This is the big time now, we must become adults now, he and
I, less he than I for like him I have been for some time now a child again. But
this is the big time, getting up and getting going, going to someplace where
they will not wait, to the bus stop of the school bus where the system says you
shall be there and the system will not wait because that is the system’s weight.
No more waiting, you shall be there, five hundred thousand others are at the bus
stops and who are we that they should wait for us when we have failed to get
there? Not like preschool these morning times that are coming, not
like yarn shops, no napping Irish Setters no ladies counting skeins when you
come on rainy days to browse and think of lovely colors. I forgot your inside
shoes once and went home to get them, I forgot your lunch bag once and went
home to get it, and in minutes I swung along this happy link between your
bright room and ours.
Driving to Camp
Driving to camp, not your first camp but your second camp,
not the close by one but the far away camp. At one end of this road is a house
it is our house, with some books and furniture and lamps that in the morning pull
the corners towards the middle of the house, and at the other end is another
house, a different house, with three Chinese ladies and no lamps but ceiling
lights and dirty walls like dirty walls in China but installed in this other house
which is where the road has its other end. There is a lady there and two girls
and one of them is beautiful, taller than she should be, so tall there is
nothing else besides a perfect face, a face so perfect I wonder why no one has
taken it why it is in this one single house on one single street at the road’s
other end.
Talking on the Road
The future is in this fact that because we drive we also
talk, unless we listen to Lady Gaga. Because after the driving you will be
gone, with these women or those women or any other women who are the women who
teach you, as I taught you five years running until we turned you over for the
days and pull the line in slowly only in the afternoons again, not too fast
again, too many questions makes you drop the hook again, but slowly, until you follow
the thread again and tell us of the day and drop your stories one by one into
the bucket that sits where we used to spend our time together.
South Side North Side
You ask why we are driving and why the driving is to the
North Side from the South Side and not the South Side from the North Side. The
North Side has the yarn shops and the bakeries and the Lego Store and the
Chinese camp with its beautiful girl and the mezuzah on the door of the house at
the end of the road, and the South Side does not have these. Because once upon
a time South Side people moved to the North Side is what Mama said and you ask
me why and I say because once upon a time new people moved to the South Side
and the old people didn’t want to share. Share what you say their neighborhood
I say why you say because the old people refused to live beside the new
people I say why you say because the new people were black I say. I don’t mind it, you say. I am happy to hear that for a
while but it doesn’t change the driving and it is still all very complicated.
“It’s time to stop fooling ourselves,” says the Princeton professor and former State Department official. “The women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.”
Feminist commentators on her essay have been quick to say that men as a group need to pick up the slack at home. “The problem isn’t that women are trying to do too much, it’s that men aren’t doing nearly enough,” writes author and activist Jessica Valenti in The Nation, citing a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing that working women still do the bulk of housework and childcare.
I don’t quarrel with their arguments or their facts. But what’s missing from critiques like that one is an acknowledgement of how much men have evolved in just three generations.
“Men are changing very rapidly,” feminist historian Stephanie Coontz once told me. “In fact, as a historian, I have to say that they are changing, in a period of thirty years, in ways that took most women 150 years of thinking and activism.” According to every single study, men today do more dishes and bring more kids to school than their fathers and grandfathers ever did.
Enter the awkward concept of gratitude. It’s awkward because many women frankly resent the idea that men should be thanked for doing the work they’ve always been expected to do. The resentment is personal and it’s political. It’s personal, because every woman who comments on these issues has had a man in her life that didn’t do his fair share. And it’s political, because the debate is fundamentally about the balance of power between men and women as groups. In fact, research shows that men will withhold gratitude as an expression of power over women.
“We should be grateful for anything that makes our lives easier,” says my friend Suzanne (not her real name), who is now divorced. “But at the same time, I’d grit my teeth because he was a big hero for doing a sink full of dishes.”
All partnerships have a division of labor, but Suzanne felt as though her specific labors had been imposed on her. Millions of women feel the way she did. This creates conflict, of course, but it also interferes with practicing fundamental relationship skills like gratitude. (Other skills like forgiveness and empathy are important, too, but here I'm just focusing on gratitude.)
Why should that be a problem? Because study after study shows that gratitude is essential to marital happiness. Suzanne didn’t just resent that her husband was a big hero for doing what she did every day. The bigger problem is that her daily work was thankless, and even denigrated by her husband: “If dinner wasn’t perfect,” she added, “he’d whine about it.”
The place of gratitude in marriage was explored by none other than UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who created a concept cited in Valenti’s article: “the second shift,” which suggests that working women go home to sinks full of dirty dishes to do. Hochschild came up with another catchy phrase, “economy of gratitude,” which turns up much less often in feminist commentary. Her theory says expressing gratitude for the labor of your spouse is more important to marital happiness than the precise division of labor. It’s not just who does the dishes; it’s also who gets thanked by whom for doing the dishes.
