Verwandte Artikel zu What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing...

What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding On To and Letting Go of Their Daughters - Softcover

Richesin, Andrea N.

 
9780373892105: What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding On To and Letting Go of Their Daughters
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0373892101 ISBN 13: 9780373892105
Verlag: Harlequin Nonfiction, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In this surprisingly vulnerable collection, twenty-eight talented fathers explore the complex, enigmatic bond they have with their daughters. These endearing, often funny and sometimes heartbreaking stories have in common an overpowering sense of responsibility and a depth of affection that is unflinchingly tender. Through their shared experiences, they examine relationships fraught with challenges and struggles, but always filled with love. The gentle strength they bring to this important role in their daughters' lives will speak to families for generations to come.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrea N. Richesin is the editor of The May Queen (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) which was excerpted and praised in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Bust, Daily Candy and Babble. As a follow-up to Because I Love Her,
she is editing a forthcoming father-daughter anthology (Harlequin, May, 2010). She has worked for Thomson Publishing in London, Red Herring and Edutopia magazines, and McCann- Erickson in San Francisco. Visit her at nickirichesin.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In the Swedish folktale "Singeli's Silver Slippers," a poor cobbler sews his daughter a pair of magical shoes to protect her from harm and lead her on many adventures. When it's time for her to go out in the world on her own, her father says, "These silver slippers will guide you in the right way Into them I have put all my love."

The writers in What I Would Tell Her have invested a similar love, almost overpowering in its intensity. With a touching vulnerability, they write from their hearts about their hopes for their own daughters.

The beauty of this collection lies in the many different ways the contributors attempt to become like mythic heroes to their little girls, to protect them and guide them throughout their lives. They recognize how important it is to be a strong male role model. After all, how a little girl sees her father and the strength of their relationship will shape and inform her relationships with men for the rest of her life. Knowing that they are the first man she'll ever love, these fathers are devoted to nurturing them. I have noticed this with my own daughter, how much she looks to my husband for encouragement and how he reflects this back to her every day. Fathers are arguably the most important men in their daughters' lives.

After editing the heartfelt essays in Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond, I was frankly stunned by the outpouring of emotion in this collection. I suppose I initially expected a more stoic and practical, far less impassioned and confessional response from these fathers. As both a mother and daughter, I felt I deeply understood the innate connection between the two, but found I had much to learn about the depths of the father-daughter connection. At first, men don't always experience the same intuitive attachment like a mother's love and it may often take some time for this nurturing bond to develop. For all these reasons, I was happily surprised by the tender essays I received.

This remarkable anthology delves into the intense nature of the intimacy of these ties between father and daughter. The talented contributors write about their love for their daughters, the emotional conflicts they've overcome together and what they've learned from them.

They also demonstrate the role their parents played in informing how they rear their daughters. Some have chosen to embrace their background, while others have decided to create a whole new model for their families. They take us on a journey through the many stages of fatherhood: birth, toddlerhood, adolescence to sweet sixteen, graduation, becoming a grandparent and even the loss of a child.

As Steve Almond amusingly explains in "What Next, Papa?" "We all fall for our girls. We all worship them. We get to perfect the heroic version of ourselves that mates never grant us. Our love resides in a passionate physical connection that is not sexual, but grounded in the sensuality of childhood." Eric Goodman echoes a similar sentiment in his essay "Do I Dote?" He discovers a father's relationship with a grown-up daughter symbolizes "an idealized kind of love, with all the sweetness and caring remaining from childhood, but without all the real-world difficulties and concerns that color a relationship with a wife or lover." Goodman believes if he has made his daughter feel "loved, respected and admired," he will have "succeeded as a father, representing to her everything that a loving relationship with a man can be."

Protecting their daughters emerged as the most common theme in this collection. Akin to a warrior impulse, the writers often feel a strong need to defend their daughters. Dean Bakopoulos realizes as a father, there are many things he cannot fix. For him, parenthood is ripe with what he deems "small mournings," or "those brief moments of daily clarity when you realize that you are unable to protect your children from every danger, humiliation and woe that the world can offer." He recognizes his daughter is likely to experience all these things with and without his help, and sometimes despite his best efforts. He ventures that it's "possible that men do not fully realize the precarious sadness of the world until they watch their own children try to navigate their way through it." Bakopoulos wonders whether as fathers "we have long realized it, and now the shattering part is that we must watch a tiny creature, whom we love more than anything else in the world, realize it, as well."

His daughter's "guarantee against everything," David Teague straps the colicky three-month-old Annabel to his chest and walks the mean streets of Philly to keep her nighttime existential woes at bay. They witness a gang of hooligans brutally attacking an innocent man. In a moment of heroic determination, Teague hands Annabel to his wife and mysteriously mumbles, "I've got to see about something." No spoilers here, but in the end, he confesses if he saw the ne'er-do-wells again today, he would "crush them to powder, take that night back and give it to Annabel."

James Griffioen offers an alternative view to the clichéd idea of "shotgun dads" and the mythology of protecting daughters from teenage boys. Although he understands the emotions involved, he doesn't think his daughter needs to be protected from boys or her own feelings. His essay is more about "sexual" protection than actual physical protection (i.e., standing by the door during dates with the mythical shotgun). When he attends a "purity ball" in his wife's hometown and talks to other fathers about their fear of their daughters' sexuality, he decides he wants his daughter to develop a healthy attitude about sex. In his stunning conclusion, he offers his most astute observation that fathers must protect their daughters from themselves, asserting "it takes real strength to stand aside and let her navigate the darkness without you." In his essay "The Man on the Stairs" Robert Wilder also notes, "A father's love for his daughter is borne out of weakness and that's the way it should be, if he only lets it." Even though Wilder would like to defend his daughter, he realizes he must let her fight her own battles.

As part of this poignant journey of fatherhood, they must witness their little ones growing up. In his mind's eye Laird Hunt creates a film that doesn't exist. His little daughter is running away from him, past the monkey bars, until he catches a last glimpse of her "grown tall and strong shouldered, racing across…the grass field beyond the playground fence. Then she is gone." Fathers ache with bittersweet longing for their young daughters and, like Hunt's flickering film, the passing of their youth and innocence. When Steve Almond's daughter Josie proclaims, "I'm starting to grow up, Papa," he experiences "a thrilling, terrifying moment, feeling the weight of her, breathing in her hair, and it's all so fleeting, the chance to love her with such uncomplicated fervor, such uncensored declaration." He suspects "Josie has sniffed out the secret power of every childhood, which is that it ends little by little, that it's ending all the time, that each moment, whatever else it might contain in the way of joy and love and need, brings her a little closer to escape."

What begins as such a sweet, uncomplicated love can become fraught with frustration and misunderstandings as daughters grow up. An uncomfortable distance may grow out of this disconnect as father and daughter try to determine how to act around one another. Robert Dugoni is heartbroken when his eight-year-old daughter locks the bathroom door for the first time. He mourns the loss of his little girl, but wears a lipstick heart tattoo...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Harlequin Nonfiction
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0373892101
ISBN 13 
9780373892105
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
HarperCollins Publishers
enquiries@harpercollins.ie

Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper
Dublin 1
D01 C9W8
Irland