I used to complain about my stepmother monopolizing my father's time, always dragging him to her relatives, buying my kids such tacky birthday presents—until one day my husband said, "Stop letting your father off the hook."

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“Huh?" I responded, sublimely obtuse.

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“He does what he pleases most of the time," said Bert.

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“And if he cared more, he'd visit more and buy the presents himself." The idea that my father was responsible for all that inattentiveness struck me with the force of a fist. It was much easier to blame my wicked stepmother than to see my father for what he was and had always been—inconsiderate, self-centered, and largely absent from my life.

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He was out every night of my childhood; not gambling, whoring, or drinking, but presiding over meetings. My father was a big shot in so many civic and religious organizations there were not enough nights for all the meetings that fed his ego. But I was able to ignore his absences because of how deftly my mother compensated.

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Like millions of women, she both mothered me and magnified his fathering for my sake. Whenever he graced us with his time, she embellished each experience—a trip to the zoo, a Sunday of horseback riding—until those rare outings slid into my memory as family traditions. She provided simultaneous translation of his behavior, filling his silences, protecting me from the truth of his neglect; she reinterpreted his absences as measures of his importance, thus helping me to substitute my daughter-pride for his father-love.

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I was 15 when she died.

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Now there was no one to cover for him, but she had trained me well in the art of paternal invention—a survival technique for the women men leave behind.

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I went off to college at 16 with a mythology constructed to fit my circumstances: a motherless child with a very important father who respected me as an equal, who gave me my independence. That's why he rarely called or visited. He knew I could make it on my own.

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When I was 17, without a word of warning, he sold my childhood home and all its furnishings. I forgave him because he was a man and couldn't be expected to know that those objects might contain memories of my mother or understand how a teenage girl might be attached to her “things.” A few months later, he remarried without preparing me for the news. They moved into a 2-bedroom apartment with a daybed for me in the vestibule. I forgave him because his actions fit my mythology: we were both adults, living our own lives. I decided this was his way of setting me free.

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For years, I kept decoding him in a positive light. It took me a long time to blame him—and all the fathers—who have been inadequate, neglectful, cold, silent, unavailable, insensitive, absent, or abusive to their children. Rethinking my own experience, which was hardly the worst of the genre, has led me to ask that fathers be held accountable and fatherhood be “deconstructed”—its distortions named and acknowledged—and then reconstructed to suit the needs of the children, not the pathologies of men. Father failure is a continuum of sins, the worst of which can be found in child abuse data: nationally, 90 percent of sexual abuse is committed by men; a study of children in battered women's shelters found that, in 70 percent of the cases, men were the victimizers. Why mask these facts by talking about “family” violence? Other failures are discoverable in statistics quantifying men's abandonment, neglect, delinquency in child support; still more surface in social science research, friends' reminiscences, confessional literature, newspaper stories of ordinary folks, and books by the rich and famous.

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Bill Cosby, the guru of male parenting, writes jokingly, “My own father used me for batting practice,” but otherwise barely mentions him. Bette Davis’ father left his family when the actress was seven. Actor Gene Hackman's father walked in and out of his life. Walter Sisulu, respected strategist of the African National Congress, was abandoned by his father in early childhood; so was Joyce Carol Oates.

Millions of men are little more than sperm donors in their children's lives. They leave their children with mothers who are trapped in poverty and despair and cannot possibly provide for them adequately. These men are deserters. When a man deserts the arms he is court-martialed, stigmatized, despised. When a father deserts his own flesh and blood, all we do is (sometimes) track him down to get him to pay the freight, but otherwise he's off the hook.

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The deserting father is to the abusive father as disappearing ink is to the indelible pen. I'm not sure which is worse: to have a blank where the male parent should be or to suffer a lifelong stain. But in both cases, and in the case of the most common father failure—father silence—children seem able to grow up and forgive the man.

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In her book Like Father, Like Daughter, Suzanne Fields determined after hundreds of interviews that “Daddy hides and we forever seek him, only occasionally flushing him out of his hiding places… behind his newspaper, behind his wife, behind his authority. Most of all, he hides behind his fear of intimacy." Fields forgives fathers because it is "the nature of the beast."

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"Some silences are maintained to enable the non-speaker to listen to the world," writes Harry Brod in the introduction to A Mensch Among Men. Others are maintained to compel the world to listen to the non-speaker.

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Such is the male silence of which my father and I and our fathers before us partook. Relieving ourselves of the obligation to communicate and disclose our feelings and desires, others are forced to be inordinately attentive to us so that they can decode our muted messages, or simply not learn what we choose to keep hidden. The silence of my father's pain was also the silence of his power.

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Like my mother, Harry Brod's mother covered for her husband. I'm convinced mothers must let fathers sink or swim. Otherwise, children are the ones who drown.

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While both women and men experience inadequate fathering, men cope by shutting down their needs while women are more likely to excuse, explain, and forgive.

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Thus fathers benefit twice from the healing impulses of female acculturation. First, men benefit from wives who run interference for them—including the feminist version of all this: compensatory nonsexist child-rearing.

That's where a mother teaches ideal male behavior we children are not actually witnessing in our fathers.

Second, fathers reap the undeserved benefits of the daughters' mother-mediated view and culturally trained empathy. Those girls whose mothers choose to badmouth rather than mediate or enhance the father often imagine themselves to have a “special” understanding of Daddy.

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Feminist-minded daughters may apply a deeper critique, but ironically, our command of the power complexities is frequently reconstituted as a bemused "there he goes again" tolerance or an activist-style one-on-one rescue operation. Add these female-specific impulses to the desire of all children to think well of their parents, and you have a powerful incentive for father forgiveness.

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Many of us do not hold our father accountable for behavior we would find unforgivable in our mothers. It is as if mothers were coated with Velcro and fathers with Teflon, not just at home but in the world. A mother who beats her kids is a monster; a violent father has to be Joel Steinberg before he is called a monster.

Remember the roommate test? We used to ask ourselves whether we were tolerating behavior from our male partners—sloppiness, task evasion, and so on—that we would not accept from a female roommate. A similar test of our relationships with our parents might inspire us to add some Teflon to Mom and Velcro to Dad. I'm not arguing against forgiveness as a moral choice, nor suggesting that direct negotiation of improved father-daughter relations is "politically incorrect." But father failure must be confronted as a systemic problem. While it's obvious that some individuals need help healing the wounds inflicted by inadequate or abusive fathering, the total picture must not be privatized, viewed merely as an interpersonal difficulty to be repaired in the courtroom or therapist's office. Nor must it be compartmentalized, as if the problem of fathers who don't pay child support is disconnected from the problem of fathers who disappear, or batter, or coerce their daughters into sex.

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Put together, the multiple shortcomings of fathers add up to a social calamity of major proportions: an epidemic of role dysfunction whose deleterious impact on children is as serious as malnutrition, illiteracy, the drug scourge, or anything else that wins headlines. The trouble lies in the parental double standard and the whole institution of fatherhood. The solution can only be a radical one—that is, one that goes to its root: to the way we raise boys to be men but not fathers, and the way we raise girls to let men get away with it.

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 MS. MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1990