Hi, this is Annie Fox of Family Confidential, Secrets of Successful Parenting.
My guest today is Dina Babel.
Dina is the co-author of The Fatherless Daughter Project.
She's a successful life coach, motivational speaker, a writer, a medical expert, a podcaster,
and the founder of The Fatherless Daughter Project.
Hi, Dina.
Welcome to Family Confidential.
Hi, Annie.
How are you?
I'm doing pretty well today, thanks.
I was just drawn into the title of your book, The Fatherless Daughter Project, because I
am a fatherless daughter, and I've never really read a book on the subject, and I wanted to
ask you how you got into it.
Oh, good.
First of all, The Fatherless Daughter Project, welcome to the tribe, anybody who's fatherless.
I lost my father when I was 13 tragically, but I lost him first at three years old to
divorce, and then again at 13 when he died.
And believe it or not, on the way home from the funeral, I felt what was God speaking
to me, and I was pleading with him about, I can't believe this is happening, and now
my dad's gone.
I'm 13 years old at this point, I have really no clue or no concept as to what has really
happened to me.
But I was pleading with him in the backseat of my mom's car, and I felt like he spoke
very clearly to me and told me that there would be, there's a reason for this and that
I would use my voice.
I didn't really understand it, and I didn't go back to that story for a good 20 years.
I basically forgot about it.
So when did this resurface again, this idea to, as you have created a community of fatherless
daughters through this project, and given voice to a lot of women who I'm guessing
like myself and like you, kind of buried this loss for a long time.
Yeah, what fatherless daughters normally do is the pain of losing their father tends to
go underground, and it doesn't resurface until the fear of re-abandonment.
So what we really want to do in the book and what was most important for me was to go back
developmentally where you were when you lost your father, because a lot of people don't
come to terms with it till they're in their 20s, 30s, 40s.
We even had some people in their 80s, and they don't understand where it started.
When they say I'm three or I was 10 or 14, what did that really do to you emotionally,
spiritually, physically?
And we pick up the pieces from there and then take you through the journey, because fatherless
is a journey.
It's not something that you're supposed to get over.
It's something that we keep fairly silent in this society for some crazy reason, and
I really want to blow the roof off and talk about it, because it's nothing for us to be
embarrassed about.
Now, it's really interesting.
I'm wondering in your experience, is it different to have lost a mother at an early age?
I think it is.
You know, a good friend of mine, Hope Edelman, wrote the book, Motherless Daughters, and
that was my go-to book in college, because I couldn't find a book like you said that
spoke to just specifically fatherless daughters.
I got a lot of therapy through her words, but I still felt that there was a community
that was missing.
I started basically researching this throughout my childhood.
Every time I met someone who was fatherless, I would take little copious notes, I would
find out a person at a dinner party, and I would be in the corner talking to them, and
lo and behold, they would lose their father.
So I did a lot of qualitative and quantitative research through the years, and what I found
out was that when you lose your mother, the community rallies around you and really gets
attention and support, because it's not very well heard of, for A, a mother to abandon,
and B, for a mother to walk away, single-handedly walk away from something you're doing.
So what I want to do is get the book, The Fatherless Daughter Project, and talk specifically
to girls who lose their father, because one in three women do, and a big percentage are
abandonment.
And they feel lost.
They don't feel like they have a home.
So that's what we wanted to create.
I thought it was so interesting how you delineated in the book about the different ways that
you can lose a father.
You went everywhere from death, which was the experience that I had, to divorce, to
a father being there, but emotionally not available, to incarceration, to substance
abuse.
It was quite fascinating.
I'll tell you why we did that.
It's so interesting that these girls, including myself, including you, have this pain they
carry around with them, but they feel like their pain is different than every other person's
pain.
No, but this happened.
No, I was 12, or no, he died this way, or I went through this.
And really, it's parallel.
Everybody feels the same way you just get there in a different way.
But I thought it was important to talk about percentages in each way you become fatherless,
so that because there are some different statistics between death and divorce, the way we put
it is abandonment and death.
