So writes Michael Chabon at the very beginning of his book Manhood for Amateurs. A bit harsh, you might say, but is it untrue?

For me, this statement is almost liberating.

As a human being who is also a man, I am prone to all sorts of failures, shortcomings, and ignorance of the facts on any given day, in any given situation. Men are taught to act as if this is not the case and we learn to fake it. We learn to pretend we are right when we are not. We learn to act as if we are confident when we are not. We learn not to ask for directions when we are lost.

Despite other significant changes in male role modeling, men have a more difficult time letting go of this deeply ingrained, yet learned, trait. Chabon writes:

When I became a father, I made a promise to myself not to pretend to knowledge I did not possess, not to claim authority I plainly lacked, not to hide my doubts and uncertainties, my setbacks and regrets, from my children. And so I have tried to share them over the years as I have been fired from screenwriting jobs or proved wrong or led to look like a fool. I have made a point (until the recent advent of GPS) to stop and ask for directions. But sometimes I waver in my resolve. My sense of myself as a father, my sense of fathers, is so deeply caught up with some primal longing (which I think we all share) for inerrancy, for the word of God, for a rock and a redeemer, a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, for the needle that always finds the true north in a storm.

I can’t claim to have made such a promise to myself, yet I struggle with this desire to be accepted in my fallibility and, at the same time, an authoritative source of knowledge, wisdom and experience. When the kids are small, this is easier to carry off. As they grow older and smarter, I find that I resort to faking that inerrancy more often in order to hold on to the parental authority that increasingly feels like it is slipping through my fingers.

Yet, much as we owe it to ourselves and our children to be honest about our humanness, we also seem to need someone who is decisive in the face of uncertainty, who is calm in the storm and who knows what to do. Chabon invokes the traditional God language of Judaism precisely because it is a reflection of this “primal longing”, as he calls it. And our kids need both: they need to know we are human, yet they need to know they are secure and safe – even when we are scared.

Ultimately, I think the manhood that I embody is a self-consciously fallible one. Yet, I believe there are moments, especially as a parent, when faking it has its place. The tricky part is to find the right balance between these modes.