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Daughters and fathers
Women share their thoughts on the first man in their lives in this book.
By Sandra Martin
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Daddy's girl
We all have fathers, even if some of them are absent, anonymous or dead. The longing to connect with them goes way beyond our annual celebration of Father's Day. After my father died suddenly of a stroke in 2005, I saw a photograph of him and my son that shook up my assumptions. At 85, he seemed frail and tired, especially in contrast to my robust 25-year-old son, yet they looked so much alike that I went back 60 years in time and tried to imagine my father as a young man: his father was long dead and he'd been overseas fighting the Germans for four years, I realized. How had that loss and that daily confrontation with death prepared him for fatherhood? That revelation made me curious about other women and their fathers. For many of us, fathers are a mystery that puzzles and torments us. We know what they look like but not why they behave the way they do. So I set out to find Canadian women with distinctive voices and compelling stories -- the good as well as the bad. I wanted to start a conversation, but I didn't realize how tantalizing and unending it would become.
The First Man in My Life: Daughters Write About Their Fathers (Penguin
Canada) has 22 true narratives about life with, or without, Dad. The contributors‹including Anita Rau Badami, Camilla Gibb, Lisa Moore, P. K. Page, Emma Richler and Susan Swan, come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, both cultural and ethnic, and range in age from their 20s to their 90s. Their stories are sometimes sad, sometimes angry, sometimes funny and sometimes heroic, but I believe that they are all loving and driven by a desire to understand what Margaret Atwood describes as "a father-shaped space that must somehow be dealt with, however well or badly it may have been filled."
The role of fathers has changed drastically in the last generation. If they choose, men can have a much greater engagement in the emotional and physical nurturing of their children. That accounts, perhaps, for the way that younger women such as Rebecca Godfrey, Marina Nemat, Rebecca Snowand Emily Urquhart write so openly and easily about the contradictions and vulnerabilities they see in their fathers. And that may be the beginning of yet another conversation: how fathers see their daughters.
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