This is a serious question, mostly addressed to the adult women among us but also to anyone else who has a stake in the matter.
What did your father do for you/not do for you, that you needed?
Context: I have recently become a father to a daughter, with a mother whose father was not around when she was growing up. I won’t bore you all with the details but our daughter is here now and I am realising that I’m the only one in our little family who has really had a father before. But I have never been a girl. And I know that as a boy, my relationships with my mother and father were massively influential and powerful but at the same time radically different to each other. People say that daughters and fathers have a unique relationship too.
Question: What was your father to you? What matters the most when it comes to a father making his daughter loved, safe, confident and free? To live a good life as an adult?
I’d like this to be a mature, personal and real discussion about daughters and fathers, rather than a political thing, so I humbly ask to please speak from the heart and not the head on this one :)
Thank you
P.S Apologies if this question is badly written or conceived; I haven’t been getting enough sleep! It is what it is!
Thanks for your comment :) Can I ask; what sort of ground rules did you have with your wife?
It sounds more formal than I suppose it really was I think. But, a few things were kind of baseline assumptions we worked from. No name calling or snide insults in a hurtful manner. That seemed to be a really core value. We allowed apologies when they were needed after an argument and we allowed them without any eye rolling or derision. We tried to go to bed without contempt…certainly we could be irritated, maybe angry but that didn’t mean we didn’t like each other so it was a sort of neutral ground, in a way?
Trying to explain it seems so contrived and cringe but in my head, and believe in hers as well, we had some idea from our parents what we should try to avoid and that was our starting point. Our parents provided a model of what not to have in a marriage and so we talked a lot about that, especially when we first met.
Also, no TV in the bedroom. Ever.
These are still the set of guidelines we follow now. Even without the pressure of children.