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

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.

The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent.

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.

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.

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

Love is not something people feel, but something people try to express no matter how they feel.