Be The Man Who Roars

You stare at your newborn child, ghostly and smeared in your arms.

Others assume your first thoughts are of wonder.

Of joy.

Of the marvel and miracle of new life.

More likely, it was for you, as it was for me:

Don’t fuck this up.

And truly, how could it be otherwise:

For you and I were taught to see ourselves as abominations: blunt instruments of procreation: as creatures helplessly, unthinkingly base… taught to live our entire life as a self-mitigation.

And so of course you come stumbling to fatherhood, as determined to “not fuck this up” as you are to succeed.

Your strength, your heat, your will to rise, and lead, and blaze… all of it buried for some future cataclysm, some new enlightenment.

Just think of it:

A man, reaching for what he wants… creating his family life one story, one exhortation, one ravishing, one upheld ritual, one wild-eyed story at a time.

What modern-day husband and father would do such things?

Here it is:

The time for head-hanging is over.

The days of apologizing and appeasing and sinking to the level of their lowest expectation…

The days of cycling between forced smiles and impotent rage, over and over and over…

The days of vapid, by-the-book fathering…

The days of serving as the second queen, humbled and harried, sullen and seething…

Those days are over.

For your wife’s sake, and your children’s… they must be.

The world is mad with confusion, eating itself in an apoplexy of rage and blame: pay its babble no mind.

Your wife and children… they need you sweaty and crazed, reaching and roaring:

They need you to stand, claim your crown, and lead.

That doesn’t mean domination… doesn’t mean reaching back to some old patriarchy:

It means uncloaking the you entire. It means no longer hiding your strength of will, strength of desire, strength of conviction:

It means fortifying your love with power.

For you, for them, for the full-blooded life you could create…

Unleash your terrible, necessary, long-suppressed gift.

Find at last the sack to be king.

…

Bryan Ward is the founder of Third Way Man and author of the LIT Black Paper