Notes on Fatherhood: Parenting & Friendship on the Like-Love Continuum
Only two things pierce the human heart — BEAUTY & AFFLICTION.
-Simone Weil
No one captures the stark contrast between beauty and affliction quite like Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In her beautifully rendered memoir, Notes on Grief, Adichie chronicles the loss of her beloved father, James Nwoye Adichie, in June 2020, in those scary, early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I cherished this book. In the two brief sections below, I share some thoughts on fatherhood inspired by specific passages from Notes on Grief.
Part I: That's Something My Dad Would Say
Early on in Notes on Grief, Adichie writes:
In my later teenage years, I began to see him, to see how alike we were in our curiosity and our homebody-ness, and to talk to him and to adore him. How exquisitely he paid attention, how present he was, how well he listened. If you told him something, he remembered. His humor, already dry, crisped deliciously as he aged.
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In this passage, Adichie's deep and enduring love, respect, and reverence for her father leaps off the page. While old school doesn’t quite capture it, there’s a timeless quality here that harkens back to an era when children revered their parents and elders, looking up to them with admiration rather than approaching them with entitlement or expectation.
The relationship between parents and children has shifted dramatically over the last thirty years. Today, parents vigilantly monitor every aspect of their children’s lives. Like human snowplows, they remove every obstacle, smooth over every challenge, and eliminate every opportunity for messiness. Schools, camps, team sports, and other institutions — once partners in raising strong, curious, independent young people — follow suit. This ultimately failed experiment in optimizing for fairness inadvertently signals to young people that we don't trust them or believe in them. This collective misadventure has left young people today less experienced, less resilient, less prepared, and more dependent on the "adults" in their lives than at any other time in modern memory.
Here's the thing: young people do not need our constant intervention. What they do need is our genuine interest, attention, and time. For us to believe in them with an unwavering faith. For us to listen to what they say about their world and their challenges. For us to prove to them that they matter. All our needless, feckless, constant hovering accomplishes is unintentionally signaling to them that they are incompetent and incapable of building a life on their own, thus undermining their confidence and depriving them of the struggle necessary to build both resilience and self-respect.
Adichie's words instantly brought to mind something I read years ago in Elizabeth Gilbert's wonderful memoir, Eat Pray Love. At a pivotal point in her journey, Gilbert vows to persevere through her depression and loneliness. She commits to love and protect herself through whatever challenges may arise:
I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There's nothing you can do to ever lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
-Elizabeth Gilbert
This is one of my favorite book quotes EVER. Sends chills up my spine. I first came across it as a young father — my daughter was five, my son a newborn. Gilbert’s words captured a love I instantly understood, wholeheartedly agreed with, and felt deep in my bones. I remember thinking: if my children ever read this passage one day, I want them to think that sounds exactly like something my Dad would say.
As I thought about both Adichie and Gilbert's words, I wrote the following note to myself:
This is the Father I Aim Always To Be — tirelessly attentive, endlessly patient, present in every moment. A curious listener — aware of everything they say. A persistent observer — including all those things they leave unspoken. A safe, judgement-free, unconditional harbor where they can openly and freely air their thoughts, dreams, and fears, without even the remotest possibility of thinking or worrying about silence, denial, or reprisal, always and forever.
-Note to Self, 2004
In this, I haven’t always succeeded, but I do hope I’ve been as consistent and true to Gilbert's words as possible. If I’ve managed to leave even a trace of this love and commitment in my children’s hearts, which I believe I have, I feel like I've done my job as their dad.
Part II: Love IS; Like EMERGES
Further on in Notes on Grief, Adichie writes about the special relationship she shared with her father. Her deep adoration for him:
I not only adored my father in that classic manner of a daddy’s girl, but I also liked him so much. I like him. His grace and his wisdom and his simplicity and how utterly unimpressionable he was. I liked his luminous, moderate faith, strong but worn lightly.
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Just beautiful. These words stopped me in my tracks. I get them. I feel them. Deeply. As much as I love both of my kids, I feel just as fortunate — if not more so — that I genuinely like them, too. In some alternate reality where I’m not their dad and they’re not my kids, I have no doubt they’d still be among my closest friends. In this world, they are my family. In that one, they’d be my people.
This observation might strike you as odd — an of course statement with a twist — but the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how significant this distinction truly is. Try a little experiment with me. First, bring to mind someone you're certain you love, but you also know, you don't really like (we've all got 'em). Next, bring to mind someone you genuinely like, but are certain you don't actually love. It's different, right? Yes, I know.
This may be a bit controversial, but I think it’s also undeniably true: love and like don’t coexist in families as often as we’d like to believe. In fact, the genuine combination of both — especially within families — is more often the exception than the rule.
Why? Because with love there's an inevitability — a deterministic expectation that comes with shared bonds and history. Like is different; it forms more quickly, instinctually, and effortlessly. Like isn't inevitable, it's emergent and synergistic — a bond that springs to life from shared joy, common interests, and the simple pleasure of someone's presence. Where love is a great theatrical drama, like is more like a live jazz band — free, unburdened, improvisational, a collaborative riffing between two or more people.
Love IS; Like EMERGES. I don't mean to diss love — NO WAY. Love is rarer and more special than like. The idea inside this distinction is that love, especially in our given relationships — those we are born into, like family — is often assumed, whereas like tends more to the domain of our chosen relationships — those we seek out and nurture by choice, like friendships and partnerships — and must be earned, fostered, and actively maintained.
This is just a sprinkling of thoughts about love vs. like on the love-like continuum. I hadn't given much thought to this before sitting down to write this piece. However, as a key function, outcome, and currency of the very complexity of our many relationships, I do think it's worth some further consideration and a deeper understanding.