GRIEVER's EXCHANGE // Father Figuring
The following miniature workshop of sorts is something I needed, so I made it for me—and now I’m sharing it with you. I hope it’s expandable and collapsable based on your needs and your time; that you might get something out of just reading through the ideas, and/or from taking on the prompts and approaching the larger outline as a creative and reflective opportunity.
Family is such a teacher. Whether any given family member is here on earth with us or not, whether we have loving bonds with them or whether we have complex or even destructive histories with them, our family (blood, chosen) and those we call or consider kin, folk, or relations help us see ourselves. How and why we are, how and why we want to be, how and why we don’t want to be.
I’ve been trying to understand my dad since he died in 2016—and, really, since long before that. This “trying to understand” is a process that takes place ambiently all the time, but then kicks into actual active mind work around his birthday, the anniversary of his death, and observances like Father’s Day1. In the wake of his death (and it still feels like that—like waves created by the hull of a vessel as it moves through the water), I’ve wanted to know as much as I can know about my dad’s burdens and his privileges. What he felt driven by, and what he felt called to. What he felt exempt from, what he felt included in. How he felt pinned down, how he inspired. How this world hurt him, and how it rewarded him.
And because of the larger … oh, let’s just call it a patriarchy audit … that we are all (to varying degrees) in the middle of, all of my personal questions feel cultural, political, social. Wondering about my dad becomes wondering about all dads, all men, all fathering people. It’s wondering about white dads and black dads; dads in 1692 and dads in 1992. Artist dads and cop dads. Industrial revolution dads, agrarian dads, TikTok dads, and cave man dads.
In wondering about what went right and what went wrong for my dad, and for my dad and me, I found myself needing to deconstruct the concept and the applications of fatherhood writ large. Like maybe one important way to look at him is to look at all that I think I know about who and what a dad is “supposed” to be. From the flash of characters I saw in my mind’s eye—all those dads I mentioned wondering about in the last paragraph—I eventually moved to the tarot. To kings who file into different suits, to the emperor who comes after the empress and before the hierophant.
What you’ll find below is for all of us—or maybe just any of us. Any of us who might need it. It’s an exercise in tracking, and mapping, and figuring, and, hopefully, freeing. Take whatever’s interesting to you and make it what you need it to be.
SOME CONSIDERATIONS OR AGREEMENTS
(less between you + me, and more between you + you)
+ Consider deciding now that you’ll stay on the side of *wondering* and deliberately not cross over to “knowing” for as long as possible and maybe longer than that. Knowing leads to tunnel vision; it clouds and cuts out possibilities, and in so doing can yield bad information. Wondering and curiosity allow for so much more wisdom.
+ Consider that this doesn’t have to be personal. Consider keeping this exercise in the realm of the theoretical and dealing only with personas, not actual people. That on its own might be taxing (physically, mentally, energetically) enough. Consider waiting to layer in any real-life examples until later (if at all); until after you’ve saved up another reserve of space and time.
+ Consider trying to adopt a polarity-free lens on all of this. (Easier said than done so consider also going easy on yourself.) Think in circles. Think not in straight or even curved lines, and certainly not in poles. Not in either/or or black/white but in continuums that loop back over each other forever. Think in terms of the day and the year and all of nature: Everything has night and day, sunshine and shadow, a wet season and a dry one. Above all things, avoid understanding anything as good or bad; consider understanding everything as everything.
FATHER FIGURING
STEP ONE: Find some pages—loose or in a bound notebook or digital file folder. At the top of the first page, write “Fathers of:” and then list these categories down the side of the page:
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM
THE “OLD WORLD”
ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY
POPULAR MYTHOLOGY
PAGAN TRADITIONS
YOUR CHILDHOOD
CLASSICAL LITERATURE
MODERN FILM + TV
MUSIC CULTURE
(ADD ANY OTHER CATEGORY OR HEADING THAT FEELS INTERESTING AND GENERATIVE TO YOU)
With your beginner’s mind and the energy of an enterprising seventh grader approaching a social sciences report, open up to and document all and any representations of fathering and dad-ness within each of those categories. Search the internet, the library, or just your memory bank. What must a father bear do? How about a father bee? Who were the biggest Greek God-Dads and what were their fates? What were their failures? What traits were ascribed to Homer Simpson? To Cliff Huxtable? What images of fathering appear on Hallmark cards and telephone company billboards? Let all images, icons, caricatures, standards, symbols, cliches, and prototypes filter in. Catch as many as you can. Document, doodle, sketch, question, and riff.
