Full Frontal What?!?!

Welcome to Full Frontal Fatherhood.

So you ask, “Where did I come up with this crazy title?”

In my experience, parenting is the hardest, wildest things in life and when we do hard things halfheartedly, they become extremely difficult. Parenting requires everything we have.  It requires that we show up in a way that is unlike anything else.  At work, we can show up and not show up.  In our friendships we can show up and not show up, but to be a parent requires that we’re continually showing up.  We’re raising a being, maybe multiple beings. They have crazy needs.

If we’re sort of there, if we’re sort of in touch with what’s going on for us, it becomes debilitating and you end up with what we see all around us: dads who are resentful, moms who are overburdened and families that are falling apart.

But when you give it your all, when you show up with your humanity and the difficulties, your emotional vulnerability, how debilitating it is at times, when you can be real about it all, when you’re engaged with your vulnerability and the child’s vulnerability, it actually becomes an amazingly wholehearted, full experience.  It requires us, particularly as fathers, to be fully engaged, to be full frontal, naked to the intensity of it.

We need to show up with who we are in order to support our children to be fully who they are, in order to make our families joyful and full in the way they can be and then to live our lives in a way that is extremely rewarding and fulfilling.