Divorce, Stay-at-Home-Dad Style

The following is based on a series of comments I made recently over at Rebeldad:

Stop the presses: Breadwinning moms are divorcing their stay-at- home husbands!

Not really--there's absolutely no evidence that this is happening-- but you wouldn't know it from a recent wave of essays, articles, and blog entries by and about moms who are disappointed with their marriages to caregiving spouses.

Two of the most recent examples: an instantly notorious blog entry by career coach Penelope Trunk on why her stay-at-home husband doesn't love her anymore and an article in the UK Daily Mail on a "househusband backlash" trend that the reporter seems to have invented.

Reports the Daily Mail: "Divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd-Platt says that in her experience, the decision to allow the wife to be the main wage earner will have a detrimental effect on as many as half of these relationships, and that divorce statistics in these cases have risen by at least five percent in the past two years."

I can't attest to Ms. Lloyd-Platt's experience, but, as discussed here many times, we do know that the vast majority of all marriages are troubled for the first three years after a baby is born--the Gottman Institute puts the number at 67 percent for more-or-less traditional marriages. So if only half of the reverse-traditional marriages Ms. Lloyd-Platt encounters are having problems, then they're actually doing pretty good.

But about that divorce stat she mentions--"five percent." The article doesn't compare the divorce rate of reverse-traditional families to traditional or dual-income families, so we have no idea what "five percent" means. We do know that the number of "househusbands" (as they're called) in the U.K. has risen by 83 percent since 1993. If the divorce rate for that group (and I'm impressed that someone in the UK is keeping track of it) has only risen five percent--and again, we have no idea what's happening with other family groups--then I'd say that's not too bad.

Some historical perspective: Non-traditional family forms are always entail some degree of internal and external conflict during their period of emergence--that is, until they become traditional, i.e., widespread and normal. This was, for example, the case when people left farms and extended families and moved to the big city and into small nuclear families -- a period of tremendous stress and conflict, and, incidentally, high rates of divorce and abandonment. Then all of a sudden (around WWII), the nuclear family was considered ideal. Family configurations aligned with the economy, and thus a post-war culture was born. In 1957, J.M. Mogey of the University of Oxford predicted that "the divorce rate should continue to decline for some years to come.”

Ha! History is cruel. That very same year, divorce rates started to once again rise, after a thirty-year decline. One in three couples married in the 1950s would ultimately divorce. Today the divorce rate stands at about 50 percent (that's actually a projection; the actual number of marriages that have failed is apparently closer to 40 percent), and guess what: according to many studies, today's egalitarian marriages are the most stable. "Women are more prone to depression and to fantasize about divorce when they do a disproportionate share of the housework," reports psychotherapist Joshua Coleman in Unconventional Wisdom. "Wives are more sexually interested in husbands who do more housework. And children appear to be better socially adjusted when they regularly participate in doing chores with Dad."

Today, traditional families have their own problems--many of them will fail. And so the question isn't, Are reverse-traditional families more unstable? That's a dumb question, given the context. Instead, the question should be (to adapt a phrase from Stephanie Coontz), What can we do to help reverse-traditional families minimize their weaknesses and maximize their strengths?

I'm not saying that the stories of unhappy breadwinning moms aren't interesting and important, only that they are not as representative as they pretend to be. Some of these moms explicitly blame at-home daddyhood for their problems -- they seem to feel that the arrangement robs their men of masculine authority and self-respect. This is true of Trunk's blog entry, in which she reports being shocked and dismayed to discover that her husband describes himself as a "stay-at-home dad" in an online professional networking profile. "Surely writing stay-at-home dad on a LinkedIn profile cannot be good," she writes, clearly ashamed of her husband.

It's a digital variation of an image that keeps recurring in these stories: the public moment when a coworker or old school friend asks the breadwinning mom what her husband does for a living, and she feels a deep sense of shame. She marks that as the moment when the marriage declined.

It's really quite horrible, when you think about it. I think there's two things going on, socially. One is that some women seem unprepared for the pressures of providing, just as some dads must struggle with the demands of caregiving. They weren't raised for these roles, they never imagined themselves doing it, and they have few role models. The second thing is that social support is extremely important -- this is one of the insights that came out of a recent University of Texas study of at-home dads, and it's certainly true in my experience. If you spend all day, every day, walking uphill with the wind in your face, you get tired. Much better to have people behind you, pushing you forward.

But we have tended to focus on social situation of the at-home dad, sometimes at the expense of the breadwinning mom: they need support, community, and role models just as much, if not more. The pressures they face are enormous: all the usual breadwinning pressures, plus sexism, plus the social ambiguities of role reversal.

Despite all that, however, many moms are very happy with their roles; I've interviewed some of them for my book. Their stories also need to be told--and then maybe women like Penelope Trunk won't feel so ashamed.

* * *

A post-script: In an article posted to her old website, Kidding Ourselves (1995) author Rhona Mahony asks: “When the sexual division of labor in the home has melted away, what will divorce mean for children? No one knows for sure. In all likelihood, though, it will be less harmful to children than it is today. I suspect that the average breadwinning mother will be more emotionally attached to her children than the average breadwinning father is today, because of the lingering emotional echoes of her pregnancies and her breastfeeding, if she breastfed. Even if her primary-parent husband catches up with and surpasses her in emotional attachment, she is starting from a higher base than the average father today. Concretely, that means that fewer, absent breadwinning parents will fail to visit, fail to send money, and go AWOL completely. More of them will be mothers. Remember, too, that improvements in child support assurance, and in other programs, will probably be necessary to attract millions of men into primary parenting. Those improvements will also cushion the effects of divorce for children whose fathers are breadwinners, too.”

Baby Clothing on the Spot

My high-school friend introduced me to her 5-year old son the other day. Apart from the fact that he stood exactly 180 degrees facing the opposite direction and refused to acknowledge my existence, he seemed nice enough. But what was up with the outfit? A John Deere trucker cap and a t-shirt with a monster car kicking up clouds of dirt from under oversized wheels. Was this an Ashton Kutcher starter kit? I’ll pass over the fact that I knew plenty of kids in high school who dressed like this without even thinking about it. Some of them even knew how to drive a John Deere tractor. But neither of us did. So how did her kid wind up this way?

I was a little surprised at my own reaction. What does it matter what a little boy or girl wears? I remember having a pair of cowboy boots with fancy stitching, and a few Evel Knievel t-shirts that I deeply regretted loosing to whoever stole them out of the laundromat in the late 70s.

But I couldn't help myself. "Gimme a break," I thought. "I'd never buy a shirt like that for Spot." Though my wife and I have never really talked about it, most of Spot's onesies are "gender neutral." We like it that way. Thankfully he looks good in pastels, because he's wearing a lot of light orange, green, and yellow these days. He has a few blue outfits, one ridiculously cute sailor suit, and a few novelty pieces. By and large, he's steering clear of the blue-pink dichotomy.

As far as motifs go, his clothes are decorated with quite a few dinosaurs, a good selection of African megafauna, and various amphibian and mammalian species native to temperate Eurasia. Plus, of course, the usual barnyard crew. So Spot is on his way to being somewhat of a naturalist, perhaps even a paleontologist. What is absent from wardrobe is anything powered by an internal combustion engine or resembling a professional athletic jersey.

Putting this wardrobe together was no easy feat. A quick stroll through the children's apparel section in Target makes it clear that there is a "pink side" and a "blue side". Delve deeper into the infant clothing section, and you'll find that the rack of Target and Gerber brands is about evenly divided according to Yin and Yang, with, as a concession to the way of the Tao, a thin strip of gender neutral offerings in the middle. If you want more selection, you have to go to specialty stores elsewhere in the City. My mother has been doing a yeo-woman's job of culling the gender neutral stuff from various discount department stores, but both she and my wife have insisted that it's not easy.

Why go to all the trouble? After pondering over the question, it's become clear to me that what Spot wears is less about him right now than about us as parents and what we communicate to the world through his outfits. My own folks have told me they paid no attention to what I wore as a small child (always nice to hear), and despite the cowboy boots and the Evel Knievel t-shirts, I failed to turn into either a cowboy or a motorcycle-riding stunt man. No, the way we clothe Spot is more about reassuring ourselves of our parenting choices, and signaling these choices to parents and others around us.

"He doesn't HAVE to dress that way," is what we're saying when we dress him. The complex of associations that make up gender identity doesn't necessarily have to include trucks, rockets, earth-moving machinery, and really really fast cars. It can include some of these things, but it can include other things too. It's all a protest, perhaps mostly symbolic, that the package of traits that is conventionally known as "boyhood" can be mixed up and filled with all sorts of things.

