Why are we here, you and I?

In some ways, it might be more correct to say that my father, Thomas J. Wingate, was a maze: complex and multi-branched, with no clear path to his center. But to me he's a labyrinth because of the half-man, half-bull Minotaur who lived at the center of the classic labyrinth of ancient Knossos, built for Daedalus for King Minos. 

Whatever branching path I take toward the father in my imagination, I know and dread the Minotaur of anger and violence that waits for me at its center.

I say "the father in my imagination" because he started dying when I was nine and finished dying when I was ten. I don't know him and doubt I ever did. But I do know that my father was an angry man with no sense of peace, and though I am not destined to replicate his path, I am destined to wrestle with the anger and the non-peace that I learned from him without wanting to.   

This book is daddylabyrinth to me not only because of the one I’m stuck in with him. I'm a father myself now, with two sons age seven and five as I pull this project together, and the longer I live as a father, the more I realize that they are stuck in a labyrinth with me, too. The more I see them taking on the pieces of anger that float through the air from them to me. 

I want to release those ancestral angers from within myself, my home, my life, and remove them from circulation before any more of them pass on. Before any of the ones already out there sink deeper into my children than they will know until it's too late.

So there are two labyrinths at play in this book: one my father, one me. At the center of both stands the man I must never become.

this book is dedicated to fathers everywhere 

and those who love them