STEP TWO: If you have access to a tarot deck, pull out these cards:
The Emperor
The King of Pentacles
The King of Wands
The King of Cups
The King of Swords
If you don’t have a tarot deck, call up images of these cards on the internet or find them in books.(Taschen’s Tarot is a an excellent resource.)
Down the side of a second page, underneath the word, “Archetypes,” list each of the tarot father figures given here (plus any that feel fatherly in your experience), and then either by consulting texts or guides or simply in describing what you see illustrated and represented on each card, notice what you notice and write it all down. Keep in mind what there is to know about the suits (pentacles = earth, wands = the spirit, cups = feelings, swords = the mind) as well as the roles of benevolent kings and colonizing emperors in history, culture, folklore, and storybooks.
Remind yourself that you’re just gathering information. You’re just making one entry in one catalogue of your mind, the culture you live in, and the stories we as humans are steeped in. Well, not that you’re “just” doing that, because doing that is a lot. But that you’re “just” doing it the way the keen seventh grader does their social studies homework. The way learning and work can feel like swimming in a warm and rapid river.
STEP THREE: At the top of a third page, write “What if:” and then these call-outs:
FATHERS SUBVERTED
FATHERS REIMAGINED
FATHERS NURTURED
Now, turn all of it upside down and over again. Write the opposite of or some absurd “anti” statement about several of your findings. Take oblique angles, write ideas into circles. Make some things up. Rewrite history. Say, for instance, that in Neolithic China, fathers were the primary caregivers due to a spike in demand for women’s silk needlecraft. Construct an alternate reality where Neolithic fathering people built elaborate play worlds for children. Where productive parenting was predicated on joy and fun and pretending. Make up a jungle where Zebra dads sing cooing noises to their mating-age sons. Toss out norms and expectations. Script in individuality.
When you’re calling the shots, which dad constructs get tossed first? What new foundations emerge? What can you imagine?
STEP FOUR: Cross reference everything you’ve assembled thus far. The cultural notes with the tarot spread with the speculative past/present/future. The weird stuff, the mundane. Notice what you notice. What themes come up? What themes do you strike down? What surprises you? What disappoints you? What taught you something? What gave you pause? What gives you or someone you love a second chance?
Circle words and ideas that feel resonate or interesting to you. Cross out ideas that hurt you. Underline best case scenarios. Black out anything you would like to rid the world of. Write and rewrite what you’d like to multiply. Draw more tarot cards to help light the way.
In the margins and the empty spaces: Document, doodle, sketch, question, and riff.
STEP FIVE: Gathering together the previous three pages, and all the annotations you just completed, take out a fourth and final page and, somewhere in the middle rather than the top, write “Fathers are:” … and then, well, and then you’ll know what to do next.
The unfinished sentence might be enough, or, an essay might come tumbling out. Or a grocery list, some old song lyrics, or a beautifully honest last thought. Give it a little time but not too much, and then layer the pages together and roll them up into a scroll that you can tie a small string around like a diploma or a sacred text. Tuck the rolled pages into a bookshelf or a box that holds winter hats.
Breathe.
LATER, PERHAPS: On a new page or just in your mind’s eye, write:
Fathers wished for
Fathers cared for
Fathers grateful for
Fathers need
Fathers loved
Fathers forgiven
Fathers let go
From there and from here on out, the task, the expression, the conclusions, are for all of us to define for ourselves. I hope we’ll feel closer to something helpful. I hope we’ll get something out of indexing and cross-referencing and imagining. I hope we’ll see something new in ourselves, and in someone else maybe, too.
And if you ever feel like telling me about it, I’ll always want to listen.
All photo illustrations and manipulations by me using images from Unsplash by Annie Spratt, Stephanie Ecate, Unseen Histories, Krismas, Klara Kulikova, and Nauman Abdul Hafeez.
In the Mother’s Day post for Griever’s Ball, we obliquely touched on the genesis of Mother’s Day. With that in mind, I looked into how Father’s Day began and found that it was initiated by a Spokane, WA woman just as the rise of Mother’s Day was spreading. Her own mother had died in childbirth so she had been raised (along with five other siblings) by her father, a veteran of the Civil War.