I’ve been a dad since I was 20 years old. I was thrown into it in 1989 by my marriage to my wife, Rebecca, who was a single parent to a two-year-old little girl named Naomi.
Rebecca and I met when I was 18 and Naomi was just 6 months old: introduced by friends, we became friends ourselves and then decided we didn’t want to live without each other. But Naomi was able to do without me just fine. I remember looking in her big, 2-year-old eyes and seeing her disdain at having me take her mother’s attention away. It had been just her and her mom for a long time, I was an intruder, and she let me know it.
I knew Naomi didn’t like me and I understood why she didn’t like me: it was clearly because I had no clue as to what I was doing. I was one of those guys that would rip open a box and attempt to put anything together by just looking at the picture on the outside, completely ignoring the detailed instructions. It would get done, but there were always these screws and pieces that looked very important still laying on the floor when I was “finished”.
For a long time, I believed life was like that, too: move forward, blaze a trail, get married, have a family and as long as you love your family and love what you are doing, everything will just fall together and work, just like on television. But over the years, I would get one rude awakening after the other, and as cruel and unusual as this sounds – love just isn’t enough.
For instance, I tried to win Naomi over by being the “Fun Dad”. Road trip to Disney? Check. Playground? Check. Could she stay up and watch television past her bedtime? Check. I even made my wife the “bad guy” by putting her in the position of always having to say no. But though I was trying my hardest to win Naomi over, she still did not like me – and, what was strange is that she loved and respected her mother more even though she said “no”. I didn’t get it.
Two years later, my second daughter, Azriel, was born, and I just knew that things would gel together; instead, I had two kids who didn’t respect me, even though I was breaking my neck to do everything for and give them want they wanted. “Bad guy” mom won the affection contest every time.
For eight years it was just Naomi and Azriel, until my third daughter, Tera, was born. My wife still consistently warned me about spoiling the kids, but I didn’t listen. I was “loving” them by giving them exactly what they wanted – and sometimes more. Instead of a doll for their birthdays, I’d say, we are going to get seven of them with all the clothes to match and complete the set with one gigantic, life-size version to boot. My wife would shake her head in mock shame, but I had done what a man is supposed to do.
I could never understand why didn’t they like me the way that they liked their mother.
Wynfrey followed – bringing the girl-total in the house to a whopping four ladies. By then, Naomi was 15 and decided to move out because she was “tired of me trying to control her”. I thought to myself, What? How can being the “Fun Dad” be an attempt to control her? Isn’t love all we need?
Two years after Naomi left, Rebecca and I had our fifth child and our first boy, Isaiah. Maybe that was it, I thought: the problem had been that I was a man among girls, and surely a little boy would solve my “Fun Dad” problem. I’d have a little man who’d understand me.
But the same problem reared its ugly head: I’d go overboard in an attempt to fun-dad the kids into respecting me, and it would almost always have the opposite result. I decided that I’d had enough.
I threw myself in parenting books, relationship books, books about women, books about child psychology, gaining-success books and avoiding-failure books. I started reading those manuals I’d so often discarded to just go by the picture on the box, and found out that I had been wrong.
Love isn’t enough despite what every sappy love song says: commitment to parenting was the missing piece. Commitment takes love on its back and carries it the whole way. When I’m committed to you, I learn to tell you no – not to hurt you but to help you grow and learn. I learned through my research that there are three things only a father can give you, spiritually more so than physically: your name; your security; and your inheritance.
I realized that Naomi had been right: I had been a “Fun Dad” out of a desire to control and manipulate my children into doing what I wanted, but it’s impossible to love and control someone at the same time. I still do wonderful, amazing and fun things for my children, but now they earn those extra fun things with good behavior, excellent grades and working hard, and value the fun things more.
Once I tried to pat myself on the back for all I’ve learned – but my wife reminded me that she had been telling me this the whole time that we’d been parents together. The more I thought about that, the more it was like a Sixth Sense moment for me: all the times she’d told me over the years to stop spoiling them played back in my head. And even when she knew that I was wrong, even when I made her be the bad guy, she loved our family and, more importantly, was committed to it – and she’s the reason that we are all still here, together.