This article is an excerpt from chapter 5 of God Breathed: Connecting through Scripture to God, Others, the Natural World, and Yourself.

I will never forget seeing my fiancée walk down the aisle toward me during our wedding. Tears were streaming down her face—not the most affirming sight for a groom! But I felt fine when I learned why she was crying. Just a few minutes prior, her father was standing ready to walk her down the aisle. When she turned the corner from her dressing room and he saw her in her wedding dress, he got choked up. His eyes welled up, and she lost it.

My wife’s dad (my kids call him “Papa”) meant and still means the world to her. No one could replace him. But is her dad only irreplaceable because he was, and is, a really good dad? Is there anything inherently irreplaceable about dads, and therefore granddads, in children’s lives? What does it even mean to be a dad? And who decides?

For most of human history, “dad” or whatever the equivalent in another language has been a restrictive term. It couldn’t stretch to fit just anyone. Yes, being a dad means much more than being a male who occupies an important place in the life of a child, but can it mean any less? Are fatherhood and motherhood merely social constructs, constantly subject to redefinition? If so, what do they actually mean? Beneath the ceiling of self [defined in chapter 1 and used to describe the view of the world in which our understanding and experience of reality is bound strictly by the limits of our personal perception, and thus for all intents and purposes we become the builders of truth and the makers of meaning], these terms mean nothing. Nothing in any ultimate, true, fixed sense. So like I said, nothing.

Beneath the ceiling of self, no idea and no relationship is stable and fixed in meaning. And this is just a short step from meaninglessness. But haven’t we in our culture made “dad” meaningless anyway, by so many men’s bad behavior in that category of life? That’s more of a conversation stopper than it is a real argument against keeping “dad” a restrictive term. It’s one of godding’s [defined earlier in chapter 5 as our living as if we have the authority, privileges and prerogatives of God] favorite strategies in the word wars: cite the bad examples of a word/idea you want to change. That way, you show that the idea cannot be restricted to a certain kind of person, because look at how bad people of that kind mess it up! We reinforce this maneuver when we insist that other people can do for children what should have been done by the person who most naturally fits the word “dad.”

Yes, when Dad is a deadbeat, it’s good to be rid of him. And yes, other men can step in to help. A man might marry an abandoned mom and maybe, if—and only if—the child is okay with it, be called “Dad.” And yes, there are homes without a dad in which children are genuinely loved and cared for. Thank God for these kinds of situations in which people step up as best they can to meet kids’ needs as best they know how. But in all of these situations, the absence of the original dad is felt. At the very least, it creates questions in the heart of the child, questions that only cruelty would ignore as unimportant or dismiss as unenlightened.

Even if the child knows nothing about Dad except that he contributed to their existence, and even if that contribution took Dad less than a minute and he’s never had more than a second’s worth of serious thought about his kid, answering questions about who he is, or was, is intensely important to the child.

Such questions do not come softly and sit politely in our minds. They strike our souls like a hammer on a gong, shimmering within us and ringing with relentless, propulsive reverb in every part of our thinking and feeling. These questions have to do with who we are, why we are, and how we came to be. Our self-understanding is missing so much without these answers. Our self-development is driven by our relationship, or lack thereof, to the people who gave us our self.

At the same detention home where I met the Satanist [discussed in a previous chapter], I had the privilege of interacting every week with young men and women from horrific home situations. Usually, Mom was still in their lives, doing her dead-level best to provide for and protect them with no help from Dad, whether or not he could be identified and chased down legally. The only thing some of the incarcerated youth knew about Dad was that he wasn’t there for them. The only lesson they learned from Dad was not to let yourself care about people. You have to keep your heart closed to ideas and relationships that certain privileged people have, but that have been denied to you.

For others, Dad was someone who showed up once a month, collected a check, drank himself into a rage, and beat the living stuff out of Mom. And for some, Dad would have been around if he could, but he was also incarcerated, fighting a false conviction so he could get home to the family who needed him so badly. Whether the word “dad” froze their hearts, fired them up, or melted them, the idea always haunted.

Many of the youth could list the countless ways their fathers had failed them. But the abuse of an idea does not nullify the idea. Having no good dad did not make these young people want to redefine “dad”; if anything, it revealed how desperately they, and their moms, wanted a man who’d live up to the word. “Dad” represented a relationship so vital that the mere mention of the word sliced into their souls, cutting through a hard scar to reveal a raw wound in their essential personhood.