But does that include dresses? At coffee one morning with a mom down the street, I saw her 8-month old daughter in a skirt for the first time. "Oh boy," I thought, "once you cross that line, there's no going back." Boys go hither, girls girls go yon. "What about a kilt?" my wife asked. Yes, there are options: the eminently practical Middle Eastern dishdashah, and various central and south Asian tunics, for example, none of which I have ever worn nor am likely to. And while experiments with all this might be fine now, while he is a tabula rasa, he will have friends one day, and in that Lord of the Flies world he will be forced to choose sides. And he will think we were foolish for not having prepared him.

Or, if we take the trouble to get him comfortable dressing beyond the pink-blue dichotomy, to take him shopping where there really is a range of things to choose from besides frilly blouses and football jerseys, perhaps he will feel comfortable designing a wardrobe that expresses who he is, and not the category in which he must be classified.

Axel’s Story: Alone and together

I am in the process of interviewing Bay Area families for a series of writing projects on non-traditional families, collected as the "21st Century Family Project." For the next year or so, I will periodically post sketches of the families based on the interviews, as a kind of public notebook of the work I am doing. What follows is the story of Axel and Lex, who live in San Francisco's Noe Valley. Some names have been changed. (The photo above was taken by Jackie Adams.)

“We’d only been together for two months before Marjorie got pregnant,” says Axel, 37. Until that point, Axel had been working as an actor, with no regular income—but with a child on the way, Axel overhauled his life. “I stopped going out and partying,” he says. “I quit sports. I stopped acting. I got a job again and got an income again.”

At first, says Axel, “it seemed very grand and romantic, having a baby.” But the couple started bickering even before Lex was born, and after the birth they found themselves thrown together in the most intimate, uncomfortable circumstances imaginable. “The first 48 hours after Lex was born was like living on a remote island,” he says. “In hindsight, it would have been better to first build a community as a couple and as parents. I wasn’t comfortable in the relationship. I was happy in Lex’s birth, but I wasn’t comfortable being a dad, I had no idea with what I was doing.”

Their fights grew in frequency and intensity, keeping pace with the couple’s rising anxiety and sleep deprivation. “It was all emotional issues, in my opinion based on the fact that we didn’t get on well together and the situation was largely forced on us…forced on us by ourselves, of course.”

Even before Lex was born, Axel and Marjorie had joined a parenting group, seeking to build a new community as parents. But, while the meetings were enjoyable and provided the basis for individual friendships, the group did not translate into a durable, village-like community. “It seemed like everyone [in the group] was silently hoping for a community, because they hoped for emotional support as well as practical help,” says Axel. “The first year we certainly didn’t get that. Since all the couples were under the same pressure, they didn’t want to hear about it, because they didn’t want to hear anything that would remind them of how fragile their own situation is. I don’t blame them for it. They had no time or emotional energy to give us.”

Over the course of Lex’s first year, the rift between Axel and Marjorie developed into a serious crisis and then one day, just after Lex’s first birthday, Axel left Marjorie. He slept on the couches of his few remaining single, childfree friends, while Lex stayed with his mother. “I felt horrible,” Axel says. “Everything had just fallen apart. But I knew that I couldn’t stay. The only thing that would have been worse was staying.”

During this period, Axel was truly isolated. His friends, even those with children, didn’t understand what he was going through. His entire family lived in Germany. Worse, he immediately lost the small, fragile community he and Marjorie had constructed. “All of a sudden, it looked to me like all these parenting groups we’d joined ceased to exist at all,” he says. Both Marjorie and Axel still received support from individuals, but the group as a whole was not able to shift its "structure and energy" to accomodate the break-up.

“The first five weeks were horrible, but then it got better,” says Axel. Though they were initially enraged at each other, Axel and Marjorie gradually calmed down, “got back in touch with reality,” and ironed out a fifty-fifty custody agreement for Lex, with no lawyers involved.

Now Axel faced a new challenge: learning to be a single, joint-custody dad. “You know, Marjorie had this mama’s group, but there I was, trying to do all this by myself, and I thought, this is insane, so I actually tried to find a father’s group. And it was almost impossible to find. I finally found some people. They were all half-time single fathers, but most of their troubles were surrounding their divorces. I didn’t really feel at home there either. There’s hundreds of mothers’ groups, but almost no groups for dads.”

Axel gave up trying to find a group to join, accepted his isolation, and, for the first time, was able to focus totally on trying to be a good father. Ironically, this acceptance is what allowed him to find a new community. As Lex got bigger, he started playing with other kids and Axel found that it was easier for him to interact with the parents with a clear identity as a single dad. It wasn’t enough for Axel and Lex to do things that seemed best for Lex; Axel had to genuinely enjoy their activities and the company of the parents who were there. Their community grew when father and son found people they could both play with. “I feel much more comfortable being a parent and I’m finding a community that works for me and for Lex,” he says.

Ultimately, he feels, the separation from Marjorie was good for the whole family. “Having this structure and having the relationship with Lex separated from my relationship with Marjorie, it made it easier for me to see myself as a father,” he says. “It made it clear to me and also to Marjorie, that I’m Lex’s dad and I’m going to do all these things that are a part of being Lex’s dad, and it has nothing to do with the relationship, which wasn’t working out. For Lex, it’s better than what he was in before, when we were fighting all the time. It’s really changed my relationship with him and allowed me to focus on being a dad. I can be with him 100 percent.”

* * *

A post-script: “Through most of history,” writes family historian Stephanie Coontz, “marriage was only one of many places where people cultivated long-term commitments. Neighbors, family and friends have been equally important sources of emotional and practical support. Today, we expect much more intimacy and support from our partners than in the past, but much less from everyone else. This puts a huge strain on the institution of marriage. When a couple's relationship is strong, a marriage can be more fulfilling than ever. But we often overload marriage by asking our partner to satisfy more needs than any one individual can possibly meet, and if our marriage falters, we have few emotional support systems to fall back on.”

Why we are having only one child

There are two hot new trends in my social circle: divorce and second children. Some couples are separating, others are reproducing, again.

We won't be jumping on either bandwagon, I'm afraid.

It's no surprise to see that as families grow, marriages are strained. I can cite, off the top of my head, a half dozen peer-reviewed studies that all say more or less the same thing: about two-thirds of couples experience a big increase in hostility and disagreement in the three years after the birth of their first child. According to the current numbers, half of marriages won't survive.

Why? Oh, I know the conservative line, and so do you. They blame the divorce rate on feminism, gay marriage, Murphy Brown, etc. In short, it's Satan's fault. But social scientists who study marriage and family--people like Phil and Carolyn Cowan at UC Berkley, John and Julie Gottman at U. of Washington, psychotherapist Joshua Coleman, and historian Stephanie Coontz--have actually asked couples about their troubles, and they discovered that there are many factors driving the divorce rate that have nothing to do with the dark prince of evil (unless you're referring to Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration's economic and family policies).

These include economic instability, more hours at work, social isolation, longer life spans, ambiguous roles, and unrealistically high emotional expectations. In their two-decade study of 200 nuclear families, the Cowans discovered that "the normal process of becoming a family in this culture, at this time sets in motion a chain of potential stessors that function as risks that stimulate moderate to severe stress for substantial numbers of parents."

In plain English, becoming a parent today can drive you crazier than a shithouse rat. Once upon a time, parents had a village to raise their children. Today, it's usually just you, your equally crazy spouse, and whatever help you two can afford.

Many parents cope admirably with the stresses of modern life. But for others, it's too much. Here's a fun fact: When the Families and Work Institute asked 1,000 children what they would change about their parents' work and how it affects family life, only 10 percent of kids made wished their mothers would stay home more and 15.5 percent made that wish about their fathers. Instead, the most popular wish by far was for moms and dads "to be less stressed and tired"—-which tells me that a) parents are really stressed and it affects their relationship with children; and b) it's the quality, not quantity, of time with parents that matters most to children.

Thus I think part of the secret to building a happy family today is knowing where to draw the line. I'm often asked when we are going to have our second, and people who don't know me well seem surprised when I reply, Never. "But you seem to love being a dad," said one person, eyebrows raised. It's true. For example: Recently my wife went away for four days and I took time off work to take care of Liko. By the end of our little vacation, I was in a terrific mood; I felt better than I'd felt in years. When I am able to give him my full and undivided attention, nothing makes me happier than to be with my kid.

But that's the problem. I can only rarely give him "my full and undivided attention." Among other things, I have to work. I have a one hour commute to my work. Outside of work, I have dishes to wash, relatives to call, emails to check, blogs to read, errands to run. So do you. It's not that our lives are harder than those of previous generations. My grandparents had it much worse, in many ways. They had their own problems, like, you know, the Depression and World War II. Our specific, contemporary problem is that our lives are rootless and overstuffed. Every time you have another child, life gets that much crazier. "Two kids are twice the fun, ten times the work!" says my friend Jodi. No kidding.

