Conscious Fatherhood: Finding Balance Between Being a Father And a Friend

All right, so, hello, Cadre community. Happy Saturday. We are in June. Happy Pride Month, everybody. Celebrating Pride Month. Pretty powerful thing to see the demonstrations, protests going on around the country. I'm not endorsing them per se. I'm just saying it's nice to see people exercising their rights and then happy early Father's Day. Some of you may know that a lot of my work is around fathers. I've done a curriculum, the first trauma informed curriculum for programs to use called Amazing Dads.

And I think that's what we really have to celebrate for Father's Day is Amazing Dads. So just to get it right out of the pocket, do I believe we celebrate Moms for Father's Day? I do not. I do not. Now, if you're a mom who stayed with your kids and through really hard stuff, that's amazing. Is that the time to celebrate Father's Day? No, no. I mean, we saw commercials years ago. Not. Not recently, thank God. But there were literally commercials saying, tell her happy Father's Day. Sure as h*** ain't never going to see a Mother's Day commercial like that for fathers.

But I can name not only a lot of fathers who have stuck around, but the number one. The number one population growing in the country are single dads, dads with full custody of their kids, or dads who have their kids. So what's my point? It is not at all to malign moms, but it's also to celebrate dads and give dads their due space for celebration. Now, look, I'm the first person, the first person who could certainly have a chip on his shoulder about dads, right? I got my dad wounds. No, no problems there.

I could name them. Was it horrific? It was not horrific. Was it terrible at times? It absolutely was. If you find yourself choking your father to death because you're so tired of being beat up by him, yeah. Chances are that wasn't a great relationship. Sadly, that kind of interaction between fathers is very common, especially between sons and fathers. It's like this kind of. This vying for power and establishing one's kind of, you know, position in the family. So it's kind of ugly stuff, right? That's not what.

That's not what Father's Day is about. There's plenty we can find wrong with fathers, but there's so much to celebrate about fathers. There's so much to celebrate, even about the imperfect fathers, even the ones who they did the best they could. And yet maybe it just wasn't everything you needed in the work that I do. I invite people to write a letter to their father. When I do trainings, one day, two day, three day, four day trainings, I'll invite people, I'll say like, hey, when's the last time you wrote a letter to your father?

Oh, God, I'm not writing a letter to my father. Just write a letter to your father. Just see what's there. It's like, it's okay, right? Because it's there. So after years of recovery, after years of my own experience of being a father, I have a lot of empathy for my father who died tragically from chronic alcoholism at the age of 54. So I've got a lot of heartbreak around dads. That's not the point. That is not the point of today and that's not the point of tomorrow. The point of tomorrow is to celebrate and celebrate the love, celebrate dads showing up, celebrate the dads who were there, the single dads, celebrate.

I mean, I know so many amazing dads, and that's why we named our curriculum Amazing Dads. So one of the things for me about being a father, right, my daughter's 15, like she's full fledged adolescent. And I love that. I love for the folks that have had good role models in their, in their life as fathers. I didn't used to believe it was true. I thought all dads were like my father. And I think my dad was even a good role model. I mean, one, he taught me a lot of how not to show up, but he did show me, teach me some positive lessons, especially when he was sober those few times that he was.

And in fact, I often think of the fact that the man that I got to experience sober was really the father he would have liked to have been the whole time, right? So this month is focused on balance in the Cadre world, the Cadre community. And so what I wrote in the livestream description is the difference between balancing between being a father and being a friend, right? So I'll try to not speak negatively of parents who think their kids are their best friends or their. Or the kids who speak about their parents being their best friends.

And I don't know, is that right or wrong? I don't know necessarily. It really is not about the label you use, it's about the relationship you have, right? Like my daughter, she knows she can come to me for anything. We laugh. We laugh so much. It's so awesome. She came home last night, came home from a party she had her last day of school. She came home from a party right now. She's 15, almost 16, coming home from a party. Do you know what I was doing when I was 15 coming home from a party? I don't have a.

I don't. I don't have a fear in my mind that she's doing those things. Which is awesome, right? It's just absolutely awesome. But she comes in, I was like, hey, how's the party? And she's like, oh, it's good. And I was like, what'd you do? And she was like, you know this. I'm like, who'd you make out with? And I just said it as a joke. You know, I just said it as a little bit of a joke, but kind of wondering if it might have. And then she just got. She just laughed, and she was like, how'd you know?

