Fatherless Behavior

A Blessing In Disguise

Human development is no simple equation but if you believed the sentiments of the masses then you'd probably believe that husband + wife + home = happy, healthy children. While I can admit that stability is incredibly important when it comes to a child's development, I also feel there's a lot more that goes into how someone turns out than just if they have two parents in a 'stable' home. Home is much more than a building that you return to after work, errands, or a trip. Much like the church, I think the home is significantly more metaphorical than it is physical but, also just like the church, many people are more attached to the physical manifestation of home than they are to its spiritual value.

Like so many other things in life, many people pick their homes primarily to impress or please others. And since the partner we choose to create a home with is such an integral part of how that home appears, many of us unfortunately also choose partners because of how we think they'll make our homes look as opposed to how they'll make our homes feel. For these reasons, I don't think growing up fatherless or motherless is always the worst thing for a child because what's much more important than having a father or mother is who that father or mother is.

Technically speaking, it's not that difficult to make a baby. I'm aware that many people struggle with fertility and I don't mean to discount that with my prior statement–I only mean that when the environment is ideal, all two people have to do is have sex to create another human. And though I don't have kids of my own, I think there's a lot more to being a parent than just making a kid. That being said, there are many people out there who grew up with both parents in the home and yet, still had a fatherless or motherless upbringing.

Personally, I technically grew up in a fatherless household but I think my saving grace was that my mother was a mother who embraced parenthood, despite often struggling to raise three kids on her own, and she has a mother who essentially devoted her life to raising and caring for her kids and grandkids. They say it takes a village to raise a child and I was very fortunate to have a village, though it was primarily made up of women. For much of my childhood, I was surrounded by aunts, great-aunts, and cousins who were all women and who all seemed to have a talent for child-rearing.

In my experience, masculinity has a lot more to do with energy than it does with gender and despite being raised primarily by women, I feel the reason why I still have a decent amount of masculine energy is because the women I was raised by often operated more out of their masculine than out of their feminine. These women all worked for the vast majority of their lives and not relatively easy, white-collar jobs like I've been fortunate to hold for most of my working career. Instead, they worked in plants and mills and factories. They worked as farmers and landscapers. They worked as caregivers and housekeepers. And when they returned back home each day, they worked as mothers and fathers, to the best of their abilities.

I don't think it's farfetched to believe that if my father had been a more active presence in my life, I would have consciously or unconsciously been pressured to follow even more in his footsteps than I did with him being absent. It's for this reason and for reasons that I will discuss further in the coming sections that I'm grateful to have grown up fatherless — because without having my father around to influence me into being the man he thought I should be, I was afforded the freedom to grow into my own man. A man that no one can truly take full credit for outside of God and myself. A man who is undoubtedly a better human because he had so much feminine influence in his life.

In the spirit of balance, I'm going to lay out some key blessings and curses that came with growing up in a fatherless home, not to convince you that one way is better than the other, but to highlight that, like most things in life, how a child develops is a nuanced thing. And sometimes, for some of us, our greatest adversities are our biggest blessings because they directly contribute to us developing our greatest strengths.

The Good

I spent so much of my life resentful that I didn't have a consistent male presence in my home growing up and I'll never deny that my development might have been stunted in many ways because of this. But the fact of the matter is, being 23 years old when I was conceived, my father had no concept of what it meant to be a parent. By his own admission, my father was not cut out for college, or school in general, really. He recently told me that he made it one month at Benedict College, an HBCU in Columbia, SC, before calling my grandmother to come and get him, as he didn't have the discipline to go to class and do his work without constantly having someone breathing down his neck.

I, too, did not think college was for me for much of my childhood. Even though I was pretty good at school, I hated it. Outside of the fun that I'd have with friends occasionally, school had no redeeming qualities to me. I remember being little and feeling heart broken to find out that I'd have to wake up early for school every year until I was 18. It was for this reason specifically that a 10 year old me told my mom that I wasn't going to college right after I graduated high school but might consider it after I'd had a few years off. In her wisdom, my mom told me that she'd told herself the same thing but as life would have it, she had kids and lost the opportunity to go back to college and feared that I might find myself in the same boat.