I don't want to put that strain on my life and my marriage. I've had one child. He's a great, beautiful gift that I never expected to receive. I know he wants a sibling--he's asked for one, several times, provoked by the bulging bellies of his friends' mothers--and I know that in many ways, he'd be better off in a larger family. But then the higher brain functions take over and I do the math of money and hours--and I look at our divorcing friends--and I know that we can't and shouldn't do it. He deserves to have two parents who love each other, who get along, who have civic and intellectual lives outside of the family.

Perhaps our hearts aren't big enough. Maybe we're not tough enough. But I think three is enough.

Social Capital: Do Dads Have it?

You probably already have a gut sense of what the social science buzzword 'social capital' means. Warren Buffet has financial capital; George Bush at one point thought he had political capital; someone with 'social' capital has a store of power and knowledge about 'how things work' in social institutions. The value of this capital isn't measured in terms of equities, cash, or political favors; it's measured in terms of who you know and how many of them you know. In the simplest terms, social capital is all about being part of a network and being able to easily move around within it.

The idea of social capital throws new light on the day-to-day challenges of the at-home dad in the early years before schooling begins. For example, much of the discussion of gender equity vis-a-vis childcare currently revolves around issues of labor and reward: how much unpaid or paid labor each parent does, how this balance is structured according to certain gender norms, and how enlightened public policy or changed mores can tweak this balance to achieve maximum benefit to both the parents and children in the 21st century economy.

What is less commonly discussed is the way certain gendered forms of sociability act to accrue resources that will benefit the child and family unit, apart from the issue of labor in and out of the workplace. Looked at this way, even dads who willing and able to pull their load of household and childcare labor may be dirt-poor in the kinds of social capital that are essential to getting their kids into the right city school, the summer camp of choice, or just positioning them to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way. Social capital means getting out there and mixing it up with the people who have information. Those people, in the world of early childcare, are mostly moms. You can do the math.

Among at-home dads, a big topic of reflection is the issue of social acceptance at the play-park. The moms congregate their in cliques, the men are a distinct minority, and awkwardness prevails. As with any new technology or social practice, a new etiquette struggles to be born: is it OK for a dad to arrange a playdate with a mom he just met? Is it manly or not for two dads at a playpark to exchange phone numbers? Is it worth the time for a dad to get involved with a playground clique of mostly moms?

The idea of social capital would suggest that the answer to the last question is "yes," because cliques of neighborhood moms are much more than social groups: they are information networks. Without a doubt they are highly gendered, based on forms of sociability that are heavily feminized according to traditional gender constructions. But in a "networked" society, this form of sociability is now where the advantage now lies -- across the board, not just with regard to parenting -- and women therefore have a distinct edge.

I've met a number of moms in my neighborhood so far, and all of them have been extremely helpful and generous in sharing information and welcome advice. Even though most of the parenting list-serves and play groups are run by and populated by moms -- who tend to be very good at gathering and disseminating information -- by no means does this mean that they are closed sororities in which men are unwelcome. Nor are the social skills that help these organizations take shape and flourish limited to women alone. In an economy in which the general ability to network is now a fundamental survival skill, more and more men are likely to feel comfortable adopting the hitherto strictly feminine practice of kibitzing at the playpark in order to gain access to vital childcare knowledge, support, and healthy camaraderie.

But this means that the issues involved in discussions of reverse-traditional families, or gender equality in childcare, need to expand beyond the core concerns of labor and reward, to include basic practices of sociability that can have tremendous impact on the future prospects of one's child. Blogs about at-home dads are certainly one step in that direction. But because most educational and daycare questions are unavoidably local, nothing beats face-time on the neighborhood mommy beat. The 'strong, silent type' of dad will be a disaster when it comes to setting a child up for academic success, even if he outdoes mom in terms of diapers washed and dishes cleaned. Much of what is most valuable in parenting resides in intangible but significant networks of information and the ability to access the network at different points.

Some universities have already implemented controversial gender-based affirmative action policies -- for men. Young men are being outnumbered and outperformed in terms of college admissions by young women. I'm convinced that social training in a network-based sociability is a big part of this. Dads can't afford to sit in the play park and read the sports page while the moms pow-wow by the sand box, not if they want their kids to get the best care and education possible.

The Zen of Strolling

The Spot is my zen master. He does it all while wrapped up like a monk in his sedan chair -- I mean stroller -- while being pushed around the neighborhood, an ageless child-sage. My wife and I have wondered if he might be on the short list for a shot at incarnating the Dali Lama, though his timing is a little off. Why not? The rabbis will tell you that both your child and mine knew the Torah by heart until forgetting it all at birth. That's a lot of reading, so surely a little spiritual virtuosity is not impossible?

Every day, for about an hour or so, we pick a circuit in the neighborhood and head out. Occasionally I bump into my friend Steve down the block, and we caravan for a few blocks before parting ways. That's about as social as strolling gets -- with a few exceptions -- and that's fine with me. We swing wide of the play parks and their fountains like freight traffic getting shunted off onto a business beltway. We'll be in the play parks soon enough. For now, I need my stroller zen.

The Spot more or less goes along. He could just as happily be on his activity mat, yanking on multi-colored giraffe legs or trying to eat the blue monkey. Instead, being the mensch that he is, he lets me get out of the house, and doesn't object when I occasionally call a halt to our perambulation before a passing but sublime moment of urban beauty.

It's hard to find the peace of mind that this brings while sitting in my living room. Strolling with Spot forces me to inhabit the world of the concrete, consisting primarily of the sidewalk in front of us. We judge the size of cracks in the pavement. We gage the slope of the street. We keep an eye on the thunderheads above. With every change in direction, I readjust the awning and carriage to protect Spot from the sun. We dodge sprinklers. If we get caught in a shower, I batten him down. When it's windy, I listen to him laugh while the awning brushes his face.

It's these everyday details of strolling that get me out of my head. And this is where the zen comes in: absorption in the immediate leads to the transcendent. In a way that would be impossible in a car, attention to the simple details of slow travel opens my mind to the occasionally edifying things around us. We could be hiking in Yosemite, or canoeing in Ontario. We just happen to be strolling in Chicago.

In June we strolled through clouds of cottonwood seed, blowing through the neighborhood like a summer snow, collecting against the curbs in small drifts. Out by the Lake we saw the waves roll in on a dry, northerly Canadian breeze. Later, we saw the water lie flat under a soggy dome of Gulf air. On the right block at the right time, the city can feel deserted, the wind in the canopy of oaks above is audible. A flock of green parakeets bobs down the street and flies up through an opening in the trees, and I notice that the sound of internal combustion has, for the moment, disappeared.

I can't imagine taking care of the Spot someplace where it was difficult or unpleasant to do our daily stroll. I know such places exist. They tend to be suburban or exurban areas with no sidewalks and 8-lane roads, or pockets of urban, gang-ridden social pathology. Small towns are perfect for strolling, as are dense urban neighborhoods. Either way, all you really need are halfway decent sidewalks, and some trees for cover against the summer sun and winter winds. Plus a good zen master to help you see things again, but for the first time.

gangsta father

the intro from rad dad 7 -- out this week

note: i'll be tabling at the portland zine fest from aug 10 - 12. stop by! there will be a few other parent zinsters: miranda, pirate papa as well as artnoose and a load of other cool things. i'll have the new issue with me and any copies of the last few issues that remain...

and finally, i realized we've never had a birth story in rad dad so maybe next issue -- nothing but birth stories????

tomas

rad dad is not cool; it’s not about being hip, not about trying to be in style, not a trend. rad dad is for radical parenting. The uncomfortable kind. The difficult kind. Radical as in not complacent, as in conscious and conscientious of our impact on our children, our partners, our environment. Radical as in taking responsibility for the privileges some of us have, whether we want those privileges or not. Radical as in being cognizant of how we challenge patriarchy (or not), how we participate in capitalism, how we depend on unquestioned roles of authority and hierarchy. And then, radical as in having the courage to consider ways of changing these aspects of fathering.

Lately I’ve seen numerous new books or web sites that clearly are trying to profit off of or benefit from or create a market for hip fathering, talking about how men can still remain men (whatever that means) and be a cool dad as well. What so many of these books or sites lack is a social critique, an understanding that for so long fathering has been intimately connected to patriarchy, to violence, to capitalism. Unless we as fathers do something to change that, no amount of coolness, no amount of humor, no amount of hip papa clothes can cover it. So my new mantra: We need radical change, not radical baby accessories.