Oh, my God, I was talking to. Blah, blah, blah. So that part right there, that's the friend or the friendly father? I mean, and sure, of course it's. It's the father, right? But what I'm talking about is what I've Learned in these 15 years, and I'm sure I've got more to learn. I know I've got more to learn is like, I have a tendency sometimes. Well, I don't want my daughter to be upset at me. I always want my daughter to like me. Am I willing to risk my daughter not liking me because of how much I love my daughter?

I think that's the big question, right? I don't think my daughter will ever necessarily call me her best friend, and that's okay with me. Will she call me one of the closest people in her life? I hope so. And when we have this relationship, you know, ongoing. I hope so. I hope I don't do anything to screw that up. And I hope she stays as connected to me as she is at the age of 15, which supposedly teenagers aren't supposed to do, aren't supposed to care about. But we're very close. We talk all the time, and we laugh and we do silly stuff and we talk about nothing or we have deeper talks.

And so the balance, right? I mean, I love. I love the. I love the focus on balance, because balance is such an important part of my life. One, because I'm always. I'm often not that acquainted with it, Right. But the other is, is that I'm often seeking balance. I'm often trying to find balance in my life, in the various areas of my life. And me being a balanced father is huge for me. It's what I call conscious fatherhood. Like, what Is conscious fatherhood. Am I willing to risk her being upset at me?

Am I willing to not really care if she's upset at me when it comes to, like, hey, I asked you three times to do the. To. To empty the dishwasher. Now we're on to the next level. Okay, did I. Did I tell her, hey, you know what? We've been really clear with you about getting the dog out and making sure that she poops, because if she doesn't get out, she can't take herself out. She's gonna poop in the house. So the next time that she poops in the house, you might find some poop in your room. Do I have a problem with that?

I don't. I don't. Because there are ways to teach lessons, and you can add a little humor to it. I put dirty dishes in her room all the time. But then there are, like, the things like when she's having a hard time or when she needs to assert her independence. She's quitting volleyball after years of. Of time and money that we've invested in her playing volleyball, but she doesn't want to continue. Do we force her to continue? Some people would say, yeah, you force her to continue, or you make it.

You. You know, you have conversations with her so that she decides for herself to continue, but she's clear she doesn't want to play in college. So what do we do? You know, that's the father and the friend. That's the. The space in between, you know, the other component. And then I'll kind of wrap up. I think the other really important component when it comes to being a father versus a friend is just how it's done. Right? A father doesn't have to be stern or borderline controlling or laying down the law or raising his voice or any of that.

You can do all of the same stuff that you're trying to do with power and control in a loving and kind way. That's been the big lesson for me, because inside of me is my father. And my father was not a nice man. He was a mean guy. And that's inside me. And I see it, and I see it come up, and sometimes I am able to not have it come out. In fact, a lot of the time these days, I'm able to not have it come out. But there were times where I did it, and that's when I was out of balance. That's when I had the wrong idea of what it meant to be a father.

Right. And so whatever side you may be skew towards wrong interpretation of a father, wrong interpretation of a friend. I think the beauty is in finding in the balance between the two and realizing you can absolutely be a friend to your child, be a father to your child, and still be a very loving, kind, empathic human being, even when you have to really assert your role as the adult in the life of this child who is still learning how to be responsible, still learning integrity, still learning how to follow through, still learning how to be their word.

And the key for me is to do all of those things and demonstrate it more than anything. So I went a little longer today. Fatherhood is really, really important to me. I love being a father. And I almost missed it, man. I almost missed it for lots of reasons, which is maybe another conversation. So this is a longer one, but I really. If you. If you're watching this and you've never written a letter to your father, there's a couple ideas for letters. The first one is if you love your dad and you've just never really expressed it or haven't expressed it in a while, just express it, man.

Tomorrow's Father's Day. Get real, you know, just get a little deeper, a little more vulnerable. And if it's not been a great relationship, write that letter and get some of that stuff out and see what's there and see what work there might be for you, right? Clean it up, clean it out and give yourself some space from that. So happy early Father's Day to everybody. Thanks everybody for listening and appreciate you and take care. Bye. Bye.