- Introduction - Page 12

For most of us, it is not a good place to be, but we feel powerless to change it; we don’t even have a vocabulary for how to talk about it. It is just a feeling, a very deep and painful feeling, but talking about our feelings is not something with which men are terribly comfortable. This distance, which is created slowly and silently, can no longer be tolerated. Somehow now—not tomorrow, not next year—we need to begin to forge a path back to our children, to discover how to create and maintain deep and strong emotional connections with them and ourselves.

I’ve also come to see that, when discussing fathering, there are no experts. There are only men who have tried to do their best and are willing to share their experience—their accomplishments and their failures, their heartaches and their joys, their confusion and their clarity.

There are no secret answers. Building and nurturing a father-child relationship requires the knowledge that it can be done, the commitment that it will be done, the persistence to keep on trying, and the courage to do whatever is necessary to make sure it does get done.

Like it or not, we are in the midst of a major economic, social, and cultural transition. The roles of men and women, and therefore the roles of mothers and fathers, are changing— and changing rapidly. These changes stem in part from new and often courageous choices being made by the emerging generations of women and men, and also in part from the very impersonal and inexorable economic shifts taking place.

What we want, need, and expect from our most intimate relationships are being reexamined and redefined as we go. At the same time, women are moving into the workplace at an astonishing rate, out of both choice and necessity. The result is