For me rad dad is about reaching out to community. It’s not a place to provide excuses for some of the fucked up ways fathering is manifested by some men in our society nor about absolving ourselves of our complicity in the ugly history of Traditional Fathering. We gotta own up to it. And that’s why I know I need other radical parents, both mamas and papas, to help me see how I am caught up in this history. Especially when I’m unaware of it. I need them to show me how myths of fathering are perpetuated in the media or to help me see when fathering is being used as a marketing ploy or is being packaged for consumer convenience.

rad dad for me is recognizing how I need help. I can’t do it alone because I already know I’m a sucker; I’m a fool. I laugh like hell during Shrek and his silliness, and my kids love him, so he’s gotta be a good model for fathering, right? And I’ll admit I’m the first one at the bar getting all stupid when the Warriors were in the playoffs. Don’t get me wrong. We as people can and should have our own interests outside of parenting, enjoy the company of other adults in places that perhaps aren’t super kid friendly. But we are straight up wrong if we think that the word father means to be cool, to be part time, or that it’s temporal, ending when we are not with our kids, or that it’s limited to the realm of the house.

I want the word father to mean: warrior, to be synonymous with dedicated; I want it to be analogous to activist, environmentalist, feminist, gangsta, anarchist. I want people to step back when we announce we’re fathers and that we’re here and we ain’t leaving until some things change.

Starting with ourselves.

rad dad is as much about radical parenting as it is about fighting patriarchy in all aspects of our society. I believe actually that to reclaim fathering, it will be contingent upon men to work diligently for equal access and rights for women in the world outside parenting. We can’t expect to be equal partners in parenting and not have women be equal partners in the rest of society. To reclaim fathering we will need to reconsider intimately what it means to be successful and how capitalist notions of success are tied to the construction of male identity. To reclaim fathering we will need to question the social stereotypes of fathering that for so long have been used to justify gender specific parental roles.

Now I also wanna recognize that how we individually manifest our parenting and our relationships is up to us. There is nothing inherently wrong with a man providing the main income for a family and a woman being the primary caretaker. But it needs to be transparent, needs to be a choice and not the default. Fathers need to actively consider what might be the underlying reasons for their decisions about how they father and what they give priority to.

And, most importantly, fathers will need to actively, vocally, publicly support and speak up for other fathers.

So let me give a shout out to the amazing fathers and mothers and other parental allies that I had the pleasure to meet and depend on as I ventured out on the Kerbloom/rad dad speaking tour of the Pacific Northwest. It was so inspiring to realize that there are people I can call up and say, I need a place to stay or can you help me out or come to our event, and they are there lending you a pillow, offering what they can, bringing their kids and neighbors to see you read. So that is what rad dad is about, what Kerbloom is about, what creating radical community is all about. There are so many people doing so many different, cool things that every time I feel slightly exhausted or overwhelmed, I just need to look around me or think of those that have helped me, and feel reinspired, rejuvenated. You all rock.

Dads and the Dangers of Metaphysics

I doubt many folks checking in on Daddy Dialectic bother to read the Wall Street Journal, but someone (my wife, who in fact needs to understand the economy, for which I begrudge her not) forwarded me a muddled and masculinist Father's Day essay ("Boys to Men", Tony Woodlief, June 15, 2007, p.W11) by an avowedly un-masculine father of three boys who somehow feels that they should deliberately be set on the path to his preconceived idea of manhood. It's a prime collection of unexamined assumptions, pop-genetic determinism, psychological unawareness, and run-of-the-mill conservative shibboleths about the need for manly courage in a dangerous world, all rolled out like sparkly plastic trinkets and baubles in an antique store.

I can't link to it because it's subscription only. Instead, a few of the choicer excerpts:

"Many academics would consider my lack of manliness a good thing. They regard boys as thugs-in-training, caught up in a patriarchal society that demeans women. In the 1990s the American Association of University Women (among others) positioned boys as the enemies of female progress (something Christina Hoff Sommers exposed in her book, "The War Against Boys"). But the latest trend is to depict boys as themselves victims of a testosterone-infected culture. In their book "Raising Cain," for example, the child psychologists Don Kindlon and Michael Thompson warn parents against a "culture of cruelty" among boys. Forget math, science and throwing a ball, they suggest -- what your boy most needs to learn is emotional literacy."

"But I can't shake the sense that boys are supposed to become manly. Rather than neutering their aggression, confidence and desire for danger, we should channel these instincts into honor, gentlemanliness and courage. Instead of inculcating timidity in our sons, it seems wiser to train them to face down bullies, which by necessity means teaching them how to throw a good uppercut. In his book "Manliness," Harvey Mansfield writes that a person manifesting this quality "not only knows what justice requires, but he acts on his knowledge, making and executing the decision that the rest of us trembled even to define." You can't build a civilization and defend it against barbarians, fascists and playground bullies, in other words, with a nation of Phil Donahues."

Who said emotional literacy had anything to do with timidity? If this dude spent more time wondering why so many husbands beat their wives, he might have less time to get spooked about Fascism. Still stranger is how parenting, boyhood, manhood somehow all gets refracted through the lens of a value set essentially derived from paganism. No reflection on, say, the ethics of Augustine, the Church Fathers, the Rabbinical tradition, or any of the many other ethical sources that conservatism claims to know all about; instead, we have tough-guy paganism straight-out of Ben Hur and other Hollywood comics. (Those Romans, and the Empire they defended against barbarians, were, of course, pagans):

"The good father, then, needs to nurture his son's moral and spiritual core, and equip him with the skills he'll need to act on the moral impulse that we call courage. A real man, in other words, is someone who doesn't run from an Osama bin Laden. But he may also need the ability to hit a target from three miles out with a .50 caliber M88 if he wants to finish the job."

Why, the Global War on Terror is the perfect moral framework for raising my son! What a quaint little idea, the notion that warfare is an opportunity for "real men" to show valor. I think that one died sometime in August 1914, along with several million other soldiers in the trenches of France. It certainly was gone by the time of the Second Iraq War of 1990-1991, in which bombs did most of the killing. Given the reference here, one might add that "finishing the job" would also call upon skills such as an understanding of Arabic, Persian, Pashtun, Parsi, and Urdu, or perhaps the domestic politics of Arab and Central Asian states, listening to other people's ideas and information, etc....but of course all that bookish nonsense is for sissies, and what everything comes down to is whether an infantry grunt can pull the trigger when he sees a turban. Assuming he can find one to shoot.

Also of note is the way emotional literacy is downplayed when, as the author freely admits right in the first paragraph, his biological father abandoned him in childhood, and his stepfather didn't pay attention to him. Hmm. So what the author's deficient male parents really needed was the ability to shoot a .50 caliber M88? Then they wouldn't have been tempted to dump their parental responsibilities on their wives while they went off to be manly? Seems like these dudes were lacking in a few other qualities, too, like the willingness to stick around and just do the work of a parent, "finishing [a] job" which for the most part doesn't include Courage, Honor, or Gentlemanliness, and if you're lucky and don't live on the south side of Chicago, doesn't involve guns.

Which is not to say that Courage, Honorableness, etc. are bad qualities. But why do they belong only to men? I like Honorable and Courageous women. I'll take help and inspiration whenever I can get it. While this guy's kids are learning how to Honorably and Courageously fight over a rubber ball, his neighbor's daughters are probably acing the SAT and getting into better schools and landing the jobs that will drive the economy. And Gentlemanliness, if it means anything at all in this post-medieval age in which most "real men" couldn't manage to fit into a suit of armor without serious liposuction, seems to me centered on respect for the weak. This is a universal value that we should ALL aspire to, regardless of gender, age, race, or anything else. Ironic twist: the very idea of Gentlemanliness, as derived from the courtly culture of late medieval Italy and Spain, is in fact heavily influenced by the high MUSLIM culture of the period, with some pagan residues thrown in. So, dad, you want your kid to be like the noble Black Saracen in The Song of Roland? The one who kills the Christian hero? Bravo! Those particular "barbarians" were reading Greek long before your own ancestors could spell their name.

I'll give the guy credit for admitting he's a couch potato from a broken home -- this itself is an index of how far we've come -- although rhetorically-speaking, anything less would have immediately alienated the educated women who read the WSJ as well as many of the moderate men -- and for suggesting that boys need moral training in addition to open-ended physicality. But if this is the conservative version of modern fatherhood, then I'm nostalgic for the days of old-fashioned Judeo-Christian patriarchy, rather than this pagan code that essentially consists of being able to use a gun and stand up to Osama bin Laden. Let's see this guy's kids use those skills when they get laid off for the first time.

Proust's Dad

At some point, I have to talk about Proust. I feel a deep sense of connection with the narrating character, so deep that I wonder if I can really write objectively about it. I could try to make the argument that he is the greatest novelist of all time. What I know for a fact is that reading him is an amazing cure for insomnia, especially when read in the original.

I recently grabbed the first volume of Proust’s massive novel for just this reason. Unable to sleep, worried about things I couldn’t identify, with nervous energy somehow liberated into my veins when it was least wanted, I lumbered downstairs in the middle of the night to retrieve Swann’s Way. In the next hour, while the Spot and wife slumbered away, I flew through the first fifty pages.

