Towards a New Fatherhood

paternal revolutions ..

Paternal Revolutions

Today I saw a father and son talking tenderly. This is where my reflection begins.

I realize that I've always seen too many men far from their kids, far from hugs, from affection; too masculine to be dads one might joke; men who have run away or are absent, in their gaze, in their warmth.
Silent and closed men, as if they were afraid, as if they didn't know the little one in front of them.

Openness with their daughters, conversations, some seriously questioned themselves. But with their son... cold... silence.
And yet they would have had a lot of things to say. Their little one was becoming a boy, and an adult man has a lot to teach: how many fears, sufferings, regressions and wasted time avoided if only there had been words, heart.

Today I understood that these men were simply men with the wound of a father who was never tender, never present, never truly felt.
Men who then passed on the mechanism of loneliness and indifference to their children.

If I look at the history of humanity, I see a woman who, in the last century, emerged from the miseries and cages of the dark ages of war and survival.
But not men! Man hasn't had his '68 yet.
He still bears the burdens of that world where he was a number, a means of procuring, where son and father were divided, pressured, pigeonholed until they were often tragic competitors with each other.

There is very little humanity in this.
What is the future of a Society where a child is denied the tenderness of a dad who caresses him with his hands, his eyes, his body, and his entire way of being a man and a father?

Today I saw a father and son talking tenderly.
And I saw in their eyes the King who loves his little Prince who has grown up, and the Prince who loves his wise old King.

(this article written by Fabio Barzagli was published in May 2011 by many italian newspapers, here some: corriere del giorno, nuovo levante, giornale di vicenza, quotidiano di parma, magazine pensalibero)

The Wall, A Fatherless Story

The Wall, awarded in 1982 at Cannes Film Festival, is one of the most important musical movie of the last century. It is still studied today for its social, psychological and philosophical content.

The film tells the story of Pink (orphaned as a baby, his father died in the world war II) a child raised by his mother alone, a dull, overprotective woman, who leaves him alone in the tough challenges of life, waiting each time he returns home, destroyed, defeated, just like when he falls into the tunnel of drugs, xenophobia, betrayed and abandoned by his wife, alienated, risking to go mad.

I won't add anything else, except the words of this very famous Pink Floyd's song:

" Daddy's flown across the ocean,
leaving just a memory.
A snapshot in the family album.
Daddy what else did you leave for me?
Daddy, what’d ya leave behind for me!?!
All in all it was just a brick in the wall.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall. "

(one note: The Wall was ideated by Roger Waters who lost his dad in 1944 during the Anzio landings during the liberation of Italy from Nazism, in 2014 Waters became an honorary citizen of Anzio)