Okay. So I slogged through the insanity of my childhood and its residual effects, which lasted well into my late twenties, and finally managed to subdue enough demons to find and nurture a loving, lasting marriage. What next? 

Fatherhood, apparently. Sitting in the perch where my own father, who I criticized and lionized and vilified and adored and feared and deconstructed, had once sat. It wasn't easy fighting myself to get to that perch, and it hasn't been easy to keep my sanity while on it thanks to many old demons and skeletons which found me once I sat there.

daddylabyrinth is all about those demons and that perch. It's no surprise that I'm writing the bulk of it when my elder son is the same age I was when my dad went nuts. I was just old enough then to know that my dad had problems, and my kids (even the younger one, who's just seven as I write this) are old enough to know that their dad had problems. 

This path is about what I do with those problems. Whether I harness them or they harvest me. Not being subsumed by them is a battle I have to fight every day, a mission I need to accomplish every day. And yet it can be accomplished once and for all. 

Which is more than I can say for this path, which feels (and is) shorter and less robust than the ones that precede it. Maybe because I've had only nine years of being a father as I write these words, and fifty of being a son. And there are so many things to discover in this labyrinth as I explore fatherhood that I ought to build in a little room, no? 

1. 8000 STEPS TO A FATHERLY IDENTITY
2. INCONVENIENT TRUTHS
3. HERE BE MINOTAURS
4. THE SISYPHUS PROJECT