It wasn’t a random choice. There are other tomes on my bookshelf that would have done equally well as a soporific. But I recalled that the initial, justly famous section of Swann’s Way was about a man who was passing back and forth between consciousness and dreaming; about a man remembering himself as a child not being able to sleep; and about a small boy not being able to sleep because his father had sent him to bed early, expressly forbidding him to receive his nightly bedtime kiss from his mother. With all sorts of connections to my immediate experience, I had to get back in touch with this book.

This mundane little story about a boy anxious over his broken routine, his coping mechanisms as he frets alone in his bedroom, his desperation and increasingly bold plans to obtain his good-night kiss against the wishes of his father, all of it not only introduces a new style of literature, a new method of weaving together a narration drawn from various states of consciousness, but raises issues about the emotional life of children and the ways adults attempt to suppress it. Specifically, how fathers police the emotional life of sons.

When I first read this episode, I was struck by how closely it resembled, in novelistic form, Freud’s model of family dynamics. The boy is attached to his mother; the father senses this competition and bans it; the boy suffers, the mother’s allegiances are torn. Ultimately, in line with all good 19^th century bourgeois fathers, the father prevails, the child encounters the “reality principle,” and begins to evolve away from attachment to the mother. And, as with Freud, the echo of this trauma of separation resounds forever after in the narrator's psyche.

It is a strong parallel. But what happens in the last pages of this episode breaks down Freud's schematic. The father, an emotionally obtuse, arbitrary, but benevolent tyrant, together with his wife, finds the boy standing at the top of the stairs, positioned to intercept his mother. It is a bald act of defiance. Both mother and child expect Mosaic chastisement from the father. Instead, the father senses the boy's distress, and with the kind of generosity that only tyrants are capable of, tells the mother to go with him and comfort him, spending the night on a spare bed beside him in his room. The father was not without heart, and the mother was complicit in wanting to wean the young boy perhaps too severely.

But their authorized, unexpected, and surely unrepeatable time together that night is what the little boy and the mother really had wanted all along. Their union, as he cries to sleep in her arms, is the first of many powerfully moving passages in this book. He began sobbing then, the narrator confesses, and never really stopped. There was something the boy was missing that only mother could provide.

But by then, it was too late; mother could not in that evening make up for years of emotional distancing. It was not only father's irritability with sentimental gestures like a goodnight kiss, but mother's determination to toughen her son, that had left the boy with an emotional hole that he carried with him into adulthood. "We can't habituate him to this," she tells father, after he has pardoned the boy. "We are not torturers here," father replies.

The reader is left with a literary taste of the classic patriarchal family, of the Father as Speaker of the Law, the One Who Says "No," the reality principle itself. This model was unquestioned as recently as my parent's generation. Today, according to conventional wisdom, it is overturned. But is it really? After all, at the heart of the patriarchal model of father-son relations is the principle of the father's authority to deny emotional satisfaction in family relationships, chiefly by denying communication of any kind. There is very little communication between the narrator's father and his son, only reporting.

"Boys will be boys," they say. But parents make boys boys, by talking to them less, by withdrawing affection sooner, by turning them into the creatures that their girlfriends and wives will later complain can't articulate their emotions, don't understand their impulses, get uncomfortable around babies, and feel that something is not right about a man caring for an infant. There's no way to avoid intensely physical communication when caring for a very young child, and this is difficult if you've been trained not to communicate with anyone.

Luckily Proust's semi-autobiographical little boy withstood the attempt to suppress his emotional life, in return producing one of the most extended tours of psychological interiority ever written. Is it a coincidence that the famous cup of tea, the one with the soggy cooky that triggered Proust's remembrance of things past, his connection to the world of his interiority, was handed him by his mother?

Reading in Berkeley

I'll be reading my short story “Same Street Twice” this Friday, June 29th, 7:30 PM at Pegasus Books, 2439 Shattuck Avenue, in Berkeley (two blocks from downtown Berkeley BART), for the release party of Instant City’s fabulous “Love” issue. Other readers include Benjamin Perez, Loren Rhoads, and Matt Rohrer.

If you go and you're a Daddy Dialectic reader, introduce yourself. I'd love to meet you.

Bridging the Generations

Spot has more female admirers at 5½ months than I’ve racked up in a lifetime. The curious thing about it is that most of them are over 65. Spot has managed to acquire his senior groupies in the course of regular visits to his grandparents’ retirement community a few blocks away, where he puts on his show a few mornings a week. It seems to be a straightforward win-win all around: Spot has more grandmas than can possibly be hugged and cooed at in one visit, and they, having already seen most of their own grandchildren reach adolescence and beyond, get to enjoy the hassle-free pleasure of having a baby around. When things start to turn sour, I’m there to wheel him offstage. He’s been called the community mascot and the community therapy baby. Who needs a dog when you can pass Spot around?

Less than a year before Spot was born, my wife and her brother, who are American-born Chinese, convinced their Chinese-born parents to do the unthinkable: defy an Asian-American law of cultural gravity and move east from the West Coast. There were a lot of good reasons for this reversal of the American Dream: they were by then retired, my wife’s mother was increasingly dependent and needed an affordable assisted-living environment -- which they weren’t going to find in the Bay Area -- and we were getting serious about starting a family. Even with all of these centripetal forces at work, it still took a good amount of cajoling. In the end, they gave in, and are now quite happily living within a mile of their only grandson.

So now the generations are reunited, and Spot has his groupies. And I am infinitely thankful for having one set of grand-folks very close by, and for the affection and enrichment they give him, to say nothing of the everyday practical assistance. I don’t know how long we’ll all be together, so I don’t know what he’ll remember, if anything, of these weeks and months when he joins the ladies of the club for late morning tea in the sun room, or finds a parking space between the variety of walkers and other contraptions during wheelchair aerobics, or listens to family gossip in Chinese. But he's being cared for by many hands; he's becoming familiar with faces of all shapes, sizes, and colors; he's learning to trust people, not just mom and dad, to get an early taste of the conversation of mankind.

But he's not the only one who is growing as a result. Now, not only do I find myself in the role of at home dad, constantly trying to process what that means and trying to adapt it to the odd assortment of personas that make up my identity; I find myself in a sort of team effort with none other than my father-in-law, who like me has blossomed into a huge "baby guy." It's a metamorphosis that has surprised his own adult children. My wife assures me it's a result of the physics of Confucian kinship structure: barred from overt displays of paternal affection to his immediate children, he is liberated with the arrival of a grandchild, who he is no longer directly responsible for. The upshot is that Spot is now getting a good chunk of his care from two men of different generations.

I don't know what it must look like from the outside when an underemployed academic historian (me) and a retired chemical engineer have a polite argument about whether Spot needs a new diaper, or when he and I huddle in the ill-equipped lobby restroom handling a major poopy blowout like two army field surgeons. I regularly grill him over how much sleep Spot had, how much he ate, and inspect their back bedroom to make sure it's being kept up to the highest nap-time standards. But recently Grandpa has completely trumped me: he's come up with big plans to fly kites on the beach next spring. I'm jealous. Three Cigars and a Playdate, anyone?

Of course I jest; I couldn't be happier that Spot has such an involved grandfather (to speak of only one half of the family) -- the more kites, the better, and I'm happy to let grandpa take the lead. I happen to enjoy kites. In fact, the inner boy in me perked up when I first heard this idea. "Wow," I thought, "I haven't done that since I was 10, and it's been way too long." Maybe it's something we can all do, the three of us, out there on the beach when the whitecaps roll in.

Poem after a summer morning stroll with my son

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

--Dylan Thomas, "Poem in October"

Dudes and Diapers

A few weeks ago my wife and I had the crazy idea to schlepp Spot to Lower Manhattan for a good friend's wedding. Spot was a good sport about the whole thing, as usual, asking only that certain minimal physiological requirements be met in exchange for enduring the horrendous inconvenience of air travel and the occasionally horrendous experience of a wedding reception. He slept profoundly through both ceremony and reception, attired in a navy blazer, khaki pants, and a pacifier stuck in his mouth like a cork in a jug.

But the wedding is not the point; the point is that on the way back to Chicago, Spot had his first in-flight poop. It was bound to happen; Spot has been raking up firsts of this sort all along the way, and shows no signs of slowing down. While he doesn't seem to care much for the act of pooping in and of itself, he certainly enjoys the aftermath. He really, really loves it. I can understand the obvious satisfaction of getting cleaned up, and if he's as much of a psychotic neat-freak as his father, then perhaps this is an early manifestation of my legacy. But there's more to it than that. He's into the whole Gestalt. Dropping Spot onto the changing table - or whatever equivalent we've contrived for the moment - is like dosing him with an enormous happy pill. We've had some of our best times there. My wife has had the same experience. Pooping, family, and happiness; how much better (or Freudian) can things get?

