As a woman who grew up without my biological father as well, who shares the ACE of that absence, I am always interested in any stories about how others experience that reality and navigate through life.
As a child.
As a partner.
As a parent.
We happen to have a leader who speaks openly about this particular experience. Before taking office, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, said:
...I had to learn very early on to figure out what was important and what wasn’t, and exercise my own judgment and in some ways to raise myself.
My mother was wonderful and was a foundation of love for me, but as a young man growing up, I didn’t have a lot of role models and I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned to figure out that there are certain values that were important to me that I had to be true to.
Nobody was going to force me to be honest. Nobody was going to force me to work hard. Nobody was going to force me to have drive and ambition. Nobody was going to force me to have empathy for other people. But if I really thought those values were important, I had to live them out.
I love hearing anyone speak about fatherlessness. But when the president speaks it gets a lot of attention!
Yesterday, his article about another "f" word - feminism - was published in Glamour.
It's wonderful to read about his views, experiences and evolution as a feminist and the ways being fatherless, being a father and having a partner have shaped his growth and views.
Here's the beginning of his essay.
There are a lot of tough aspects to being President. But there are some perks too. Meeting extraordinary people across the country. Holding an office where you get to make a difference in the life of our nation. Air Force One.
But perhaps the greatest unexpected gift of this job has been living above the store. For many years my life was consumed by long commutes—from my home in Chicago to Springfield, Illinois, as a state senator, and then to Washington, D.C., as a United States senator. It’s often meant I had to work even harder to be the kind of husband and father I want to be.
But for the past seven and a half years, that commute has been reduced to 45 seconds—the time it takes to walk from my living room to the Oval Office. As a result, I’ve been able to spend a lot more time watching my daughters grow up into smart, funny, kind, wonderful young women.
That isn’t always easy, either—watching them prepare to leave the nest. But one thing that makes me optimistic for them is that this is an extraordinary time to be a woman. The progress we’ve made in the past 100 years, 50 years, and, yes, even the past eight years has made life significantly better for my daughters than it was for my grandmothers. And I say that not just as President but also as a feminist.
In my lifetime we’ve gone from a job market that basically confined women to a handful of often poorly paid positions to a moment when women not only make up roughly half the workforce but are leading in every sector, from sports to space, from Hollywood to the Supreme Court. I’ve witnessed how women have won the freedom to make your own choices about how you’ll live your lives—about your bodies, your educations, your careers, your finances. Gone are the days when you needed a husband to get a credit card. In fact, more women than ever, married or single, are financially independent.
So we shouldn’t downplay how far we’ve come. That would do a disservice to all those who spent their lives fighting for justice. At the same time, there’s still a lot of work we need to do to improve the prospects of women and girls here and around the world. And while I’ll keep working on good policies—from equal pay for equal work to protecting reproductive rights—there are some changes that have nothing to do with passing new laws.
In fact, the most important change may be the toughest of all—and that’s changing ourselves.
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