Frank Pittman Quotes

All those tough guys who want to scare the world into seeing them as men . . . who don't know how to be a man with a woman, only abrute or a boy, who fill up the divorce courts; all those corporate raiders and rain-forest burners and war starters who want more in hopes that will make them feel better; . . . are suffering from Father Hunger. They go through their puberty rituals day after day for a lifetime, waiting for a father to anoint them and say "Attaboy," to treat them as good enough to be considered a man.

Becoming Father the Nurturer rather than just Father the Provider enables a man to fully feel and express his humanity and his masculinity. Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.

Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.

As a guy develops and practices his masculinity, he is accompanied by an invisible male chorus of all the other guys, who hiss orcheer as he attempts to approximate the masculine ideal, who push him to sacrifice more of his humanity for the sake of his masculinity, and who ridicule him when he holds back. The chorus is made up of all the guy's comrades and rivals, his buddies and bosses, his male ancestors and his male cultural heroes--and above all, his father, who may have been a real person in his life, or may have existed only as the myth of the man who got away.

In time, after a dozen years of centering their lives around the games boys play with one another, the boys' bodies change and that changes everything else. But the memories are not erased of that safest time in the lives of men, when their prime concern was playing games with guys who just wanted to be their friendly competitors. Life never again gets so simple.

When the masculine mystique is pulling boys and men out into the world to growl manly noises at one another, the only power with astronger pull on the male psyche is maternally induced guilt. The guilt is quite necessary for our moral development, but it is often uncomfortable.

The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child-raising is not the child but the parent.

Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.

. . . in the end, there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't, except be a father.

It's not that we have too much mother, but too little father. We can't forgive our mothers for taking the place of our fathers until we are ready to see that the point of a man's life is to be a father and a mentor, and we can't do that because we don't know how we would be a father or a mentor when we never had one.

No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him.

The great passion in a man's life may not be for women or men or wealth or toys or fame, or even for his children, but for his masculinity, and at any point in his life he may be tempted to throw over the things for which he regularly lays down his life for the sake of that masculinity. He may keep this passion secret from women, and he may even deny it to himself, but the other boys know it about themselves and the wiser ones know it about the rest of us as well.

However patriarchal the world, at home the child knows that his mother is the source of all power. The hand that rocks the cradlerules his world. . . . The son never forgets that he owes his life to his mother, not just the creation of it but the maintenance of it, and that he owes her a debt he cannot conceivably repay, but which she may call in at any time.

The more things we can laugh about, the more alive we become: The more things we can laugh about together, the more connected we become.

Bad marriages don't cause infidelity; infidelity causes bad marriages.

Nothing is quite so horrifying and paralyzing as to win the Oedipal struggle and to be awarded your mother as the prize.

Fathering makes a man, whatever his standing in the eyes of the world, feel strong and good and important, just as he makes his child feel loved and valued.

Masculinity varies from time to time and place to place. But it doesn't exist just in the mind of a single guy: it is shared withthe other guys. It is a code of conduct that requires men to maintain masculine postures and attitudes (however they are defined) at all times and in all places. Masculinity includes the symbols, uniforms, chants, and plays that make this the boys' team rather than the girls' team.

Mothers who are strong people, who can pursue a life of their own when it is time to let their children go, empower their childrenof either gender to feel free and whole. But weak women, women who feel and act like victims of something or other, may make their children feel responsible for taking care of them, and they can carry their children down with them.

The most likely cause of a man's depression is his failure to be the man he thinks he should be

Most of us have felt barriers between ourselves and our fathers and had thought that going it alone was part of what it meant to be a man. We tried to get close to our children when we became fathers, and yet the business of practicing masculinity kept getting in the way. We men have begun to talk about that.

A real man doesn't have to run from his mother, and may even have to face the reality that no great deed is going to be great enough for him to ransom himself completely, and he may always be in his mother's debt. If he understands that . . . he won't have to feel guilty, and he won't have to please her completely. He can go ahead and be nice to her and let her be part of his life.

Our ability to fall in love requires enough comfort with our masculinity to join it with someone's femininity and feel enhanced. .. . If our mother made us feel secure and proud in our masculinity, then we want to find that again in our wife. If we are really comfortable with our mother, we can even marry a woman who is a friend rather than an adversary, and form a true partnership.

