All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

Too many times I'd left him reaching for me, from a babysitter's arms. Am I still a mother? I asked myself... What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough? Paul never asked himself that. He thought he was a great dad.

When kids made a decision for themselves they have a vested interest in showing they were right. Lee wanted to prove to me that he had made the right choice so he worked hard and did well. If we'd forced him to go to college somewhere else all the incentives would've been different. Then he would have had a motive to prove that we were wrong.

Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.

It was not till I experimented with seeds plucked straight from a growing plant that I had my first success...the first thrill of creation...the first taste of blood. This, surely, must be akin to the pride of paternity...indeed, many soured bachelors would wager that it must be almost as wonderful to see the first tiny crinkled leaves of one's first plant as to see the tiny crinkled face of one's first child.

We both lacked the same thing in our childhoods - the love of a father... We both sought to fill that lack in our adult lives with family and love, as everyone does, but also with thrills and sometimes periods of recklessness. Luckily, I have always come back from my recklessness. Tommy Darling did not.

Prospero the Enchanter's immediate reaction upon meeting his daughter is a simple declaration of: Well, fuck.

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

Do you suppose, gentlemen, that our children as they grow up and begin to reason can avoid such questions? No, they cannot, and we will not impose on them an impossible restriction. The sight of an unworthy father involuntarily suggests tormenting questions to a young creature, especially when he compares him with the excellent fathers of his companions. The conventional answer to this question is: 'He begot you, and you are his flesh and blood, and therefore you are bound to love him.' The youth involuntarily reflects: 'But did he love me when he begot me?' he asks, wondering more and more. 'Was it for my sake he begot me? He did not know me, not even my sex, at that moment, at the moment of passion, perhaps, inflamed by wine, and he has only transmitted to me a propensity to drunkenness- that's all he's done for me.... Why am I bound to love him simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all my life after?Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. 'Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window'.

In the history of American fatherhood, there have been roughly three stages, each a response to economic change. In the first, agrarian stage, a father trained and disciplined his son for employment, and often offered him work on the farm, while his wife brought up the girls. (For blacks, this stage began after slavery ended.) As economic life and vocational training moved out of the family in the early nineteenth century, fathers left more of the child-rearing to their wives. According to the historian John Nash, in both these stages, fathers were often distant and stern. Not until the early twentieth century, when increasing numbers of women developed identities, beyond brief jobs before marriage, in the schoolhouse, factory, and office, did the culture discover the idea that father was friendly. In the early 1950s, popular magazines began to offer articles with titles such as Fathers Are Parents Too and It's Time Father Got Back into the Family. Today, we are in the third stage of economic development but the second stage of fatherhood.

Incidentally, I have also learned a bit about the importance of avoiding feminine embarrassment ('Daddy,' wrote Sophia when she enrolled at the New School where I teach, 'people will ask why is old Christopher Hitchens kissing that girl?') and shall now cease and desist.

I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.

I slid down in the seat and began to weep. I wept for her, for me, but mostly because the siren call of my first big story with a yellow border around it was more powerful than the call of fatherhood.

Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.