How much of a woman’s relationship choices are influenced by their fathers? How do father’s impact daughter’s definitions of womanhood, self esteem and intimacy. How many women are trying to make up for the neglect, absence, or abuse of their fathers in their romantic relationships risking their own authenticity and relationship success?

The FLOW has asked these questions at the 2008 Harlem Book Fair with the panel discussion Sins of the Father: How Fathers Impact Daughters Relationships and by popular demand, we repeated this panel at A Good Book bookstore in Baltimore, Maryland in January of 2009. Ray Williams, producer and filmmaker of the documentary film Where Was Daddy was a panelist at both these events.

In Where Was Daddy, Ray explores this generally unrecognized, but significant, universal issue in the lives of women. On his website, www.wherewasdaddy.com Ray notes,

Volumes have been written about the intergenerational degradation of the black father/son relationship and how it has affected the black family structure in America. But it is the relationship a daughter has with her father that cements her perceptions of men and provides the template for which she will use to attract a partner.

Through compelling personal stories, Where Was Daddy paints a picture of women grappling with the issues of self-esteem, acceptance, intimacy, and even the possibility of ever attaining a meaningful relationship, based upon their relationship with their fathers. One woman, poignantly states that “… if my father left me that means that any man can leave me…” “…why am I even worth a man loving me for me, if my father, the man who is supposed to love, left me…”

In the book, When the Past is Present, author David Richo says “…How sad it is that what shaped us became a burden and a secret too.” Ray Williams states that the testimonies of the women in his film become inquiry. The inquiry Intertwined in the stories of these women is how men are the victims of a culture that denies them healthy expressions of love in their relationships with pathological consequences.

Author and social critic Bell Hooks puts it aptly when she says of women, “We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real men.” Where Was Daddy begins the much needed dialogue that is not so much an indictment of fathers, but a vivid testimony of how their unresolved pain flows through the generations.

Share your comments with The FLOW community or send an email to flow4theworld@comcast.net. For more information regarding Where Was Daddy go to www.wherewasdaddy.com