INTERNATIONAL MEN'S DAY SERIES 2026 | Part 2 of 6
Last week, in the first of six essays leading up to International Men’s Day on November 19, I wrote about a question I've been carrying into my morning prayers: what is mine to do? The longer I sit with it, the more I think another question must come first. Before I can know what to hand forward, I have to look honestly at what I was handed.
Every man inherits more than money or a family name. We inherit ideas about what a man is, how to handle anger, and whether love is given freely or has to be earned. Most of it arrives before we're old enough to notice, and we start living it out long before we think to question it.
What I Was Handed
I believe my father loved my brother, my sister, and me in the only way he knew how. He had a hard life that started in childhood. He was volatile, carried a lot of anger, and our home was often chaotic. As I grew older, I learned his had been too.
My father wasn’t around much. When he was, I learned to read his mood and adjust around it. I didn’t realize it then, but I was performing. When I was 11, my parents divorced. After that, he often canceled planned visits and broke many promises. When I did see him, he acted more like a friend than a father. Part of me liked that. But I needed a father, and I often felt abandoned.
What I didn't understand then is something I don't think most children can. Kids make everything about themselves. As children, we don't have the perspective to see what a father is carrying, so when he's angry, we assume we did something wrong. We find ways to cope, and mostly we learn to try to please him.
After I graduated from high school, I told my father I was going to college. He had never finished high school himself. I thought he'd be proud of me. Instead, he asked whether I wanted to be a professional student. It stung then, and it still does.
How a Pattern Changes Shape
When I became a father, I promised myself I would not repeat my father’s mistakes. And yet I have struggled with anger most of my life, and many times my family has felt it. I’ve learned that the patterns we most want to escape can still find us.
I wanted my kids to have the encouragement I didn't get. I told Ryan and Katie that I loved them no matter what, that I was proud of them, and that their best effort mattered more than any outcome. I meant every word. But when they fell short, my face and my body language often said something else. I fear that, at times, they learned my love depended on how they performed, and that it may have cost them some of their sense of being enough.
I didn’t repeat my father’s words. But in a different form, I repeated the message underneath them: that love and approval have to be earned. That is what I mean by unexamined inheritance. We receive a pattern, live from it, and pass it on, sometimes while working hard to do the opposite.
None of this is about blaming my father. The older I get, the more I want to understand him: his childhood, what he carried, and what he probably never had the chance to examine. That understanding has helped me forgive him. It doesn't excuse what happened, but it has let me choose something different. I can have compassion for him and still decide that some things stop with me.
What Ends With Me
When I look honestly at what I was handed, two things stand out. The first is anger that runs the room. The second is believing that love and belonging must be earned.
What I want to pass on instead is simple to say and hard to live. I want Ryan and Katie to feel seen, heard, and safe with me. I want them to know they are loved unconditionally and that they are enough, not only because I say so, but because of how I show up for them when they struggle. That’s why learning to control my emotions is more than a self-improvement project for me. It’s how I make sure the patterns I inherited end with me.
Every generation gets the chance to draw a line and say, “This came through me, but it will not continue through me.” I'm still drawing mine.
Finding What Was Handed to You
If any of this hits home or stirs something in you, try this sometime this week. Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns. In the first, write down what your father, or whoever raised you, taught you about being a man, less by what he said than by what he did. How did he handle anger? How did he show love? What happened when you fell short?
In the second column, next to each line, write one word: keep, change, or end.
It may bring up more than you expect, both gratitude and grief. If your father wasn't there, that's an inheritance too, and it belongs on the page.
Two Questions
Next week, in the third essay of this series, we'll look at what it takes to change a pattern once we've seen it. I've found that awareness isn't enough. It takes the courage to let the people closest to us see who we really are, including the parts we'd rather keep hidden.
These are the two questions I'll be sitting with this week, and the ones we'll explore together in The Courage to Be Seen:
Where am I still protecting myself instead of letting myself be known?
Is there something I need to own in one of my closest relationships?
Inheritance is not instruction. What we were handed may explain us, but it doesn't have to decide what we pass down. The story isn’t finished.
