“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
In the second instalment of Filipe Toledo’s docuseries Peace and Power, the two-time and reigning world champ has gifted surf fans a wildly personal glimpse into his life in San Clemente with his extended family.
Here we find Filipe Toledo, artist wife Ananda Marçal, children Mahina and Koa along with Daddy Ricardo and mammy Mari in their sprawling Orange County compound, living as only a happy family can, connected by blood and love.
The scenes of Filipe Toledo and his little boy Koa reveal a father and his progeny in the beginning stages of that crucial relationship between father and son. Father is provider, role-model, teacher, authority figure but also the little boy’s guide to the true nature of love and the provider of maps to success and happiness.
(Although, to quote Sherwood Anderson, “You can’t always be too fussy about what you say to a young boy. Really, sometimes, you should take him into your confidence, into your life, make him a part of your life.”)
Watch as father and son embrace when Filipe exits the water. As grandaddy Ricardo cradles the boy as the family sits around the outdoor fire pit.
If you’ve got boys, what kind of father are you?
Are you leaving ’em with smudges, cracks or totally broken?
You ever get haunted by quotes?
Michael Chabon got me real good in his book Manhood for Amateurs.
“Sooner or later, you will discover which kind of father you are, and at that moment you will, with perfect horror, recognize the type. You are the kind of father who fakes it, who yells, who measures his children with greatest accuracy only against one another, who evades the uncomfortable and glosses over the painful and pads the historic records of his sorrows and accomplishments alike. You are the kind who teases and deceives and toys with his children and subjects them to displays of rich and manifold sarcasm when–as is always the case–sarcasm is the last thing they need. You are the kind of father who pretends knowledge he doesn’t possess, and imposes information with implacable gratuitousness, and teaches lessons at the moment when none can be absorbed, and is right, and has always been right, and always will be right until the end of time, and never more than immediately after he has been wrong. And when your daughter’s body begins to betray her, and her sky flickers in the distance with the heat lightning of sex, you clear your throat and stroke your chin whiskers and tell her to go ask her mother. You can’t help it–you’re a walking cliché.”