/lit/ - Literature

>>16183463
My father is a good friend. Many anons are chiming in, “I love my father, but[...]” and they don’t know that saying so is setting themselves up for inequality between themselves and their fathers as men for their whole lives. Accepting your father’s faults makes you his equal, finally. We only demand perfection from our fathers, expecting anything but from everyone else. I mean, by all means, if your dad hanged you upside down and slapped you with a bamboo chute like a piñata as a kid, wash your hands of him. But come on, Anon. You seriously all had Dennis Rader for fathers?

A lot of the bellyaching I’m seeing here amounts to failed expectations. We hold our fathers to meteorically high expectations, but we set those expectations after living in their houses—seeing other dads, seeing dads on TV (Leave it to Beaver is the worst programming ever on American television). We get hard with our friends bitching about whose dad was worse to whom.

And we promise we’ll do better. Promises, promises.

Our culture doesn’t have a coming-of-age rite for its men. Here’s one. Being able to look your father in the eye and shake his hand, man to man, equals.