Were my father active in my life at this time, he likely would have shared his poor experience of college with me, and since I looked up to him so much, and wanted to be like him so badly, that probably would have been enough to solidify for me that college wasn't for me. Had I not gone to college, I probably would have never gained the courage to leave my hometown at all and would have been destined for a much more limited life than the one I've been blessed to live. I don't mean to imply that a limited life can't be a happy life and that no one in a small town is living a good life; I only mean that for me personally, I feel I was destined for more, and that's I always felt out of place in my small town. This is also why my father not indoctrinating me with his small town sensibilities is one of the best things that could have happened for me.

The father is typically seen as the leader of the household and growing up without a father in my home meant that being a 'follower' was never really an option for me. Though I can admit that I used to be a lot more susceptible to conforming, I've always walked to the beat of my own drum at my core and I think that's because I've always had to be my own leader. Being ostracized from groups and losing friends for other reasons has always been painful for me but it has never been devastating because I've always walked alone, following no authoritative guidance outside of my own heart. Though it has very often been lonely, it has also been liberating and my self-reliance has prevented me from falling into a lot of traps that would have otherwise kept me stuck and stunted my growth even more than growing up without a father.

The Bad

Though it is toxic, spite is a powerful source of energy and the spite that I held towards my father greatly contributed to the success that I found in young adulthood. My father didn't come to my pre-school graduation and wasn't invited to either my high school or college graduations and to be honest, I reveled in the fact that he knew I was successful in school but couldn't be a part of, and couldn't take credit for any of my academic success. It was my own way of punishing him for how I felt he'd punished me by abandoning me and I was so driven to pour more and more salt into the wound by achieving for myself everything that he failed in.

I wanted to be better than him in every way that was important to him. I wanted to look better, speak better, be more athletic, be tougher, make more money, be more desired by women, be more admired by men, get married, and to specifically have a son who I would have made the center of my world—not because I loved that son so much, but because I hated my father so much. Me having a son would have really been about the adult version of me giving my own wounded inner child the love, care, and attention that I'd always longed for myself. And this would have been a tragedy because it would have meant my son would have never gotten the opportunity to be himself or for me to love him as himself because, in my eyes, he would have been the 'me' that I was 'supposed' to be.

What makes spite so toxic is that it forces us to behave in ways that are more about the person we want to spite than it is about ourselves. Which is why rebound relationships never work—because we never truly meet or see the person we're rebounding with. Instead, they are just a means to an end–that end being making the person we want to spite, the person we actually care about, jealous, or to hurt them in some other way. And we do this by hurting someone else who doesn't deserve it. That's why I'm so grateful that I did not have a son before I had healed because I would have inadvertently damaged that son even more than I'd been damaged myself as I would have been using him to hurt my father.

Growing up without a father in my home definitely made me a much more spiteful person than I would have been had he been present in my life. And though I was blessed to be triggered into healing my parental wounds due to my mother's sickness, I can still imagine just how hurt, damaged, and how much more damage I would have projected onto others had I not been offered that grace.

The Ugly

By far, the worst consequence of growing up without a father in the home for me was how it skewed my perception of women and their value. I've read before that womanizers don't love sex, they love power, and many womanizers are the way that they are because they observed their father rebelling against their mothers by refusing to commit, or be controlled, and so the womanizer's understanding of masculinity is that it means to dominate women.

This was certainly the case for me, though I didn't see it that way for a long time. Not only did I spend most of my life afraid of commitment, even though I often found myself in long-term relationships where I didn't cheat technically, I never fully committed to the people I was in these relationships with. You might ask, how is that possible? Many ways:

1. Secretly entertaining other women in a way that doesn't count as cheating because it didn't involve physical or emotional interactions.
2. Being emotionally unavailable or emotionally distant in how I seemed indifferent to whether or not the relationship succeeded.
3. Constantly lusting after other women—be it just women that I'd see while out and about, on social media, or watching porn daily despite being in a relationship with a healthy sex life because the idea of only desiring one woman made me feel way too vulnerable and trapped.
4. Using sex primarily as a form of masturbation in the sense that it usually lacked true intimacy and connection. Instead, it was more of a primal, carnal thing used to please myself instead of an emotional and/or spiritual activity meant to bond me with a lover.

