself for women; but the message directed towards men is all duty-based, and anything non-productive is viewed as, at best, a regrettable but tolerable vice. This is what our fathers endured before us, and many of them were bent to its will. We owe it to ourselves, to our fathers, and to our sons to dissent from this, too. Being a man is not easy, especially in a world that views us as disposable and expendable, and when our duties have been fulfilled and we find ourselves in moments of idleness, we should not feel guilt in painting figurines, jumping back into a video game we enjoy, reading a fantasy novel, or watching some wrestling matches. We need male spaces and companionship where we can encourage each other and do leisure activities together. So long as our hobbies do not keep us from our responsibilities, it is no crime to enjoy frivolous activities to decompress from our stressful lives. I believe that our fathers were subjected to the aforementioned duty-based mentality, and it is long past time that we gave them what was taken from them.

My father sacrificed much to make sure that my siblings and I had a good life. Now that I’m an adult, I consider it not just a duty, but a privilege, to give some of that back to my father. At Christmas, I presented my dad with two Atlanta Braves baseball caps, one for him and one for me, to wear when we sat behind home plate at Truist Park. That game happened recently. There was a multi-hour rain delay, the game ended after 1 A.M., and the Braves got killed, but it was an amazing time because I was there with my dad, we had incredible seats, and we were able to enjoy leisure time together in a way we never had before. I am lucky still to have my father and to have a good relationship with him free of hurt. Because I have been blessed by God with the chance, I will be my father’s friend. If we are serious about building male community, we should all do the same, especially those of us who are Millennials and Zoomers and have parents who are late Boomers and early Gen Xers. As I stated in my article on Gen X, the rift between generations is regrettable, and ideally we should find our way back to intergenerational camaraderie. It starts with you, and it starts with the older men who are closest to you. Take your dad fishing, have him over to your house for a cookout from your grill, take him to a ball game, or do whatever it is that your father did for you or what you always wished you could have done with him but the opportunity never came up. How do we signal that things have changed? We don’t abandon our fathers the way that Boomers and Gen Xers did to their fathers in many cases. We are not cursed to live out the last verse of “Cat’s in the Cradle” and should make time for our fathers to be a part of our lives.

For people like me, this is a bare minimum effort thing. I love my father — even at the nadir of our relationship when I was a teenager I loved my father — and I am happier with him in my life. For many others, though, this is a process. Far too many young men of my generation have absentee fathers, fathers who hurt them, or no fathers to speak of. My father is a good man, but many fathers aren’t. What I will say to those of you who have strained relationships is this:

Please do all that you can to reconcile and change your relationship. If you cannot reconcile or if you are one of the many whose fathers are long-gone or deceased, you can still reach across the generational gap and find an older man left abandoned by society and restore his dignity through masculine friendship. Think of all the widowers, the men who lost their sons, or the men who drove their families away with their past sins but have since sought redemption. Think of every gray-haired elder Chud whose son went off to college and was gobbled up in some way by progressivism and now lives entirely separate from the boy he raised. You see them in your churches, in your towns, and even online. These men deserve the chance to have that brokenness repaired. We have suffered at the hands of the older generations, but many of those men were suffering, too. We are not leftists angry with God for the crime of existence. We do not have the ideology of “I hate my dad.” Many of us describe ourselves as traditionalists, and, as such, we should seek restoration of the father/son relationship.

As a Christian, I believe that all men are made in the image of God. God is our Heavenly Father, and, as such, the role of Father is a divine office. Christian salvation is a restoration of the father/son relationship on a spiritual level, and part of practicing that should be a restoration of our earthly father/son relationship. In doing so, we should also recognize how our fathers have been laid low by the clown world we live in that makes a mockery of men, denigrating our roles and responsibilities and seeking to tear us down. Restore our fathers’ stolen dignity. We can bring our fathers into these male communities we are building. We can find those men who have lost their sons and let them know that it’s not too late. This Father’s Day, begin to lay that groundwork, especially if you have a son of your own. We want to restore the dignity of men, so let’s start by showing our sons and even our daughters how we can honor our fathers.