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John Sowers is the President of The Mentoring Project, and his book came out last week. I thought I’d feature an excerpt. If you’d like to understand the fatherless crisis, John’s book would be an excellent place to begin….

Fatherless Generation: Redeeming the Story

The earliest memories of my father are the few times he came to visit us during Christmas. About once a year, he would drive up from Austin to Little Rock for the weekend. My brother and I usually stayed with him at the Motel 6. Back then, Motel 6 had the big mechanical beds that, for only a quarter, would shake and make a low humming noise. Sleeping on them was like riding a giant, lumbering submarine.
My father usually smelled like an odd mixture of Old Spice and musky sweat. And for most of my childhood, I just thought that was how a man was supposed to smell. Sometimes he let me “drive” his burgundy Monte Carlo, which consisted of sitting in his lap and playing with the dark hair on his arms.
My brother Bill and I always ended up fighting for his attention. To us, his attention was a prize to be won. To be earned. It was as if we had one weekend to catch up on an entire year of absence. One chance to have him notice us, look at us, be proud of us, and love us. One brief moment to shine for this elusive man we called “Dad.”

I remember the park swings. Swinging beside him, trying to keep up, to go as high as him. I wanted him to be close to him, to make him proud. My brother and I took our Polaroid camera with us to the park to capture these moments. I hoarded these pictures and placed them in a big red album, poring over them for countless hours. These pictures represented seismic moments of acceptance. Moments of joy and belonging. Moments of life as it was supposed to be. Dad was here with us, with me, and everything was all right because of it.

Secretly, I hoped he might stay around this time. Just maybe. If we pleased him enough and were good enough, he just might stay. He might stay home with us, where he belonged. So I continued to live my little fantasy until it was time for his inevitable departure. I remember once grabbing his ankles—hanging on for dear life—as he walked out the front door, dragging me as I pleaded with him to stay. I was fighting for his affection, literally. But it didn’t work. It never worked.

Each time he left, my heart would break and I would die again.

Somewhere along the way, I grew callous. As his visits grew more infrequent, the promise of Dad became remote. He became a face- less voice on the phone. A signature on a birthday card. A fading image on an old, yellow Polaroid.

Eventually I let go of the hope that he would ever stay. It simply hurt too much to hope. So I buried it like some lost and forgotten treasure. I hid away my red picture album under piles of books and shoeboxes full of baseball cards, swearing to never look at it again. As the years passed, I began to accept the reality that he wasn’t coming back. And nothing I could do would ever change that. So I stopped trying, stopped performing, stopped caring altogether.
Rejection is the defining characteristic of the fatherless generation. In the United States alone, just over 33 percent of youth — over 25 million kids — are fatherless and searching for Dad. Searching for his love and acceptance. But Dad is nowhere to be found. He has run off to Vegas with a younger woman. He is lost in an alcoholic fog. He is sitting in a jail cell in Memphis. He is gone.

What’s your story of fatherlessness? Sharing your story is often where the healing begins.