Men: A Missing Link With Our Fathers?
If you’re a man reading this article right now, how deep is your relationship with your father?
Now, I will exclude those men reading this article who have left their father’s side because of abuse or neglect, or whose father is no longer here, this article may or may not help you and your growth as a man.
But for every adult male reading this, or if you have a boyfriend or an adult male husband, whose father is still alive, this article could have a huge impact on your life.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve been in the world of personal growth for 42 years as a counselor, master life coach, minister, and best-selling author… I still need to learn on a daily basis, and the story I’m going to tell you below is one of the greatest teachings I’ve ever learned in my entire life.
Like most men, I had a very surface relationship with my mother, although that deepened over the last couple of years due to her illness, and my father was in the same situation, I had a very surface relationship with him until two weeks ago.
Over the years, and I’ve spoken to my brother and other adult men about this, we have a tendency to shy away from telling our parents the truth about our lives, our addictions, our money issues, our relationship challenges, and so many other things we’re afraid to be open and share with our mother and or father.
Now for some of us this kind of makes sense, if we have been rejected, put down, emotionally abandoned by our father, we are not going anywhere near the depth of intimate, honest communication because we’re afraid of the end result.
Or, we might be afraid that our father would worry about us so we don’t tell them the truth about our lives because we think we’re saving them grief.
Or maybe we come from a macho image, that it’s weak to show our weaknesses to our fathers, and as men, a lot of us fall victim to this false belief system.
So what am I getting into with all of this?
Just a few weeks ago I decided to fly myself and my fiancé Mia up to meet my dad on Father’s Day, and this will be the very first time that Mia met my dad and I was so excited to make it a huge surprise and she was so thrilled to be able to meet my father in person.
Now we had FaceTimed so many times over the last many months and Mia and my dad connected like white on rice, an old southern saying, but they really connected deeply and my dad, even with all of his illnesses would perk up like you wouldn’t believe the minute he saw Mia on FaceTime video.
My brother Terry made sure that every Saturday or Sunday this FaceTime happened because I wanted to see my dad every week and Mia wanted to continue to grow her connection with him.
So on Father’s Day weekend, we arrived and surprised him, and it was absolutely one of the most beautiful days of our lives.
But what happened the second day, is the reason for this entire article.
I told my dad on Sunday, Father’s Day, that I needed to sit with him privately and talk and my brother and my sister and their families and Mia we’re outside having fun, talking and getting to know each other on a deeper level while I sat inside for about 30 minutes with my father having the conversation of my life!
I’m starting to have tears as I’m writing this article because it was the first and only time my father and I have had an incredibly deep, intimate conversation that included tears and laughter and most importantly made me be 100% honest with him about my entire life for the first time in my existence.
I think I’ve made up all kinds of beliefs systems in my brain that because my father was an accountant, because my father wasn’t overly expressive emotionally, that it wouldn’t do any good to share with him certain things because he wouldn’t understand me anyway.
I could not have been more wrong, I could not have been more incorrect in my beliefs about what my father was capable of doing within any emotional state that he was presented with.
So I started out telling him that I had a very important question to ask him, and that question was, would he hold the hand of Mia as I got down on my knees and propose to her to marry me.
The whole point of the conversation was to see if he would accept Mia into my world as my wife and if he would endorse this type of relationship.
Now, I had never asked my father anything to do with any of my past relationships or my failed marriage, I have never requested his advice for anything whatsoever in my entire life until this day.
I’m not even sure why I did it, maybe it’s because he’s 94 years old and he has so many medical and health issues I couldn’t even begin to describe them in this article, but he seems to battle through and have a good attitude almost every day of his life. I have no idea how he does this.
But for some reason I wanted his permission, maybe it’s because of my own mortality. I may have wanted his permission to get engaged and marry Mia because I knew that there would only be a limited amount of time that he would be left on earth, and I believe my subconscious mind always wanted to have a deeper relationship with my dad but I just never did it until this day.
As a man, if you’re reading this, I want you to really slow down and think about the power of having these types of conversations with our fathers, while they’re still with us here on earth.
My dad for 30 minutes never left eye contact with me. In other words, for the full 30 minutes, he stared directly into my eyes as we both smiled, laughed, and cried together.
I did not know my father had that type of emotional strength because to stay focused on someone’s eyes for 30 straight minutes without breaking contact takes a very evolved, very emotionally grounded, very beautifully strong human being.
I had no idea my father fell into all these categories until this very day!