Parents have subtle ways of humbling you, of reminding you of your origins, perhaps by showing up at the moment of your greatest glory and reminding you where you came from and demonstrating that you still have some of it between your toes.

Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, andwhat circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke.

We long for our father. We wear his clothes, and actually try to fill his shoes. . . . We hang on to him, begging him to teach ushow to do whatever is masculine, to throw balls or be in the woods or go see where he works. . . . We want our fathers to protect us from coming too completely under the control of our mothers. . . . We want to be seen with Dad, hanging out with men and doing men things.

Our father has an even more important function than modeling manhood for us. He is also the authority to let us relax the requirements of the masculine model: if our father accepts us, then that declares us masculine enough to join the company of men. We, in effect, have our diploma in masculinity and can go on to develop other skills.

At the heart of male bonding is this experience of boys in early puberty: they know they must break free from their mothers and the civilized world of women, but they are not ready yet for the world of men, so they are only at home with other boys, equally outcast, equally frightened, and equally involved in posturing what they believe to be manhood.

There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents.

We perversely see mother love as the problem--when it is all we have to sustain us--rather than blaming the fathers who have run out on our mothers and on us. We seem willing to forgive fathers for loving too little even as we still shrink in terror from mothers who love too much.

As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence.

Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how tobe men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.

We never really are the adults we pretend to be. We wear the mask and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside ourskin we are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince ourselves and others we are. We may fool all the rest of the people all of the time, but we never fool our parents. They can see behind the mask of adulthood. To her mommy and daddy, the empress never has on any clothes--and knows it.

Why do otherwise sane, competent, strong men, men who can wrestle bears or raid corporations, shrink away in horror at the thought of washing a dish or changing a diaper?

If fathers who fear fathering and run away from it could only see how little fathering is enough. Mostly, the father just needs to be there.

Early on, girls begin to menstruate, which is dramatic but not obvious to their playmates. They grow taller and rounder, but underneath their makeup they are still recognizably themselves. For boys it is far more disorienting. Puberty comes later, sometimes much later, and its delay is humiliating. While the tall round girls are getting themselves up like grown women, the prepubertal boys, with their featureless, hairless bodies, are just dirty little kids who could pass for the children of the hypermature girls.

In considering the ledger equal, understand the greatest gift you have given your parents is the opportunity to raise you. The things a child gets from parents can't compare to the things a parent gets from raising a child. Only by experiencing this can you understand the degree to which children give meaning to parents' lives.

Parents offer an open womb. More than anyone else in your life, mothers, and sometimes fathers, can kiss it, and make it well whentheir grown children need to regress and repair. More than anyone else in your life, mothers, and sometimes fathers, can catch you when you start to fall. When you are in disgrace, defeat, and despair, home may be the safest place to hide.

When it comes to little girls, God the father has nothing on father, the god. It's an awesome responsibility.

The problem is simply this: no one can feel like CEO of his or her life in the presence of the people who toilet trained her and spanked him when he was naughty. We may have become Masters of the Universe, accustomed to giving life and taking it away, casually ordering people into battle or out of their jobs . . . and yet we may still dirty our diapers at the sound of our mommy's whimper or our daddy's growl.

To insult a friend implies that you respect his masculinity enough to know he can take it without acting like a crybaby. The swapping of insults, like the fighting between brothers, becomes the seal of the male bonding.

Family love can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it out for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.

Character, not passion keeps marriages together long enough to do their work of raising children into mature, responsible, productive citizens.

We know how powerful our mother was when we were little, but is our wife that powerful to us now? Must we relive our great deed of escape from Mama with every other woman in our life?

Fathers who compete hard with their kids are monstrous. The father, for a throw-away victory, is sacrificing the very heart of hischild's sense of being good enough. He may believe he is making his son tough, as he was made tough by a similarly contending father, but he is only making his child desperate and mean like himself. Fathers must let their sons (and daughters) have their victories.

A boy is not free to find a partner of his own as long as he must be the partner to his mother.

Marriage, like a submarine, is only safe if you get all the way inside.

Family life in Western society since the time of the Old Testament has been a struggle to maintain patriarchy, male domination, and double standards in the face of a natural drift towards monogamous bonding. Young men have been called upon to prove their masculinity by their willingness to die in warfare, and young women have been called upon to prove their femininity by their willingness to die for their man. Women have been asked to appear small, dumb, and helpless so men would feel big and strong, brave, and clever. It's been a trick.