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Writer's pictureFlow Withwater

We have work to do and it must start, for all of us, with our fathers.


Silence is the tool, making your truth visible is the resistance.

Fathers day today, and while we sit with the conversations we've been having lately about toxic masculinity and how it must be addressed, I have yet to read one fathers day post addressing anything other than praise for fathers. Makes me wonder what exactly we think addressing toxic masculinity looks like outside of rhetoric and in real life practice.

I'll start. Hey dad thanks, for everything, really. Thanks. Thanks for being an emotionally unavailable and distant person that would float in and out of my life throughout my childhood, showing up sporadically and randomly. Thanks for being that sanest parent between you and my mother and abandoning me to neglect and horrifically adverse childhood experiences. Thanks for never acknowledging the countless nights that I had to listen to my little brother cry for you and how through that experience I learned that I had to be strong and disassociate from my own emotions so that I could provide emotional labor for others.

Thanks for developing a dynamic with me in which I learned that I had to silence my hurt feelings with you so that my hurt feelings didn't hurt your feelings. Thanks for never telling me that it was okay to feel hurt and angry about the constant disappointment and rejection I felt when you never showed up when you said you would or did what you said you would do. Thanks for never showing me that men have a capacity for vulnerability and that it is safe to be vulnerable with them. Thanks for jumping off a bridge without so much as a farewell. Thanks for the ten years that I had to watch my little brother self destruct to a walking dead man after your suicide. The brother that you told me before I was 5, that I was his keeper and that it was my responsibility to take care of him.

Thanks for playing a part in the destruction of that perfect little child, and that final call to tell me that he had been found overdosed in a creek. Thanks for deciding that it was okay with you that your children and grand children carry your burdens for you. Thanks for making a decision that robbed my children of both a grandfather and an uncle, and me of a family support system that I can depend on when things get rough. Is this too much? Is this inappropriate? Does this cause you to be offended?

Perhaps we must all think about how our practice around smashing patriarchy and addressing toxic masculinity aligns, or fails to align, with our rhetoric. I have no interest in being complicit in perpetuating or supporting a national fucking holiday that silences the real truths about the fathers of these generations. Yes, there are good things I could say about him and how he was just a victim of mental illness, but in the end, his impact on my life, along with the whole culture that socialized him, has been catastrophic. He made a decision to abandon and defer his pain, rather than do the labor intensive emotional work of staying alive and repairing the damage.

This is what I think addressing toxic masculinity looks like, and I am okay with it if you don't agree. Our vested interests might just differ.


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