The Father Hood by Luke Benedictus

Author:Luke Benedictus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

So there wasn’t a whole lot of leniency where my dad was concerned. It was very much ‘My way or the highway’. He was very, very strict.

But you start to understand your dad better as you get older. There’s a recognition that he was just doing the best that he could. And, like many of us, we’re victims of our own suffering.

I believe there was a lot of uncertainty for him, and he very much lived his life with his body armour on, so that expression of emotion and that more gentle way of being wasn’t shown too often.

As a child, I saw that example as a constant, so then I thought, Well that’s how I need to be as an adult. My dad was so quick to anger, and he used anger as a means of quelling a situation. But later I realised that there was another way.

Brianna was born when I was twenty-two, so I was still young and very much like a dog chasing its tail. Your ego gets the better of you. I remember, as a young dad with Brianna, certain circumstances where I would almost be like this big scary monster to show her who was the boss.

But then Ella and Jack came along in my thirties, and there was a point when I had a conversation with myself about how I wanted to be there for my kids as a dad. I suppose that I wanted to do things differently to how I felt my parents had approached raising me. I didn’t want to perpetuate a lot of fear and, to a degree, the ignorance that’s born out of fear.

If you can be gentle, if you can be kind, if you can harness those emotions—then why not be that way as a dad? Why would you want to be anything other than that?

Dad was a small-engine mechanic and what I learned from him was to work hard. But what I’ve done with that message is work hard, not just in the sense of getting up and clocking in, but in all aspects of life. I’m trying to be a role model, a mentor, and a better parent. I try to show my children that, as a male, as a man, as a father, that nothing is below me. So I’ll get in there and clean the toilets, wash the dishes, cook the food and make the beds. But I’ll also do those things with pride, because I think children are ever-present and always watching.

Dad was big on respect. He just wanted his boys to grow up being willing to go above and beyond for anybody, really. That emphasis on making a contribution was something that he did, not so much in words, but very much in his actions.

Being in the military as a dad, I didn’t know anything different, and I didn’t really question any other way of being. And then I started to listen to mates who were a little older—into their late twenties and thirties.

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