A wonderful woman who ministered to them, affectionately dubbed “Mother Hill,” acknowledged the soul-shredding circumstances that brought many of these young men and women into existence. She would often say when speaking to them, “God had to get you here somehow.”¹ By putting it this way, she acknowledged that something vital, often someone vital, was missing from their lives. She acknowledged their pain, but she also affirmed their purpose. Their existence, no matter how illegitimate the actions of those who gave them life, was sacred; their lives were a matter of divine appointment. But that truth didn’t take the pain away, and she never pretended that it could.

A dad’s absence in the life of a child is a vacancy not even the most heroic of mothers can fill, not because of a lack of sacrificial love, but because “father” is as closed a concept as “mother.” Mother Hill knew that she was not these young people’s real mom. The title honored her by recognizing that her actions came so beautifully close to a concept she couldn’t personify in their lives without legally adopting them. She never tried to replace irreplaceable people in their lives, only to love as best she could from her position among them. Motherhood and fatherhood are defined, irreplaceable relationships. But beneath the ceiling of self, that won’t stop us from trying.

To free our thinking from unsophisticated and often religiously oriented ideas about parentage, ideas that repress adults and might make children think they’re missing something if they don’t have a mom and dad in the archaic sense, we first try to extend the reach of the words “mother” and “father.” We can teach kids and culture as a whole that there’s really no reason to be sad when children lack mom or dad in the old, dated sense of the terms. Thus, Elton John’s partner had himself listed as “mother” to the child he and Elton adopted.² But as we saw with the phrase “black person,” to stretch “dad” or “mom” to such proportions is to strain them to the point of rupture, to move them that much closer to meaninglessness. Hardcore godding sees this and says we should all save ourselves time and tears and just get rid of words like “mom” and “dad” altogether. In certain parts of the enlightened West, we’re doing just that.

Oh, Canada

These topics are so personal to so many, and I truly want to be so careful. If possible, let’s all take a step back to see what’s speeding toward status quo in our culture’s understanding of kids and family and ask a very simple question based on what we all say we want: Is this really what’s best for the kids?

Canada tends to be more cutting edge than America when it comes to the process of self and social redefinition. With a swift savagery that would make a ninja blush, lawmakers are slashing ties between time-honored words and essential societal relationships. One example comes from the province of Ontario (Canada’s most populous province): Legislation called Bill 28 “removed the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from Ontario law, while allowing people to become parents through ‘pre-conception parentage agreements’ with up to four unrelated and unmarried adults.”³ Bill 28 was passed into law within two months, with no opposition.

By removing the words “mother” and “father” from legal definitions of parenting, Canadian officials are subjecting the relationships these words represent to all kinds of change. They’re removing legal significance from motherhood and fatherhood, and this can’t help but damage the personal significance of such relationships in society. If legal language becomes common language, reflecting and encouraging increasingly common practice, politicians have set the cultural stage for more and more kids to never know what it means to have a mom or dad, and for kids who do know to never be able to say “mom” or “dad” in any way meaningful beyond their personal experience.

Children won’t realize until later in life what’s been taken from them, the parts of their souls and self-understanding to which they were forbidden access. They will never discover aspects of themselves that only a dad could bring out and strengthen in his unique way, or that only a mom could call forth and cultivate in hers.

We’ve gone way beyond the good and necessary effort to help children not feel badly about themselves because they don’t have both a mom and dad in the home. That’s not their fault and they should never feel that it is, though some of them can’t help but take on that guilt anyway. It’s one thing, and a good thing, to tell a child that he or she will ultimately be okay in the absence of Mom or Dad. It’s another thing, a dishonest thing, to tell that child that it’s okay. It’s not. It hurts, and it should.

Some hurts cannot be healed by any natural means; to disregard that is to dishonor the victim and to deny the importance of that for which her heart aches. Though our intentions may be kind in wanting to prevent kids’ pain, pain is a signal that things are not as they should be. To no longer feel anything is not to be healthier; it’s to be dead.

But, we think, if you remove the object of craving—in this case, an allegedly archaic, arbitrary, unnecessary aspect of parenthood—you’ll remove the craving itself, right? Yes, but it’s like trying to end hunger by eliminating food. Eventually, it will work. But what will be left of us when it does?

It seems that we’re doing our best to bury concepts represented in the words like “mom” and “dad” so that more and more, generation by generation, the natural hunger within us for those relationships dies. In our godding, we’re declaring vital aspects of human life—realities rooted not in arbitrary social custom, but tethered to why and how we exist—to be not that big of a deal.