“I’m telling you all this, because I hope you understand that you don’t have to be perfect to be the perfect father. Just be you.”

If you’re a father, you might often feel like you’re always taking a backseat to everyone else in the family…

I want you to know that you are and always will be, the most significant man in your child’s life, for their entire life. You are your child’s hero, and you don’t have to do much to maintain that status. Just be you.

My parents were the yin and yang of extroversion and introversion.

My mother always took center stage. She was an elected politician after all! She was the initiator, the ringleader of our family circus.

My father, an electrical engineer by profession, a rancher by choice, was a very quiet man. If I hung out with him, it was usually in silence. Sitting on the back porch while he smoked a cigar. Sitting in the living room, while he read a book or the newspaper. Watching television with him.

The state of Montana once sent someone from the Department of Commerce, the official drove 436 miles, to interview my dad as to why he moved his manufacturing company from Ohio out to isolated northeastern Montana. They thought that he would give them some ideas on how to market to other manufacturers from the midwest. But my father’s reply was nothing they could use for a promotional campaign.

“I don’t want to be around people,” he said.

My father was not social at all. He didn’t go have drinks with other men. He didn’t hunt. He didn’t fish. He didn’t own a boat, even though we lived near a giant lake. He ate his meals at home, never meeting someone for lunch, and only going out to dinner with my mother.

My mother would half-joke, “When your father dies I don’t know who will be his pallbearers, he doesn’t have any friends.”

Once, it was my mother’s idea, we took a vacation. We were driving to Disneyland. But as we were standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, Dad decided that we were going to go back home.  He was tired of traveling. I don’t remember any push back. My mother might have rolled her eyes. But I think we were all surprised and thrilled that we had at least made it to the Grand Canyon!

A teacher once asked me if my parents were divorced, because they had never seen my father. 

I was a cheerleader in high school, and when I was a senior, my mother begged my father to attend the last basketball game with her, so that people would know that the ugly man she usually ended up sitting next to at the games was NOT her husband.

My father was not an emotional man. We never said “I love you,” in our house.

I don’t remember my father hugging me, until I was grown and that was only after the stay was over, when I was leaving. But there was never a hug on arrival.

When I was going off to college, I came into his office to say good-bye, but I couldn’t say anything, get a word out of my mouth, I could only burst into tears.

My dad said, “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you cry.”  So I said good-bye, and went off to college.

My father never told me he loved me. He didn’t hug or kiss me. The only school events he attended were a play in which I acted, that basketball game with my mother, my high school graduation, and very reluctantly, he traveled to the west coast for my college graduation.

I don’t think a psychologist would hold my father up as the template for the ideal father. But I would. I have never met a man I admire more than my father.

I’m telling you all this, because I hope you understand that you don’t have to be perfect to be the perfect father. Just be you. Enjoy being with your children. You don’t have to go anywhere. Just be together in your happy home. If you can’t voice “I love you,” they’ll know you do by your actions.

With Love, Lizbeth

Givling’s Founder + CEO