Without getting into the probable sources of his pleasure, I know that for me "doing a diaper" has joined the family of certain other elementary procedures, like changing a flat tire, sewing a button, or whipping up a white sauce, that are the mark of a generally competent adult. But beyond that, it's just fun. How could it not be, when Spot gets that giggly smile on his face and then cantilevers his legs into frog position on the changing-table, all while the seat-belt sign is blinking and the turbulence gets nasty? "Come on old man," he's saying to me, "let's see you get that diaper on me this time!" I'm the one who freaks out, he just enjoys the show.

I managed to keep Spot from sliding into either the sink or the toilet, and one day he'll thank me for this, but as I picked him up I bumped his head against the curved bulkhead and this he refused to tolerate. Fortunately, the jet engines were handy and did a fine job of muffling the wails, allowing us to return to our seats just a few minutes later with no one the wiser.

"How'd it go?" asked the guy next to me, an affable MBA with all sorts of interesting things to say about affordable housing in New York. I told him how I bumped Spot on the curved bulkhead and he lit up with a boyish smile. "That's what I'll tell my wife," he said, with what my own father would describe as a shit-eating grin. "I'm too tall, I can't change the diaper in-flight because I can't do all that in the airplane restroom." He seemed satisfied, like he had found something he had been looking for. I have no doubt that this fellow had changed his fair share of diapers, but he seemed to also know that he was expected not to like it, and not to want to do it, because he was a man, and that if he found just the right excuse, the world would let him off the hook.

The diaper thing seems to run pretty deep, and I have a feeling that it lies at the root of our gendered conceptions of labor. Women handle small dependent things. Men control big impersonal things. Women are closer to the raw, men to the cooked. Or so it goes. Personally, I don't quite get it when our babysitter tells us that "most men don't like to change diapers," something that's been repeated to me over and over again, mostly by women, who are in a position to know. Since most men, I assume, understand the importance of consistently wiping their own asses, I'm not sure what accounts for the hesitation to wipe someone else's, especially that of one's offspring.

My wife recently shared a statistic with me, which I can't source but I'm sure the readers of this blog can, indicating that among adult caregivers of elderly parents, 38% are daughters, while only 7% are sons. If diapering represents an aversion to infant dependency, this statistic suggests that the aversion reemerges in the presence of elderly dependency at the far end of life's trajectory. Caregiving is feminized, whether it be for the young, the old, the sick or anyone else.

But culture is full of contradictions and capable of endless permutations. Diapering could conceivably go the route of national barrista competitions, where what had once been a menial service operation is transformed into an artisanal skill that is subject to expert appreciation on the basis of speed, technical, and artistic merit. Had such a panel of judges viewed my in-flight performance, I'm sure I would have wilted as they raised their placards: 8.5, 7, 6.5. After all, making the baby cry is the equivalent of falling on your rear-end during a triple axel turn in figure skating.

Father's Day Redux

Last year's Father's Day post, here reproduced in it's entirety.

Scenes from playgroup, Karen's house:

"No!" cried Nico, snatching a fire truck out of Liko's hands. "Nico! Nico!" he said, clutching the truck to his chest.

Nico's dad Stefano took him into a corner and held him close. For the 10th time that afternoon, Stefano patiently explained the concept of sharing to his toddler.

Nico twisted out of his dad’s arms and ran off. Stefano's shoulders slumped. Nico had been a handful; he was often a handful in playgroup, pushing other kids, throwing things, grabbing toys, requiring constant management. Stefano was plainly worn out and perhaps slightly embarrassed.

Among the parents, there was an uncomfortable moment of silence.

Suddenly Karen spoke: "You're doing a great job, Dad."

It struck me as just the right thing to say. "Yeah," I added. "Stefano, you're a really good dad."

Karen and I both meant it.

Stefano just put his head in hands and sighed heavily.

---------------

The next day I was at a restaurant where Liko and I are regulars. Liko made himself at home, trying to get in every corner, touching everything, saying "Hi!" to everybody. It had been like that all day (and the day before, and the day before that...), him going a hundred miles an hour, me trying to keep up.

A professionally dressed middle-aged woman approached me during a respite, when Liko stopped to caress and sniff a row of flowers on the patio.

"I've been watching you two. I just wanted to say that you're doing a really great job."

"Uh, really?" I was taken aback and maybe a little guarded, uncomfortable with the idea that our antics had been so closely regarded.

She noticed my reaction, and tried to explain. "I raised two girls myself, and now they're both in their twenties. I've seen a lot of parents in action, and I wanted to say that you have a really nice touch."

"Really?"

"I can see you know him well and understand him. You have a really good sense of when it's time to let him be and when you have to hold him back."

"Thanks." I tried to make up for reacting like a dolt. "I really appreciate that."

Liko took off into the restaurant and the clanging, steam-filled kitchen. I dashed in and grabbed him; when we returned, the woman was gone.

Afterwards, I thought about her praise and my reaction. I was embarrassed, feeling unworthy, initially thinking, actually, that she was a little strange for watching us, and even patronizing me in going out of her way to deliver the praise.

Then I thought to myself: you are a shithead.

She was trying to make me feel good, just as Karen and I had tried to pat Stefano on the back; such acts make a better world. I tried to see myself as the woman might have seen me. I tried on the idea of seeing myself through her eyes, of dropping my guard and just basking in praise from a stranger. Why not?

--------------

It's Father's Day, a day of praise for dads. Well, why not have such a day? Why not reflect the best in a dad back to him, so that he can see himself in some more exalted context than the diaper-changing, food-throwing, toddler-chasing reality in which he lives?

Is it just a greeting-card cliché to say that every dad is a hero? Maybe not. In parenthood, there's an element of evolutionary self-interest: animals that we are, we seek reproductive success. But as anyone who grew up reading comic books knows, heroes become heroes by ultimately transcending self-interest. It is always the villain who acts purely on self-interest, however deranged. The figure we call a hero acts on behalf of something greater than himself: an ideal, a tribe, a family.

Like Rilke's Apollo, the hero asks us to change our lives. The quest to become that hero is what we call commitment. Commitment - political and personal - creates an image that we chase all our lives and never reach, and yet there's something heroic in acts like caring for a child or marching against war, which defy distance and death.

We not just admit that to ourselves? Why not strive to be heroes, instead of the bunch of losers that we might feel ourselves to be? We need ideals. We need praise. "Our strongest weapons are our stories, the stories we tell our children, the ones we whisper to each other in beds of our own making, the myths that fill our imaginations," says Dialectical Daddy Tom in his June 17 post. "It is those weapons we must employ over and over to create the world we want."

--------------

It's Father's Day. Praise to my father!

I won't share with the reader his many fine personal qualities - I don't expect you to care - but I will say that my dad modeled for me the kind of thoughtful heroism that I'm trying (and possibly failing) to describe.

No, he's not perfect. Of course not; I’m not even sure what “perfect” means. But he taught me through his actions how to take care of other people; even now he asks me to change my life. For that I'm grateful.

More Old vs. New

Here's an interesting essay by Penelope Trunk entitled "Generation Y: Our American Dream." Trunk indulges in a little ahistorical generational warfare (something I'm not keen on, for what it's worth) in order to make a case I agree with:

The best of Generation X and Y are slow to move into the work force and quick to leave it. According to the department of labor, people in their 20s change jobs, on average, every two years. And Generation X is shifting in and out of the workplace in order to spend more time with kids. It's costing companies a lot of money, and they're paying millions of dollars a year in consulting fees to figure out how to decrease turnover.

There are many reasons for high turnover, but the most fundamental one is that baby boomers have set up a work place that uses financial bribes to get people to give up their time: Work 60 hours a week and we'll pay you six figures. Generation Y will not have this. To hold out money as a carrot is insulting to a generation raised to think personal development is the holy grail of time spent well.

Baby boomers are also baffled by women who grow large careers in their 20s and then dump them in order to spend time with kids. Newsflash: Generation X values their family more than their money. Our American Dream is not about buying a big house, our dream is about keeping a family together. You can tell a lot about values by the terms that are coined. When baby boomers were raising kids they invented the term latchkey kid and yuppie; we invented the terms shared care and stay-at-home-dad. The divorce rate for baby boomers was higher than any other generation. We can afford to have less money because most of us don't need to fund two separate households.

I don't like the way Trunk sets up Boomers as the enemy; it's self-righteous, and not an accurate reflection of reality. Generations are complex and contradictory, and I can point to lots of people my age who don't fit Trunk's vision of Generations X and Y. Moreover, struggles and trends initiated by previous generations made our choices possible. It's spoiled to think otherwise.

But, she's put her finger on something important and widespread, and perhaps she's not wrong to feel a certain degree of generational pride, or at least amplify the parts we should feel proud of.

