the tindog coffeehouse

About a week ago, we finally got around to seeing the animated movie How To Train Your Dragon. It’s a great movie, and the kids loved it. Of course, when it first came out, I couldn’t help but to joke that it looked nothing like the book, that book being Donald Miller’s To Own A Dragon.

Interestingly, though, I think there might be some thematic similarities between the two.

Miller’s book, subtitled Reflections On Growing Up Without A Father, deals with the subjects of manhood and fatherhood and the difficulties of coming of age without a father. Fatherhood is likewise a driving theme of How To Train Your Dragon. In the movie, a scrawny, bookish boy named Hiccup tries to win the approval of his battle-hardened Viking dad Stoick, but the distant and cold Stoick cannot accept his son unless he becomes a fierce warrior like himself. When Hiccup refuses to slay a dragon, he’s rejected, left alone while his father leaves to wage war without him.

Miller reflects on that sense of rejection in his book:

There was a book with pictures of a boy riding a dragon through the clouds, smoke and fire coming from the creature’s nostrils, the boy leaning in as the dragon ascended over a pleasant village. And I remember wondering what it would be like to own a dragon, to lie across the monster’s spine, inching toward its neck as the beast jolted into flight, thrusting through the milky pretext for heaven that glows over Houston, up and above the weather where my dragon and I could watch lightning fight itself into exhaustion.

I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I am writing a book about a dragon or a troll under a bridge. For me a father is nothing more than a character in a fairy tale. And I know fathers are not like dragons in that fathers actually exist, but I don’t remember feeling that a father existed for me. I know they are real people. I have seen them on television, and sliding their arms around women in grocery stores, and I have seen them in the malls and in the coffee shops, but these were characters in other people’s stories, and I never stopped to question why one of these characters wasn’t living in our house. I don’t say this out of self-pity, because in a way I don’t miss having a father any more than I miss having a dragon. But in another way, I find myself wondering if I missed out on something important.

The common message of both the book and the movie is this: fathers matter to their sons (and daughters). Children want desperately to be loved and accepted by their dad, unconditionally and without fail, to know that they themselves matter, and not just in fairy tales or stories of Vikings and dragons.

Previously:
Why does Donald Miller hate Texas?
(Re)defining ‘manhood’
Lesson One
Defining ‘manhood’