The girls who lose their father to death, like you and I, tend to have a more positive
mindset around their father, and can sometimes make him a little holier than now, or kind
of like the king, because he was in their life.
Even if he was terrible in this lifetime, we can fantasize about him.
And we tend to hold the most sadness.
A fatherless daughter who was deserted, or divorced, or had emotional abandonment, they
tend to be the ones that statistically kind of get the bad rat, that are a little more
hypersexual, angrier, a little more take control, forceful personality, and it comes out in
unfortunate ways, because down deep, they're just really in pain.
So I'm thinking about my viewers and listeners who tend to be parents of tweens and teens,
and they might be listening to this and hearing, oh, well, the daughter that I'm raising doesn't
have a dad in her life, or they may be taking it in personally from their own experience
and saying, wow, Dean is speaking to me, and I've never explored this.
So I'm curious from your perspective, how does the fatherless daughter, then if she
hasn't dealt with the loss in a therapeutic way, how does that affect the way she parents
her daughter?
Such an interesting question.
It's cyclical, unfortunately.
We found over and over again that a fatherless daughter was raised by a fatherless daughter,
and the cycle continues, because what they find if a mother is raising a fatherless daughter,
a lot of times that mother might have made poor decisions in her life, if there's divorce
or desertion or whatever, and she wants to be done with that father, so she may alienate
the situation and therefore show her daughter that you don't need a man, you can do this
on your own, and the woman or the daughter then takes on a lot of male energy.
And so society sees her as bitchy or too confrontational.
When she's spent her whole life learning how to take up for herself, but then she gets
into the real world and people are like, slow down, you're a little out of control or you're
a little too much for me, whereas if a father died and the mother is mourning him, then
that girl may take on the adult responsibility with her mother.
Let me take care of her, let me not bring up his name, let me not show her that I'm
looking at his picture or I miss him, because I have to be on her side or I have to take
care of her.
So I think the hard part of this whole thing and why it's so important to get the help
you need is that you can't break it by yourself.
I mean, I walked around with the heaviest load you could possibly imagine, had a personality
outwardly looked happy and on paper, check, check, check, check, I was doing everything
you needed to do in society and you know, I looked like I was doing a great job.
You know, I had the husband, the children, but down deep, I was just lost and really
sad because I'd lost the connection.
And I'll tell you, doing the work, even though it was put upon you and you feel like, hey,
I don't want to do his work, doing the work and going back and finding the forgiveness
to yourself and to the others around you, maybe in the peripheral part of the family
really does heal you.
You can heal very late in life.
You can heal when you're 80 or when you're 20 and in between time just makes life a little
bumpier when you could be having a really good time out here.
That's one thing that I really appreciate about your book is that it wasn't just describing
this stuff, it really felt like a workbook on some level that you could work through
a lot of this stuff just with the information in the book.
Yeah, what I wanted to do and you know, obviously I'll walk around with this book like a Bible
is I wanted the book to feel like some sort of workbook.
I did this book years ago called the Inner Child Workbook that was phenomenal and I feel
like this is not something a girl wants to walk around and say, so she could put the
book on her nightstand and start doing the work at night in her own home and the privacy
of her home and work through it.
We also interviewed a bunch of men in the book, the guys that love us, the husbands,
the fathers and said, what can that husband or father or partner do to show her that they're
not going to get reabandoned because that's a lot of work for a man to take on and my
husband's done a great job with that.
But it's really important to hear from these men and know that we have a little crack that
was put there, we're heartbroken, but we can be healed and fixed up very nicely with true
love and with someone that we know supports us and better yet understands us and really
respects where we've come from and where we want to go.
So you call it a project.
So do you mean project in that this is an ongoing project for the people who are experiencing
and working through this loss or is it a project in terms of an ongoing community that you
are creating?
You know, both.
It's a project because this is a lifelong journey.
It's going to even flow as you do, as you become a mother, as you become the same age
he was when he left or when he passed away.
As all these milestones in your life happen and you mature, you see things very differently
and you have to go back to the guidebook and say, okay, what do I do here?