He looked at me with this beautiful smile and said, “David, I would be honored to give Mia‘s hand to you for your engagement today, I think you’ve made a beautiful choice with a beautiful woman and I’m so proud of you for the choice you made and who she is and I’m so proud of you for coming to me and asking me to be involved in this most sacred moment of your life.”
I immediately broke into tears. But why? I didn’t need my father’s approval to get married at 65 years of age, but I also knew that I have changed dramatically as a man over these years and I’m living life totally different than I did 20 years ago.
I wanted to show him respect, I wanted his approval, and as important as anything else I wanted his involvement in the special day!
I wanted to thank him for all the details I never thanked him in my life by having him involved in my engagement.
As we continued to talk, the direction of our conversation took the wildest turns ever.
I ended up telling him all that he taught me, all that my mom who had died three months earlier had taught me, and I told him I was finally getting closer to become a man like him, filled with integrity, compassion, and so much more.
I told him about struggles in my life that he was unaware of, I told him about how hard it was losing my mom, I told him about how hard it was the day before to go to the cemetery after mom had only been gone for 3 to 4 months, and how I broke down over and over and over in the cemetery missing my mom.
The whole time of me telling him all of these challenges that I have had in my life, he never turned away, he never broke eye contact.
He has these very powerful hearing aids that sometimes he can’t even hear with them, but he never missed a word I said.
Over the 65 years that I have been on planet earth, I can’t remember ever crying with my dad, I can never remember the intense eye contact that we both had for 30 minutes, I can never remember telling him my own personal secrets, I never could remember telling him about all of these emotions that were pouring out of my mind, my heart and even my eyes in this very incredibly deep intimate conversation.
And then, when I told him I wanted to walk out the front lawn of his grass which is right on the lake’s edge, and ask Mia to marry me in this place, he said no way!
I looked at him, and he started smiling and said, “David, this needs to be done on the water, we need to get everyone in the boat and go to a beautiful quiet place on the lake and have you do it there because I know how much you both love nature and I think it’s the best place to do it.“
Here is my dad, sick as hell, 94 years of age, fully present, fully emotionally engaged, fully emotionally available, and even now getting into the director’s seat and telling me where I’m going to become engaged to Mia!
And how he treated Mia, how he reacted to her, the pictures of him and her smiling together, the pictures of him holding her hand, are so incredibly beautiful, and a testament to his love for us both.
I started laughing so hard! My dad was taking over, his idea was brilliant, and he was telling me he was so in my corner that it was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had in my life.
If you’re a man reading this, I highly encourage you to not wait until some big special day like an engagement, not wait for a holiday, I almost waited too long… As I mentioned above my dad is 94 and many times struggles deeply with his health, shipped to the hospital regularly, and I am just so lucky, such a lucky man to have him here still and to be able to experience what I did above share in this incredible wild conversation with him.
For me, and I feel the same would be for you, is that it allows us to grow up! It allows us to become mature adult men! It allows us to risk being rejected, It allows us to be put in a very vulnerable situation, but it also allows us to be surprised out of our minds with the beautiful reaction my father gave to me that day.
Yes, there is a risk of rejection.
Yes, there is a risk of embarrassment.
Yes, there is a risk of abandonment.
And I can only tell you that the risk is worth it!
I don’t want to ever go to my grave not being able to express what I expressed to my dad and it could’ve easily happened.
Please don’t wait. Reach out now. Find a way to create enough space for you and your dad to have open honest conversations.
It might start out about sports and then go into how much you appreciated him during your teenage years when he dealt with so much of our nonsense, correct?
Maybe there is something important that you always wanted to tell him, well let’s get our act together and tell him now!
I could write the same thing about your mother, and about my mother, but I will save that for another time.
As everyone says, “life is too short”, and it is. As everyone says, “I wish I would’ve done this or said this while that person was still alive“.
I am so fortunate that I reached out to my dad the way I did which is why I am writing this article.
I saw a dad I never knew I had. I saw an accountant, so filled with joy, love, and emotion and I had no idea my dad had all of this inside him!
But I finally got the prize. The prize of a connection with my father, that will ever be in my heart, they can never be taken away, this conversation with my father, Edward Essel, will absolutely be one of the highlights of my life.
I hope you’ll take advantage, and do the same thing for yourself.“
David Essel‘s work is highly endorsed by individuals like the late Wayne Dyer, and celebrity Jenny McCarthy says “David Essel is the new leader of the positive thinking movement.“
His work as a counselor and minister has been verified by so many different organizations, like, Psychology Today, Therapy Tribe, Theravive, and marriage.com has verified David as one of the top relationship counselors and experts in the world.
To work with David one on one simply visit https://www.davidessel.com
