Fatherhood: An Incomplete Job Description

Good fathers are adventurers, protectors, storytellers—and, at the end of the day, heroes.

Fathers shape the next generation by passing on not just knowledge, but also shared experiences, character, and traditions. Biba Kayewich

When a man becomes a father, no one hands him a job description even though his job is one of the most important ones in the world. Most fathers discover the job description slowly, sometimes painfully, over the course of years. It reveals itself as a gift. It grows and unfolds like the seasons: The youthful energy of the young father chasing toddlers gives way to the more serene mentorship of the middle-aged father, which then passes into the smile of the worn old man who sees all his efforts come full circle in the flourishing of his children’s children.

For anyone who begins to contemplate what a dad’s job description might look like, the first thing he or she will realize is how long that job description would have to be. Probably, the number of roles a father must play is virtually endless. But here, at least, are a few of a father’s roles, offered as a reflection on and celebration of fatherhood, with all its multifaceted mystery.

A Father Is an Amateur

John Green wrote, “The nature of impending fatherhood is that you are doing something that you’re unqualified to do, and then you become qualified while doing it.”

Maybe all the most important things in life are like that—being born, getting married, having children, dying. There’s no trial run for such things because nothing can prepare someone for the magnitude of the task. In all the most crucial roles we’ll play in life, we are amateurs—at least at the beginning. It’s as if the best way to approach life-changing moments is with a good deal of ignorance, a strong dose of humility tempered with hope, and a generous helping of beginner’s luck. Fathers are refined, little by little, in the furnace of experience.

A Father Is a Boy Becoming a Man

It’s through the journey from amateur to seasoned father that men experience the full development of their own masculinity. In giving of themselves, fathers find themselves. As philosopher John Cuddeback wrote on his blog: “Being good always means passing on the gifts we have received. What is fatherhood but a passing on of manhood? And behold, if fatherhood is itself the fulfilment of manhood, then here we see that manhood only becomes itself through ‘passing it on!’”

In other words, it is by trying to pass on life, experience, manhood, and womanhood (for daughters) that a man really plumbs the depth of his own manhood. He becomes mature in the fullest sense. He becomes fully master of his own life, experience, and wisdom in the very act of giving these things away to his children.

A Father Is a Gardener

Originally, the term “husbandry” referred to the management of a farm. The “husband” was the master of some piece of land that he cultivated. This suggests to us an integral connection between the work of the husband and father and the work of the farmer or gardener.

Both the father and the gardener must nurture and nourish the living things under his care. The father, like the gardener, cannot force the growth of the little lives that he’s responsible for—he must create an atmosphere that fosters growth, and he must provide the food (both literal and figurative) that sustains and develops life. He must tend to his charges diligently and pray for favorable weather as he seeks to draw from each child the full potential that lies within.

A Father Is a Protector

From the very beginning, fathers of families have served as the primary protectors of their homes. Whether facing wild animals, natural disasters, criminals, or invading armies, the father has always stood between his family and the chaos of the world, ready to give his blood for the preservation of the lives entrusted to him.

While fewer fathers today must confront physical dangers than in the past (although this still happens!), the role of protector remains as crucial as ever. Fathers form a key barrier between their children and the damaging influences of an unpredictable world, preserving a place of peace and safety—emotional, mental, and physical—for their children to thrive in. From ensuring his daughter marries a good man to staving off economic hardship, a father guards the well-being of his family.

A Father Is a Storyteller

Fathers have the potential to pass on an education more powerful than any formal curriculum simply through the stories they tell and the conversations they share. A good father spreads wisdom, know-how, and humor without even realizing it. The casual things he says to his children soak into their souls like water nourishing plants.

One way that the father shares his wisdom is through storytelling, which is one of the most powerful forms of teaching. When a dad tell stories from his own past, his children get to learn from their father’s experiences. Some of the most important stories a father tells are about civilization, about the way things have been done and why, by which he transmits precious tradition to the next generation.

Something as simple as a silly bedtime story can build connection between parent and child, stimulate imagination, and help teach a sense of humor. But of course, the larger story a father tells is the story of his own family—its laughter and tears, the journey of each child toward his or her future, and the family as a whole as they move like a band of pilgrims through life.

A Father Is an Adventurer

Every man, on some level, desires adventure. It’s built into the male nature. Too often, men seek adventure in the wrong places, through dangerous, destructive, and selfish behavior. Yet the true adventure lies right under our noses, in embracing meaningful duties, such as the duties of fatherhood.

The prospect of fatherhood presents a man with a challenge worthy of all his deepest ambitions, a mission that will challenge his resolve, resourcefulness, leadership, and ability to love. And the prize to be won from this adventure is nothing less than the lifelong happiness of his sons and daughters and, through them, perhaps, countless future generations. The French poet Charles Péguy went so far as to say: “There is only one adventurer in the world, as can be seen very clearly in the modern world, the father of a family. Even the most desperate adventurers are nothing compared to him.”

Theodore Roosevelt considered fatherhood the pinnacle of an ambitious man’s career, saying, “For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”

A Father Is a Hero

Stacks and stacks of books and articles have been written on heroism. What is heroism? What makes someone leap in front of a bullet, run into a raging inferno, or refuse to back down in the face of unbeatable odds?

The short answer is love. When we love something or someone, we will do whatever it takes to save it, even at the cost of the greatest sacrifices. A good father lives a life permeated by love. And so, by necessity, he lives a life permeated by sacrifice.

That is a life of heroism. The heroism might be of an “ordinary” kind, if by that we mean that the world generally never notices it and perhaps it never unfurls itself in a single, grand action. But the heroism of little daily actions, little sacrifices, performed consistently decade after decade, is no less real than the heroism of the dramatic moment of superhuman effort. And both flow from the same source: love.

In most cases, the dramatic, heroic event simply unveils something that existed in the hero all along but never had a chance to come out before. The father who walks a crying baby late at night, the father who rises early to go to a job he doesn’t particularly like, the father who gently corrects his child for the hundredth time, the father who sets aside his own project when his son needs to talk, the father who takes time to play with the kids even though he’s exhausted—this man is a hero, however little the world notices him.

A great deal of the good that each of us experiences in our life and that the world experiences in general is owing to the unsung heroism of our fathers, and their fathers before them, and their fathers before them, receding back in history so far that eventually we do not know any of these men’s names.

But we do know that, somewhere back there, those nameless men—for all their mistakes—made good, loving decisions, decisions such as placing a hand on their boy’s shoulder and saying, “Son, tell me what’s on your mind.”