Do you need to be a firebreak father?

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One of the things that my girls and I really enjoy is walking in the forest near where we live. There is something magical about forests not to mention the vital role they play in replenishing oxygen, preventing soil erosion, providing building materials and forming a habitat for all kinds of wildlife.

However, these wonderful places have one terrible vulnerability - fire. So, if you walk through a managed forest then, sooner or later, you will come across a firebreak - a gap cut through the tress to prevent the spread of fire. All the vegetation is removed, down to the base soil layer so that there is no organic matter to provide fuel for the fire. The taller and more flammable the vegetation is, the wider the firebreak has to be.

Firebreaks make a great metaphor for holding back harmful forces, for holding the line and making a significant change in the landscape.

I love that metaphor and often use it when I refer to my dad as a “firebreak father”.

I guess the default for most parents is to copy their own parents - consciously or otherwise but a firebreak father does the opposite. He sets out to break with the pattern of previous generations for the sake of his kids. That’s what my dad did.

He was raised in poverty by working class parents in a suburb of London and was shown no affection whatsoever by his dad. Apparently, his dad was raised in the same way by his own father and there is every reason to believe that this pattern of behaviour went back for generations.

And yet, my dad was incredibly affectionate to me, my brother and my sister. He was extremely strict but he was also attentive, empathic, tactile and a brilliant story-teller. Serious illness and the second world war robbed him of any significant education but he still managed to instil in me a love of learning and an inquisitive nature. He was the firebreak in our family’s approach to fathering.

Like me, he was a deliberate father, not because he was separated from his kids but because he wanted us to have a better childhood than he did. He clearly had empathy and affection in his nature but rather than hold it in, like his own father had, he chose to let it out.

This was a risk for him and, looking back, it is clear that, at times, there was a struggle between his empathic side and the strictness he learned from his father.

I once asked him, just before he died, why he thought he had been such a different father to his own dad and he struggled to come up with a clear answer. In the end he said “ I wanted you never to doubt that you were loved and approved of so I just decided to be as loving and affirming to you as i could be. I wasn’t sure i had it in me but I wanted to give you whatever I could.”

As it turned out, he clearly did have it in him, it just needed his initial decision to be that kind of father. I suspect that all of us have a much wider range of fathering abilities inside of us than we realise or show and that means we have a lot more choice than we think about the kind of father we turn out to be.