Father's Day: My Father's View – Column by Samira El Ouassil

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Photo: Tetiana Garkusha / iStockphoto / Getty

The 55-year-old former fashion director of the French »Elle«, the journalist Sophie Fontanel, decided overnight to stop dying her hair and let her white roots grow out.

Of course she wrote a book about it, of course it became a bestseller.

"Une apparition" it said, "An apparition" - and I managed to make amends with my head.

I've been dying my hair white since I was twenty-one.

In my late twenties I was completely gray.

At first I romanticized this as a kind of existential photosynthesis: in my youthful perception, the cold reality out there seemed like a perpetual autumn;

so my head had no choice but to remove all the pigments from my glossy black wreath of leaves to leave dull gray strands.

Surprisingly, when my snow-white roots became apparent due to the pandemic, my father in particular complained more than indignantly about my George Clooney temples.

At first I found it unusually paternalistic and a bit offensive.

I felt unloved for something I couldn't help.

On the contrary: It's his genes that gave me the hairy early aging.

But then I realized: the sight of his daughter with white hair makes him feel much older in an instant.

My head mirrored its own impermanence.

At that moment, something else also became clear to me: I will never really be able to understand and empathize with my father and the way he looked at me.

Even if I ever have a daughter of my own, I won't know how a father looks at me.

Likewise, he will most likely find it difficult to understand the way I look at him, because he too cannot look at his own father with the look of a daughter.

This is of course somewhat banal, but then again not, because the dynamics, the frictions in the family, which we inevitably have and which we warmly nurture, have a certain indissolubility.

And suddenly there was the melancholy fear: my father will never be able to understand me, his daughter, even if he tries.

And the other way around, I will never be able to penetrate his fatherhood.

The understanding of exactly this misunderstanding between father and daughter makes up exactly one part of the father's role.

He does not become the person who is my father for me solely through his relationship, biology or on paper, but above all through his willingness and willingness to courageously enter into this loving dynamic of different perceptions again and again.

There are many things that we see differently, issues that we naturally look at differently due to socialization and age.

But in dissent I also see how we are mirrored, that I recognize myself in him and he sees me and we watch each other as this role play makes us father and daughter.

In his graceful essay »Fathers of the Future«, the philosopher Björn Vedder describes it as follows:

»So from this perspective, too, the father is primarily a role or an office.

It comes from being looked at and spoken to in a certain way and responding to it in a certain way.«

That is why, according to Vedder, one cannot simply take up this office and make oneself the father, »as the Romans thought, who assumed that a father is someone who declares himself to be the father of a child and accepts it as his , so adopt.« (See, for example, the internationally successful Netflix series »Barbarians«.)

No, this adoption must come from both sides: 'To be a father and to be a child is the result of a mutual regard and response as.

Being a father, being a mother, being a child are roles that we play for ourselves and for others.

Family life is a play, and our acting serves to 'support a particular situation, to establish a view of reality, so to speak,' as sociologist Erving Goffman puts it.”

As a philosopher, Vedder advocates the thesis that, precisely because fatherhood also takes place in a performative manner, there is a lack of a modern father role today that is not tied to traditional, patriarchal ideas and traditionally sees the father as the head, representative of the order and superego of a family thinks, as has long been the case for historical, sociological, economic reasons.

Incidentally, in his deliberations he does not necessarily link the role of father to a gender, it is actually about the position of a second parent who behaves in a complementary way to the mother, who is also not tied to a gender.

They are actually – roles.

In his essay, being a father is thought of from the end - and that is exactly what brought me closer to my father's perspective, which I used to find so difficult to adopt.

In Vedder's plea for modern father figures, these become »fearless fellows.

They run forward to death and look back calmly from there.

They sit by the river with their children and watch everything go by.

In this way they teach them to transcend the individual executions of their actions and to understand life as a whole.

They support her in developing an order in her heart and in taking herself seriously.«

As I read this, I felt that this might be my answer to the apparent unforgiving of parent-child perspectives.

If you allow and allow this friction out of family closeness, maybe even look for it, because it is precisely this that the father-child relationship manifests itself in, every friction creates: warmth.

So how do you deal with the knowledge that you can never really understand yourself?

The answer is love.

A father may not be able to understand his daughter even if he wants to, but that he still tries again and again with the knowledge of the constellation-related failure makes him determined and tireless as a love became a parent.

I still color my hair at least every three weeks.

Because I can't stand a perpetual fall on my head and I like myself better with dark hair.

And surely my father too.