Here's another link of interest: a new bill in California will make it easier for men to change their last names after marriage.

Old vs. New

Three links. In all of them, you can see the old world standing side by side with the new:

1. "Workers inventing new types of career models," Chicago Tribune. Describes how young parents of both genders are creating careers paths that permit time off with children. "There's lots of talk these days about finding new career models that no longer force people -- usually women -- to choose between work and family and that provide better transitions back to work for those who take time off," Barbara Rose reports. "The reasons are obvious. The 1950s-era model for success -- a career with no employment gaps and ever-increasing responsibility -- suited a privileged class made up largely of white middle-class males with stay-at-home wives. Today's workforce is far more diverse. Often both spouses work, and younger couples are less willing than their parents to sacrifice family time for careers."

2. "Signs of Détente in the Battle Between Venus and Mars," New York Times. This coverage of a study I've already mentioned twice here at Daddy Dialectic. Sociologists Monahan Lang and Barbara J. Risman "analyzed findings from studies based on national census data, in-depth interviews, and dozens of surveys." They found more similarities than differences in men and women. “The evidence overwhelmingly shows an ongoing shift toward what we call ‘gender convergence,’ an ever-increasing similarity in how men and women live and what they want from their lives,” they write. The Times also reports: "Convergence shows up more in younger parents, said Kathleen Gerson, author of 'Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career, and Motherhood.' After conducting 120 in-depth interviews with men and women ages 18 to 32, Dr. Gerson found that Generation X fathers spent more time with their children than did baby boomer fathers, and that both sexes aspired to the same ideal: 'a balance between work and family.'"

3. "I made a friend..." Thanks to Google, I ran across this personal blog entry, in which the writer, a stay-at-home mom, meets a stay-at-home dad at the playground:

I'm a happily married woman who will be faithful to Mike til the day he dies (cause I plan on out livin him LOL) but today I met someone and it was like we'd known each other for years! He's a stay at home dad with 3 year old who charlotte got on great with. And where did this amazing encounter take place? At the local park... yeah i know LOL

I've been married ten years and apart from Bob, don't really have any male friends any more, and I"ve always liked the company of boys/men. SO not sure if it was a void being filled or not, but in a purely platonic way we talked and talked and talked and talked and pusehd the kids on teh swings and caught them on the slides and we all had an amazing day today.

His son goes to different school to Christine, I declined swapping numbers or emails so there'll be no further contact, but I have to tell you I had an amazing day today. Was like a kid in a play ground LOL It's not often we meet like minded people. If he'd been a woman I think I'd have a new best friend. But he wasn't and well appearances matter, inuendo and the reality is men and women really can't just be friends ...well not in my experience.

This story made me very sad. I once thought that the isolation of stay-at-home dads was either a myth or self-imposed, but the more dads and moms I talk to, the more I realize that it is a real problem for many parents. At a time when families are so diverse and so isolated, it is truly self-destructive to declare certain families out of bounds -- especially when you feel the kind of connection this woman describes.

4. I just published a piece at Mothers Movement Online about friendship between stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads--well, it's really about new gender roles and how that shapes the social world of parenting. Here's my personal prescription for negotiating our differences:

I look around at the other parents, moms and dads, and I see my community. I believe in our creativity and resilience, because experience and science tells me that's who we are, and I believe that we will develop new forms and understandings and names that will be every bit as comfortable and familiar to our grandchildren as the nuclear family was to our grandmothers and grandfathers. We're not at a stage where it pays to limit our options. I say we throw open the gates and let everyone in who loves and cares for other human beings, and let's see what happens.

Equality vs. Equality

Recently I've been hearing a lot of comments from anti-feminists on how feminism has "failed" or from feminists about how men are just as bad today as they were when feminism was reborn four decades ago. Like a snake eating its own tail, these ideas start in different places but end up saying the same thing, mostly to each other: that egalitarian families don't and can't exist, primarily because of the innate perfidy of men and the natural weakness of women. Both positions are empirically wrong: by every measure, women have advanced in rights and economic power, men are taking on more housework and childcare, and the attitudes and behaviors of men and women are converging.

For example: Two weeks ago I was a guest on "The Agenda with Steve Paikin," a Canadian public affairs program. The topic was the "mommy wars," and the star guest was--no, not me--Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake, yet another over-hyped book that denigrates caregiving and promotes the "opt-out" myth. (This refers to the belief that more and more women are opting out of careers for a more traditional homemaker role, a false trend which has been totally debunked by economist Heather Boushey, as well as the sociologists Molly Monahan Lang and Barbara J. Risman. For an intelligent take on Bennetts' book as part of current trends in mommy book publishing, see Mothers Movement Online -- you'll have to scroll to the bottom of the editorial note for that issue.)

The "Agenda" panel started with a whimper when a Canadian conservative activist dismissed feminism as a failure. Her evidence was that women had not yet achieved perfect parity with men in housework and economic power, and therefore, she implied, we should all just get back to the good old-fashioned, all-natural sexual division of labor. This is like saying that a first-generation college student has "failed" if her sophomore year grade point average is only 3.1, and so she should drop out and go to work at McDonalds. Later Paikin told me that my family's childcare arrangement seemed pretty egalitarian to him, and he asked me if that impression was true. I hesitated before I answered, mostly because I was reluctant to pin a medal on my chest for something like this, which I felt like Paikin was asking me to do. But I also found myself locked in a split-second internal debate about the meaning of egalitarianism in a relationship between a man and a woman.

Families with stay-at-home dads are not, strictly speaking, egalitarian. Instead they are reverse traditional. One spouse has money and a career and all the benefits and burdens that come with that. The other is also working, but it is unpaid work that is scorned by our society--which leaves the spouse, male in these cases, profoundly vulnerable in the event of a sudden change in the family, such as divorce. The relationship is indeed asymmetrical when viewed in terms of money and power (an equation that leaves out love, trust, and other intangibles that drive work-family choices, but I'll leave that discussion for another time).

However, we think of these families as egalitarian because if enough men stepped out of the workforce to take of children, men and women as social groups would get that much closer to achieving economic, and possibly political, equality. So, from this viewpoint, inequality between two individuals might result in much greater equality between two social groups. Of course, this might, and probably would, have the long-term effect of equalizing the relationship between individual husbands and wives, because if more men are pausing their careers to take care of kids, then society might open up to seeing caregiving as a legitimate choice.

Leslie Bennetts--like Linda Hirshman, our favorite faux-feminist critic here at Daddy Dialectic--doesn't think it should work like that. She thinks that equality happens only when both spouses work: in this view, personal equality goes hand in hand with social equality. No one should be vulnerable--and when no one is vulnerable, society is equal. In her book, Bennetts provides example after example of women stranded by death, divorce, or the sudden unemployment of husbands, who found themselves shut out of the job market after years as homemakers.

Her case has a certain hardheaded appeal. I believe every single one of the stories Bennetts tells, and I think her basic warning to women is solid and important, though she undermines her case by strongly implying that stay-at-home parents are idiots. Both Bennetts and Hirshman are heavily invested in the notion that men will not share in childcare and housework because childcare and housework are boring and difficult, and therefore these are tasks best left to women who are not as educated and affluent as the ones profiled in their books. Their vision of equality for two people is based on a larger vision of inequality between social classes--which in our society is gendered and racialized. In other words, the people who end up taking care of their children are poor and working class women of color, often immigrants--and many of them are doing it under the table, with little in the way of job security and benefits.

These questions--plus caveats and doubts from my personal life--all raced through my mind in the second before I answered Paikin. (Onscreen, my internal debate sounded like this: "Um, er, ah, well...") Then a week after the Paikin show, I was interviewed by a reporter writing about work-family balance for men. She asked me to respond to an interview she did with a well-known national feminist leader who acknowledged that while men were spending more time with children and doing more housework than ever before, inequality persists even in seemingly egalitarian, dual-income couples because the "men were hogging all the good chores for themselves." Instead of cleaning toilets and changing diapers, the well-known feminist leader charged, men were doing pleasant things, like cooking gourmet meals and watching kids cavort on playgrounds.

Hell, maybe they are. I asked the reporter if the feminist leader had any empirical evidence to back this opinion up. The reporter said, probably not. Later I actually researched this; I didn't find any studies indicating that the men who were taking on more housework and childcare were also taking away chores that their wives might deem more desirable. (In fact, this is an area that needs more research: most studies cover the quantity of domestic labor and how it’s divided; few tackle qualitative questions about how the housework is subjectively experienced.)

Here we see another layer in the question of equality: even when structural equality is achieved between two people, perhaps inequality can persist in the content of the relationship. Husband and wife are making the same amount of money and doing the same amount of housework, but husband thinks he is having more fun and so does wife. (For the record, I think these couples need therapy, not a social movement.)

