Today, I was surprised to read an article in the Wall Street Journal about the fraught relations between fathers and children of divorce. As a 61-year-old-child of what I like to call “the divorce generation,” it’s a topic that is always on my mind on Father’s Day, and it’s a topic that I have never seen discussed during a holiday that often celebrates the ideal of fatherhood.
In his article, Joshua Coleman discusses his experience as a therapist, with fathers, who have grown estranged from their children after divorce. Quoting a study published last year in the Journal of Marriage and Family, he emphasizes the severity of the problem.
“26% of fathers experience a period of estrangement from their adult children at some point, four times the rate of mothers.”
Coleman offers plausible causes for this outcome: the persistently gendered nature of the division of labor, where fathers are encouraged to keep emotionally distant from children that they are expected to provide for, but don’t really help to raise; the continuation of the original conflict after the divorce; the attempt to maintain a sense of order by the children; the rise in single-mother homes; and the current fractious political environment.
To the reasons that Coleman offers, one could add the existential problem that Shakespeare identifies in his famous sonnet, “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” He suggests that all children can frustrate our species’ desire to live forever by rethinking the expectation that we should be close to our parents. Or even that we should have children of our own.
We are all “tender churls,” as Shakespeare calls us. We threaten the genealogical chain, but we are also a menace to the profound desire of our species.
Given the magnitude of the difficulty, it is perhaps not surprising that Coleman’s solution falls short.
He writes, “Based on my research and the thousands of estranged dads I’ve counseled, my advice to fathers is: Don’t defend, don’t blame, and don’t criticize. Instead of asking your child ‘Why are you doing this to me,’ say ‘I know you wouldn’t do this unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing to do.’”
I know it wouldn’t make me feel any better to hear my father say something like that.
But I find that Shakespeare, by giving a beautiful form to such a thorny issue, gives me the comfort that the therapist cannot give. Perhaps because the poem goes far beyond the therapist’s advice to empathize with the feelings of the children. Instead, the poet addresses all readers, fathers and children, and tells them to “Pity the world.”
The radical empathy for a world that is burdened by our desire to live forever, goes beyond the commandment to go forth and multiply, and beyond the advice to empathize with the other.
Instead, Shakespeare exhorts us to read, to think, and perhaps even to write a sonnet for Father’s Day.
2 responses to “A Sonnet For Father’s Day”
Very nice!
😻