I can easily admit that for the first 26 years of my life, women who I was not related to were primarily objects to me and I see this as a direct result of seeing my father treat my mother and the other women he dated as objects. This objectification breeds misogyny and promiscuity because it reduces every woman you see into being just another opportunity to make yourself feel better—not physically—but emotionally, and I truly think that's why I and many other men were so sex obsessed. Since I'm not a woman, I don't want to speak on their experience but I've noticed that promiscuity is something that women also experience sometimes when they don't have a strong father figure in the home and I would guess this is because they are looking for the intimacy and affection they didn't get from their fathers in other men.

The Healer Is Birthed From The Wound

While I stand by the fact that growing up without a consistent father figure in my home was the best thing for me personally, I also have to admit that my turning out the way I did happened in spite of this fact, and not because of this fact. To me, growing up without a father in my home was one part of a pretty complex equation that helped contribute to the person I am today. A critical part that helped shaped me into someone who is so passionate about helping others heal and who couldn't have had this passion to help heal if he didn't have his own wounds.

What makes loving ourselves so difficult at times is that to truly love ourselves, we also have to love everything that has made us who we are—including the pain. And though it has taken just about every bit of the 34 years I've spent earth side this go round, I can truly say that I've arrived at a place where I'm grateful to have grown up fatherless because I wholeheartedly enjoy, admire, and appreciate the man that I've grown into without my father's direct influence.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's still much I need to learn about manhood and I'm still discovering and working on how to express masculinity in a healthy way. I still have residue from my past beliefs and behaviors and desires that sometimes get in the way of how I'd like to show up. And if I ever did become a parent, I would have a lot to learn as I didn't have an example to follow in regards to how a healthy father-child relationship looks. But what I can say is that I've never felt more ready for a truly intimate, vulnerable, deep, and fulfilling connection with another person and that's because I've never felt more intimate, vulnerable, deep, and fulfilled within myself—exactly as I am.

There's so much more to having a 'stable' home than a mortgage and two people who claim to love each other. A recurring theme in this month's newsletters is that home is ultimately within and so, regardless to how comfortable our physical homes may seem from the outside looking in, if what's on the inside isn't stable or secure, then how pretty our physical homes is doesn't really matter. Though in the flesh I may always feel fatherless, in the spirit I'm guided by the highest authority and supported by many wise beings who have never led me astray. And I don't think I would have such close relationships with these inner authorities had I had an outer authority influencing me to be more like him. Ultimately, being fatherless as a child was a small price to pay to end up free and autonomous as an adult.

What's Going On In The World?!

I'm low-key starting to think that there was a timeline split back when Trump got re-elected and we all got stuck in the bad timeline 😩 lol. Jk, but you have to admit that a lot of weird shit has been popping off this entire year. If I'm honest though, I think the weird shit happening is more evidence of things shifting in a more positive sense than otherwise because a lot of the 'weird' shit happening is old power structures seeming to fall. It seems that collectively we have grown tired of the idea of 'celebrity' and are becoming more conscious of how these people we've chosen to elevate do everything in their power to keep us limited.

The recent brazen assassination of a health insurance CEO by a 'privileged' member of society, and the fact that this has been celebrated by people on all sides of the political spectrum is proof that the only real divide in society is between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots'. And to be honest, I don't think this will be the last situation of its kind. Revolution is never triggered from a place of peace and I think that may be why there's seemingly more and more uncomfortable things occurring. Personally, I think the recent drone sightings in and around New Jersey is a U.S. Military operation but at this point, if it did turn out to be an alien invasion, I wouldn't be surprised at all, lol.

On a more personal note, I've been thinking a lot about what I'd like to accomplish in the upcoming year and though I'm not 100% sure exactly how, I know for a fact that I want to share my artistic side more–so I'm looking forward to seeing how that manifests. I'm also looking forward to taking a brief break from writing after my last newsletter for the year is published next week! Doing these newsletters has been fulling for me in so many ways, but also extremely challenging, so I'm more than looking forward to fully achieving my goal of publishing a newsletter every week in 2024 and then taking some well deserved rest.

I really have grown a lot this year and I really hope that reading these newsletters have helped you grow in some way too. Talk to you next week if we haven't all been abducted onto the mothership by then, lol.

With love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