In each of the examples I've just provided, we can see that one person's equality is often predicated on some other inequality. In different ways, each also raises basic questions about what constitutes individual equality in a society that is based on social and economic inequality. In a winner-take-all society like ours, it's not hard to see why so many people, feminists and anti-feminists alike, have so much trouble believing that egalitarian families are possible and desirable, or that egalitarianism might be compatible with caregiving.

Certainly, we know that couples who do try to build egalitarian relationships face serious cultural and economic obstacles, including criticism from relatives, the absence of parental leave, lack of quality daycare, and so on. But despite this, we know that egalitarian families exist. They really do. Their existence has been documented by social scientists like Barbara Risman and Scott Coltrane. I see them in the research I'm doing and I see them in my own daily life. Yesterday morning I was at a kid's birthday party. At one point there were three dads in a room changing three diapers, with one mom assisting. It was no big deal; it was perfectly normal. But from everything I've ever read or heard, prior to 1968 this would have been a very rare sight indeed.

Far from failing, feminism's impact has been enormously far-reaching; it might well be one of the most successful social movements in American history. But its successes are sometimes hard to define; the new reality is sometimes at variance with the old-time utopian dreams of thinkers and activists. I have discovered that in the real world, egalitarian relationships do not follow one simple-minded ideological model. Sometimes men and women take turns at home and at work, and so their level of equality must be measured over time. Others split it all fifty-fifty. Many parents decide that one of them must stay home--and sometimes the jobs just aren't available--but still do their best to ensure that the stay-at-home parent retains some degree of economic and emotional power parity.

But that equality will always be curtailed when the rules of the game are rigged against caregivers. What combination of policies and attitudes would allow parents of both genders to stay home with children without risking a fall into the margins of our society? We need to culturally validate caregiving as a life choice for both men and women; build social security, legal protections, and training and educational opportunities for caregivers who are returning to work; provide more parental leave, flextime, quality childcare, and guaranteed wage replacement for both men and women of all social classes, not just the affluent; and build infrastructure that the rest of the industrialized world takes for granted, such as national health care, that provide for the basic well-being of all families.

This is where I think progressive leaders and writers like Bennetts should be putting their formidable energies. Women who make choices that white, affluent feminists deem bad are not the ones who created or are maintaining male domination. The same goes for men who take on more housework and childcare, who are making themselves part of the solution. These two groups should not be blamed, attacked, or erased--especially by people who claim that they want to build a more egalitarian society.

I've come to feel very strongly that we have entered a stage when it is critical for both men and women to see positive examples of egalitarian families in action. They need to hear about successes and they need to help each other to create new expectations. Given that our society provides so little support for egalitarian families, it is nothing short of astonishing that so many couples have come so far. They deserve credit and encouragement, not suspicion and insults.

Next time someone asks me a question like the one Paikin posed, here's what I'm going to say: "My family is as egalitarian as we can make it--and social science tells us that my family is not unique. Parents all over North America are building alternatives to the traditional family, which was based on male privilege, but those alternatives are as diverse as the families themselves. However, these families are largely invisible and their arrangements are not supported by public or workplace policy. We need to change attitudes and policies to support the expansion of egalitarian families, because that's the only ideal that makes any sense in a world where 80 percent of mothers work."

Race, Violence and (Black) Fatherhood

For a little while now, I've been stopping by a local bakery every Friday morning to pick up a challah loaf. Most often I was served by Charles, a good-looking black man who ran the morning shift, seemed to love his job, and clearly had a sense of pride in his work that he shared with the rest of the staff, a mix of young neighborhood and university students.

We never really got to that level of familiarity that sometimes develops between regular customers and staff. But he clearly had a rapport with other customers, especially students, even the geeky foreign ones whose English was not great and who spilled their change all over the counter in the middle of the morning rush. He had an aura of toughness and street-cred that was unmistakable but not threatening. He had been there for what seemed like forever. The staff clearly looked up to him, and he seemed to anchor a hip and friendly camaraderie behind the bread racks.

The last time I stopped by, about a month ago, I had the Spot in a stroller. Charles had just finished the morning shift and was waiting for his ride by the door on a sunny but chilly spring day. I'm not sure if he had a car. I didn't know then that we had a few substantive things in common: fatherhood and age. He had 4 children and was 38, almost exactly the same age as me. I wished him a good weekend, and he returned the pleasantry as I maneuvered my stroller through the foyer, preoccupied with the fluctuating caffeine level in my bloodstream and the timing of Spot's next meal. That was the last time I saw him.

Charles Carpenter was shot to death on Saturday night, May 19.

I happened to know who he was. But he was preceded and followed by others unknown to me. A few weeks before, one teenage black male boarded a CTA bus near a local high school and fired four rounds, killing another teenage black male, who happened to be someone's only son. Just a few days ago, a black bank teller was murdered by robbers when he insisted that he didn't know the bank vault's combination. Tramaine Gibson was 22 and father to a 4 year-old daughter. All of these spasms of violence happened in seconds. They are part of the steady beat of black-on-black violence that fills the morning metro section, a tiny bit of Bagdhad hell here on the Chicago River.

A former black student of mine, a devout 30-something single father, once told me that most young men in his neighborhood felt there were basically two avenues in life that offered real chances of success, and the respect that came with it: rapping or sports. Charles Carpenter wasn't heading down either of those avenues. Neither was Tramaine Gibson. They were both holding down jobs and raising children on the classic middle class model. They were doing what for so many American men is a matter of course. In their case, it was heroic.

Looking at the Spot as he fidgets in his stroller, I've become aware that his being is the greatest risk I will ever assume. His conception was an enormous gamble in a game of chance that never ends. In a lot of ways he has the odds in his favor -- so far. Not all children are so lucky. If Charles at the bakery were still around, I would make it a point to say hello more often. To find out what he thinks about being a dad, what his kids are like. To let him know that he has my respect.

Be a Man!

The Spot had no idea what was coming when he started rehearsing his routine for the future Olympic sport of synchronized water-disco on the pediatrician's examination table -- supine, rhythmical frog-kicks, accompanied by a succession of grandiose arm gestures cribbed from ballet (my wife's pre-natal influence, no doubt), all topped off with that silent, toothless smile -- none of this prepared him for the triple whammy of vaccination shots administered to his thighs. The lag between stimulus and response was shorter now than it had been before; this time, it only took him about three seconds to realize he had been double-crossed, that this wasn't water-disco, and that it really hurt.

Our pediatrician's nurse, a street-wise 30-something woman from Chicago's south-side, quickly withdrew each syringe from Spot's leg and slammed it into the vinyl-coated cushion of the examination table, leaving three hypodermics wavering on their long beaks like some kind of ancient marsh grass. While Spot was working to connect the sensation of pain in his leg to his sensation that his leg was a part of his body, I was thrown off as I tried to process the needles in the cushion, like arrows stuck in a straw target, or cutting knives on a butcher's block. None of it seemed to match the high-tech vision of a sterile medical utopia that I had brought with me that groggy morning.

Before I could sort out my own sensations, the nurse leaned over to Spot, still lost in his wasp-like fury, and advised him: "be a man!" Tongue-in-cheek, of course, given that it would be a challenge at this point for Spot to match the intelligence of a dog or the coordination of a chicken, let alone the fortitude of a "Man." But I marked the event. Here was a quite conspicuous intrusion of cultural conditioning. For all my friends who ponder why it is that boys just gravitate towards trucks or become aggressive on the playground, I can now point to this: just four months out of his mother's womb, and Spot was being told how to manage pain in a manner appropriate to his gender. No doubt the larger process of gender acculturation has already started, in a million ways that we are unaware of, interacting with all the hormonal feedback loops that go hand in hand with learning, socialization, and development.

Granted, there is great value to managing one's relfexes, to gaining discipline over one's sensations, control of one's body and its processes, and building a high tolerance for discomfort. But this is Spot we're talking about, not an advanced yoga guru or a Stoic philosopher. The pain may as well have come from an out-of-control nail-gun that threatened to perforate his entire bottom. Cries of alarm were entirely warranted, adults had to be notified, dangers removed.

So Spot and I decided to turn the tables on our well-meaning nurse. Rather than adopting the grim ideal of manly impassiveness -- admirable in its way, at certain times, in certain circumstances, by both men and women -- we turned on the power of babyhood. I got Spot up on his legs to work out the pain, and helped him do a little jig on the table. Before you know it, he was cooing and clucking, the toothless smile was back, and our nurse was down on her elbows, down in Spot's world. It is an enviable place, where there are no grudges, where the joy is in the moment, and a universe of fascination unfolds from the smallest thing. This is a baby, I thought, not a man, not even really a boy. He will become those things, or something else, or some combination of them all -- whatever they mean, whatever they are -- later, and hopefully of his own volition.