What's everybody feeling at this point in their life?
There's a lot that happens as you move through your journey.
The other part of it is being the project.
Again, this is not just a book for me.
This is a lifelong mission.
So when I'm 85, I'll still be talking about it.
I promise you.
I want to write down starting mentorship programs.
We get girls all over the world literally saying, how can we help?
How can we get involved?
So there's a mentorship program.
It's a little bit like a book club, if you will.
And then you learn if you are one, you can mentor one.
God, the sky's the limit.
If you go to dinababel.com, you can find everything you ever want to know about how to get better.
And hear other stories from other fatherless daughters.
And what I would like to do is at one point, we're going to set up the website.
So if you click on anywhere in the country, you can find another fatherless daughter or
another group that you can connect with.
I love that idea.
That's so great because a lot of caring grief around is it's very isolating.
And that's the hallmark of a fatherless daughter.
They don't get mad.
They get distant.
And the reason for that is we are really scared that if we speak our truth, that someone might
leave us.
And so we go to every place you can imagine where really we're just self-inflicting pain
on ourselves again, because we don't want to say, hey, I didn't really appreciate that.
Because we are on a pendulum not knowing, is this being too girly or needy, or am I being
too controlling?
Where do I naturally fall?
And it takes a man to kind of show you when to use that energy and when not to.
Mother as well.
But it takes two for a reason.
Well, I'd also like to think of gay partnerships where there are two women and one of them
is a fatherless daughter, the other is not.
And so that support can come from any intimate partner.
It can.
And we talked a lot about that.
We talked a lot of people in my community that are in same-sex partnerships.
And I think it's just important to understand the need of two parents.
I call it the fatherless daughter project, because that's how it affected me.
But it's just the need of having two people that are showing you.
There's not just one person in this world that may or may not be there for me, because
if one can leave, will the other.
And where you're learning, your brain doesn't really completely form to your 25.
You're learning a lot of stuff as you develop.
Your brain's changing, your hormones, your spirituality, your physicality.
And there's so many things that you need to have different perspectives on.
So the more people that you can have, whether it's a stand-in father, a girlfriend, an uncle
or whoever, it takes a village.
So the more people we have, the better.
The more people we have, the better.
And the more honest we are about, as you say, speaking our truth, the more likely we're
going to get the help we need.
Absolutely.
I love it.
Thank you so much, Gina.
This has been great.
I've got about 30 seconds left, and I would love for you to, once again, tell our viewers
and listeners where they can find out more about the work that you do.
Thank you.
You can go to thefatherlessdaughterproject.com.
You can go to dinababel.com, which is D-E-N-A-B-A-B-U-L.com.
On Facebook, same thing, Fatherless Daughter Project.
And if you want to stay incognito and you want to share something, but you're not really
ready to show or reveal who you are, we even have the Fatherless Daughter Project tribe.
So you have to get involved into that, and you can really let it all out there, and there's
a whole community to support you.
This is great.
I'm so glad that I found you on Twitter and had the opportunity to read your book.
I've been recommending it to friends of mine.
Thank you so much.
I plan to change the world, so I'm working on it.
I'm exhausted.
I'm going to keep going.
Thanks very much, Gina, for your time, and have a good one.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This is Annie Fox for Family Confidential.
To learn more about my work with tweens, teens, and their parents, visit annifox.com.
And check out my parenting book, Teaching Kids to Be Good People, Progressive Parenting
for the 21st Century, and my latest book for tween girls, the girls Q&A book on friendship,
50 Ways to Fix a Friendship Without the Drama.
And rate us on iTunes.
It helps other folks find the show.
Family Confidential podcast is produced by Electric Egg Plant.
Readers of books and apps for parents, kids, tweens, and teens.
And tune in next time, where my guest will be Karen Deer-Wester.
Karen is the owner of Family Time Coaching and Consulting, and is a highly respected
speaker and consultant for parents and educators.
She is also the author of The Entitlement-Free Child, practical tips to guide you through
today's confusing parenting situations.
And until next time, happy parenting.
