The Beautiful Irony of Leading a Fatherhood Program

If you had told me years ago that I would one day become the Project Director of a fatherhood program — a program built to strengthen the bond between men and their children — I probably would have shaken my head in disbelief. Not because the mission isn’t meaningful, but because my own life story has been shaped by a complicated mix of absence, loss, and men who didn’t have the skills to show up in the ways children deserve.

There is an irony in standing at the frontline of fatherhood work when I, myself, never truly had a healthy father figure to lean on. The fathers in my life have carried wounds from men who came before them. Wounds they never healed, lessons they never learned, skills they never developed.

My biological father either didn’t know about me, or wasn’t ready to be a father to me,  and that absence carved out a silence I carried for many years. My adoptive father, the man who raised me, struggled to offer the emotional safety every child deserves. Not because he didn’t care, but because he didn’t have the skills. His father didn’t teach him, and his father’s father didn’t teach him, and like so many men across generations, he passed down exactly what he had received.

Fatherlessness echoes.

So how does a woman raised in the shadows of unmet expectations end up leading a fatherhood program?

Because I believe deeply in breaking cycles.
Because I believe in the power of skills.
Because I have witnessed what transformation looks like when someone chooses to rise above the example they received.

My husband is the first man in my life who taught me that fatherhood can look different from what I experienced. He also didn’t grow up with a model of what a healthy father should be — but he made a choice. A choice to try. A choice to grow. A choice to show up.

He is not perfect, none of us are, but he does something powerful:
He owns his mistakes.
He apologizes.
He learns.
He keeps going.

Watching him parent our children has shown me that you don’t need to come from something healthy to create something healthy. You simply need the willingness to learn new skills and the courage to use them.

That belief shapes everything I do in this work.

When I sit in a room filled with fathers — some hopeful, some struggling, some unsure of themselves — I do not see failures. I see men who were never given the tools they deserve. I see men who want to love their children well but never received the blueprint. I see the little boys inside of them who were hurt, ignored, dismissed, or unprepared.

I see the father my biological father might have been if he had known or been ready.
I see the father my adoptive dad could have become if someone had taught him.
I see the possibility of healing in every man who chooses to try again.

Leading a fatherhood program as a woman who never truly had a healthy father figure isn’t a contradiction. It’s my calling. It’s the place where my personal story and my professional purpose meet. It is the work that allows me to give others what I never received and what every child deserves.

In every session, every skill we teach, and every father who commits to doing better, I am reminded that cycles can be broken. Skills can be learned. Love can be taught.

The irony isn’t that I lead a fatherhood program.
The irony is that through this work, I finally learned what a father can be — not from the men who came before me, but from the men who choose to grow now.

And that gives me hope, not just for the fathers we serve, but for the generations that will follow them.

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Rachel Marmor, LMHC, is Project Director of PAIRS Foundation’s IronBond Fatherhood initiative. Learn more at www.pairs4me.com/iron-bond-fathers.