The father you get and the ones you make

LOUISVILLE — Patton Dodd nearly walked away from completing his memoir “The Father You Get: And the Ones You Make, Believe In and Become,” published in September. It was painful writing about his father, and even about some of the men who’d become father figures for him.

But complete the book he did, and he spent about 50 minutes talking about it with Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe, the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to their conversation here.

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Dodd, the executive director of storytelling and communications for the H.E. Butt Foundation, told the hosts he’s settled on presence as the sign of what healthy fatherhood looks like.

“Ideal fatherhood has a lot to do with just being present in your children’s lives, showing up over and over again in all sorts of seasons and situations, and being able to attend to them and their stories as they actually are and not what you wish they would be,” he said. “Settling on presence was in some ways a response to my own experience when I was a kid was my dad offered no presence. He was there,” Dodd said, but was “kind of absent and negligent.”

“I don’t think that’s uncommon,” Dodd said. “I’m a dad and I try to be a good dad, but I also struggle with presence.”

Writing his memoir involved researching his father’s story. He learned that his father, who’s deceased, “had tropes [about fatherhood] in mind and tried to live up to them and failed.” His father fell short in some traditional masculine ideals including competing and achieving success, Dodd said, and struggled to hold down a job. “I think he was falling short of those masculine ideals, but he never questioned them,” Dodd said. “I think it would have done him a lot of good to blow up those concepts and figure out his relationship to them instead of trying and failing to live up to them” and “transferring those masculinity ideals to me.”

Dodd and his wife have three children. “Once my kids were adolescents, I probably had more sympathy for some of my dad’s mistakes and failures. It’s challenging to be a parent,” he told the hosts. “One thing that happened over the course of being a dad is I shifted from anger to something like grief. Anger is a simpler emotion and it’s full of blame.” Being a father “humbled me a little bit” and “shifted that predominant emotion to one of grieving the loss of the man he could have been and wasn’t in our home.”

“I’m still fully aware of his faults,” Dodd said, “but I’m shifting how I respond to them.”

Catoe asked how better understanding his father has reframed Dodd’s concept of God as a father.

“I’ve always struggled with the idea of God as a father. It’s not a comfortable concept for me,” Dodd said. While in college, “a lot of well-meaning people encouraged me to lean into this idea of God as a loving father.” At one prayer meeting, Dodd was encouraged to think of God sitting in a rocking chair, where God’s children could climb up and be comforted by God. “That person meant well, but I was totally turned off by that image,” Dodd said, “and I felt guilty for not wanting to think of God that way.”

Even though Jesus taught the disciples to pray to “our father,” “I don’t think it’s the only way to approach the loving and parental presence of God,” Dodd said, noting references Jesus himself made utilizing feminine images for God.

“I’m probably more open now to saying in my own prayers ‘our father in heaven’ without crossing my fingers,” he said. “I’m more serene than I have been, but it’s taken a lot of work. I worry about Christian environments where too much pressure is placed on having to relate to God only in that way.”

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Even after he pitched the idea for the book and signed a contract with his publisher to write it, “I started running from it for a year,” he said. “There was a lot of heaviness, a lot of grief, a lot of darkness I didn’t want to face, and I liked the idea of facing it more than I liked the work, of getting up in the morning and spending a couple of hours wrestling with this stuff.”

The four categories Dodd writes about — his father, subsequent father figures, his relationship with “God the father” and then becoming a father — are now lighter burdens for him. “I didn’t go into it to experience healing. I just wanted to tell a good story and have some better understanding, but I have experienced deep healing,” he said. “Part of it was that I have coherence and through lines in my own story and in my family’s story that I didn’t have before.”

He said he’s heard from people “in all walks of life” who “for whatever reason found this book, read it and connected with it in some way. I think it’s an invitation for people to create space to reflect on their own stories, and I think that’s vital work for us to do.”

“We don’t have to stick to our biological connections,” Catoe noted. “We can look outside and find people who can fill those roles for us.”

At its best, church can fulfill that role, Dodd said. “As hard as it can be for some of us to find and maintain a church community, it ideally can be what you’re describing,” he said, “when you’re making family-like bonds with people that might supersede the blood relationships you have.”

“Ultimately,” Dodd said, “we’re made for nurturing. We crave influence and father figures and mother figures, and we crave nurturing.” In his book Dodd draws on the research by Dr. Anna Machin, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University.

“Part of what she has found is the survival of the species [of apes] depended on what she called ‘investing dads,’” he said. The mothers in the ape community for the most part raised the young ones, but “her research suggests part of what saved the species were the dads who stuck around. Our brains are wired to receive that kind of ongoing, persistent, helpful, guiding, loving presence from both a mother and a father.”

When Dodd left home for college, “my mother made the gift of telling me, ‘you’re going to need a male mentor in your life.’ She said, ‘I’m praying you’ll find someone whose wing you can get under, because there’s a lot you haven’t gotten yet.’”

“I came to terms with my own agency in seeking and making father figures,” he told Catoe and Doong. “I turned it into a verb, ‘father figuring,’ as something we do.”

“Nurturing is something we need,” he said, “but it’s also important we have agency in those relationships.”

New installments of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.