Your Daddy Loves You

By Rob Neves

My daughter is about 12 years old. While I can’t be certain how hard she will crash into the hormone wall we know as puberty (the pre-pubescent boy in me still wants to giggle when I say that word), my work with teenagers leads me to believe that any day now she will wake up and then we won’t get along for about a decade. I want you to understand that I love my kids more than I love my next breathe, but there is something about the teenaged years that test even the best father/daughter relationships. I wonder if these challenges are based on the fact that some dads just don’t feel comfortable talking about emotions. Lots of dads see themselves as the person who fixes things in the family. Dads can fix problems, dads can fix jump shots, dads can fix lawn mowers, but emotions are these weird things that not only defy fixing, they ask Dads to use tools that may not be comfortable handling. If forced to choose between using a power tool that could easily cut off an arm or using a listening technique that may lead to crying, I know lots of dads that could get used to the nickname Stumpy.

So on behalf of dads everywhere I am going to tell you a few things that your Daddy may have a hard time telling you himself. As messed up as this may seem, most of the things that drive you nuts about your father exist only because he loves you.

1) Your Daddy loves you. Your Dad loves you so much that he wants you to avoid the hurt he has experienced. Being older than you, he wants you to avoid some of the hurt he brought on himself. While being older doesn’t necessarily make you smarter, the truth is that the older you get the more diverse your perspective becomes. Think of it in your own lifetime. How would you feel today if you were to honor life choices you made half of a lifetime ago? At that age you probably thought you would never get tired of the way you wore your hair, how you dressed, or how you spent your time. Of course things change with time and the “young” you couldn’t imagine how going to a dance with a wardrobe that still consists of “My Little Pony” jumpsuits might be a problem for the “teenaged” you. Even though you have no idea what your perspective will be when you are 20, 40 or 60 years old, you are currently making life choices about faith, friends, education, sexuality and work that you may have to honor the rest of your life. Your Dad just wants you to avoid some of the suffering he can see from his perspective that you can’t yet see from yours.

2) Your Daddy loves you. Your Dad loves you so much that he wants you to share in everything that brings him joy. We all do it. When you watch a great movie or find a great restaurant, we want to tell the people we care about so they can experience the same kind of joy that we did. Dads do the same thing with their childhood. There are traditions, values, practices and customs in their childhood that they hold in high regard and that they may want to pass on to you. The problem is if you don’t hold those same things in high regard, it feels like they are being inflicted on you. My dad wasn’t born in this country, so the differences between what he grew up thinking was good, normal, and wholesome and what I grew up seeing as good, normal, and wholesome are huge. Around here dried pigs’ ears are chew toys for dogs, but my mom would have wanted to make soup out of them. These differences caused a lot of friction because it was hard for me to appreciate the value that my Dad was placing on things that seemed valueless to me. I know my Dad felt the same way. Regardless of where or how your Dad grew up, you are growing up in a different culture than he did. The world has evolved so much that the computer that runs your ipod is as powerful as the computer that put the first man on the moon. You speak a different language (googling was something your Dad would never have admitted to doing in public), you wear different clothes, and you have different responsibilities, goals, and pressures. In many ways all Dads are immigrants who arrive daily into the constantly changing pop-culture world your generation is creating. When he wants you to value, honor and respect the same things that are important to him, your Dad is doing that out of desire to share joy. It might feel like he is trying to compromise who you are, but remember that it is sometimes difficult to understand the message of love being spoken through the accent of another generation. Some things just get lost in translation.

3) Your Daddy loves you. Your Dad loves you so much he doesn’t want to risk losing you. There are moments when every Dad wishes he could just freeze time. Times when everything seems to be right, when your kids understand you, you understand your kids and the world seems to make sense. Dad’s worry about losing that. We worry about losing the part of our relationship that we expressed with our little girls when we would tickle them, but now can’t share because she is a woman. We worry about losing our place of importance in your life because the list of things that only Daddy can fix is shrinking, and the list of things Daddy just won’t understand is growing. We worry about how to support you with the parts of female life we just don’t understand (there aren’t wheels on a training bra and we would rather tackle a gorilla on crack than the feminine hygiene aisle at the supermarket). With emergence of each of these new parts of your life, Dad’s have less and less of the old relationship left to hold onto. Dads don’t just worry about you physically leaving, we worry about losing our way to love you, piece by piece, to school, friends, jobs, boyfriends and everything else that makes your eyes sparkle the way we used to.

4) Your Daddy loves you. Your Dad loves you so much it terrifies him. Most Dads will admit that the feeling of helplessness that comes from caring for someone so much that it hurts, will make you do crazy things. Some of the things we may disagree on are based on fear, and when people are afraid they don’t always make the best choices. I know of someone who, upon seeing a mouse, jumped so high they sprained their ankle… It was a very scary looking mouse and my ankles have always been weak. Even though the sprained ankle caused much more pain than the mouse ever could have, because the choice was made based on fear, jumping still seemed like the best thing to do at the time. There are going to be times when what scares you and what scares your father will be very different and as a result your decisions and thoughts about the exact same thing may be completely opposite. The fear of making the wrong choice, the fear of you getting hurt, the fear of not being who you need us to be or the fear of failing you will eventually stop us from letting you do things that may not frighten you at all. There was a moment in almost every Dad’s life when he held his daughter as a newborn and instantly knew that he was now totally responsible for the most precious thing in the universe. Something so precious it would consume his thoughts, dreams, goals and hopes for the rest of his life. The weight of that realization is lived out in every choice he makes for you, everything he says to you and everything he does for you. The truth is that there is nothing on earth that is more frightening than the thought of being responsible for someone you love more than life itself, except perhaps the thought of life itself, without the person who brought you that love. You see every time I look at my daughter, there is a part of me who hopes that, at some time in the future, she will have a chance to look deep into the eyes of her own newborn child and have all the love in the universe flow through her. In that moment, she will understand what I have been trying to describe with my whole life. Your Daddy loves you.

Rob, Colleen (his wife of 16 years) and 3 amazing kids  live in London and can be reached at www.robneves.com