Patton Dodd nearly walked away from completing his memoir “The Father You Get: And the Ones You Make, Believe In and Become,” published in September. It was painful writing about his father, and even about some of the men who’d become father figures for him.
But complete the book he did, and he spent about 50 minutes talking about it with Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe, the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to their conversation here.
Dodd, the executive director of storytelling and communications for the H.E. Butt Foundation, told the hosts he’s settled on presence as the sign of what healthy fatherhood looks like.
“Ideal fatherhood has a lot to do with just being present in your children’s lives, showing up over and over again in all sorts of seasons and situations, and being able to attend to them and their stories as they actually are and not what you wish they would be,” he said. “Settling on presence was in some ways a response to my own experience when I was a kid was my dad offered no presence. He was there,” Dodd said, but was “kind of absent and negligent.”
“I don’t think that’s uncommon,” Dodd said. “I’m a dad and I try to be a good dad, but I also struggle with presence.”
Writing his memoir involved researching his father’s story. He learned that his father, who’s deceased, “had tropes [about fatherhood] in mind and tried to live up to them and failed.” His father fell short in some traditional masculine ideals including competing and achieving success, Dodd said, and struggled to hold down a job. “I think he was falling short of those masculine ideals, but he never questioned them,” Dodd said. “I think it would have done him a lot of good to blow up those concepts and figure out his relationship to them instead of trying and failing to live up to them” and “transferring those masculinity ideals to me.”
Dodd and his wife have three children. “Once my kids were adolescents, I probably had more sympathy for some of my dad’s mistakes and failures. It’s challenging to be a parent,” he told the hosts. “One thing that happened over the course of being a dad is I shifted from anger to something like grief. Anger is a simpler emotion and it’s full of blame.” Being a father “humbled me a little bit” and “shifted that predominant emotion to one of grieving the loss of the man he could have been and wasn’t in our home.”
“I’m still fully aware of his faults,” Dodd said, “but I’m shifting how I respond to them.”
Catoe asked how better understanding his father has reframed Dodd’s concept of God as a father.
“I’ve always struggled with the idea of God as a father. It’s not a comfortable concept for me,” Dodd said. While in college, “a lot of well-meaning people encouraged me to lean into this idea of God as a loving father.” At one prayer meeting, Dodd was encouraged to think of God sitting in a rocking chair, where God’s children could climb up and be comforted by God. “That person meant well, but I was totally turned off by that image,” Dodd said, “and I felt guilty for not wanting to think of God that way.”
Even though Jesus taught the disciples to pray to “our father,” “I don’t think it’s the only way to approach the loving and parental presence of God,” Dodd said.
When Dodd left home for college, “my mother made the gift of telling me, ‘you’re going to need a male mentor in your life.’ She said, ‘I’m praying you’ll find someone whose wing you can get under, because there’s a lot you haven’t gotten yet.’”
“I came to terms with my own agency in seeking and making father figures,” he told Catoe and Doong. “I turned it into a verb, ‘father figuring,’ as something we do.”
“Nurturing is something we need,” he said, “but it’s also important we have agency in those relationships.”
New installments of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
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Rebecca Storti, Director, Project Operations, The Board of Pensions
Shawnda Styles, Senior Accounting Clerk, Controllers, The Presbyterian Foundation
Let us pray:
Gracious God, we give you thanks for allowing us to be a part of building a kingdom in which all people are equal. Amen.
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