Researchers Jess Alberts and Angela Threthewey put Hochschild's “economy of gratitude” theory to the test in a series of focus groups, interviews, and surveys of heterosexual and same-sex couples. They “found evidence that gratitude isn’t just a way to mitigate the negative effects of an unequal division of labor. Rather, a lack of gratitude may be connected to why that division of labor is so unequal to begin with," as they write in "Love, Honor, and Thank."
So when a spouse expresses gratitude to an "under-performing" partner for picking up his socks off the floor, he's reminded that it's not fair that she's usually the one who does that. "And since people who receive gifts typically feel obligated to reciprocate, this insight can lead the under-performing partner to offer 'gifts' of his own by contributing more to household tasks. In addition, the over-performing partner is likely to experience less resentment and frustration once her efforts are recognized and appreciated."
Thus expressing gratitude does not necessarily perpetuate inequality, as some fear. Instead, it can help make relationships more equal. Unfortunately, the research suggests that men are worse than women when it comes to being grateful. This makes for an emotionally lethal combination: tradition imposes housework and childcare on women, and then individual men forget to be grateful for their wives’ contributions—a habit that might have a lot to do with maintaining their own social power. As psychologist Robert Emmons notes in his essay, "Pay it Forward":
It has been argued that males in particular may resist experiencing and expressing gratefulness insomuch as it implies dependency and indebtedness. One fascinating study in the 1980s found that American men were less likely to regard gratitude positively than were German men, and to view it as less constructive and useful than their German counterparts. Gratitude presupposes so many judgments about debt and dependency that it is easy to see why supposedly self-reliant Americans would feel queasy about even discussing it.
While the research evidence for this idea is scant, it personally resonates with me. Averages don't tell us much about individuals, and certainly there are men who are better at gratitude than women. But I have struggled to weave gratitude into my life, and so do many men I know. So if American marriages need more gratitude, that change should start with men. Guys, I’m begging you: Go home tonight and thank your wife for everything she does. Be specific; the "meta-thanks" won't work, because it doesn't show that you recognize the contribution as a unique and personal thing. Here, just watch this video:
So, should women be grateful to men for doing the dishes? My own answer is yes and no. Yes, individual women should express gratitude to the men in their lives for what they do, for the sake of positive reinforcement and marital sustainability. But no, I don't think women should be thankful to men as a group for changing so much in recent decades. They could have and should have evolved earlier than they did, when women started taking jobs in large numbers.
This brings us to questions of power and how it shapes gratitude, which has been the subject of recent lab experiments.
One 2011 study by Yeri Cho and Nathanael J. Fast paired two study participants and asked them to perform a task together—designating one the supervisor and the other the subordinate. The results were fascinating, and have useful implications for marriages. They found that gratitude from supervisors made subordinates happier, of course. But they also found that supervisors who had been challenged in any way by their subordinates were more likely to turn around and insult that person.
This is a dynamic that defines many marriages. If a wife challenges her husband’s competency at home—“Don’t you know how to sweep a floor?!”—the research suggests he’ll end up denigrating her own contributions, a vicious cycle that might be depressingly familiar to some readers.
To be fair, men aren’t the only ones who forget to be grateful. It’s commonplace for full-time caregivers—usually (but not always) women—to forget to thank breadwinning spouses—usually (but not always) men—for their efforts and sacrifices. Supporting a family is hard, especially in hard economic times, and can entail intense stress and deferred dreams. Even two-income couples, whose members are theoretically facing similar stresses, can fall into the ingratitude trap: They become too busy to see or appreciate what the other is doing.
Indeed, gratitude must go both ways to be effective. It’s the role of the spouse to serve as witness to their partner’s life. Gratitude tells the spouse that they are being seen, that their sacrifices and struggles are visible and honored.
But interpersonal power imbalances are pernicious in another way: They make us cynical about others’ motivations for expressing gratitude. In a study published in January of this year, M. Ena Inesi and colleagues ran five experiments testing how power shapes gratitude. They found that people with power tended to believe others thanked them mainly to curry favor down the line, not out of authentic feeling. This cynicism, the researchers found, made power-holders less likely to express gratitude to people with less power. In marriages, this gratitude corruption also led to lower levels of marital commitment in the more powerful spouse.
The bottom line from these and similar experiments is clear: Having power makes you less grateful, which just exacerbates power differences and all the resentments that go along with them. But expressing gratitude can help break that vicious cycle and change the balance of power. For me as a man, this amounts to a persuasive feminist argument. Power inequalities cut us off from genuine and necessary human feelings like gratitude—and that can push us a little further away from the possibility of happiness. It follows that it’s in our interest to act against power imbalances.
We can do that through our votes and political activism, I believe—it’s policies like flextime and paid parental leave that will best help women advance in their careers. But we can also make a small, positive contribution in our own homes by just saying “thanks.” It might not be equity that we as men are striving for, though that should be a goal and might be a glorious byproduct of this struggle. Instead, our greatest rewards will come in the form of meaning, authenticity, and, yes, happiness in our homes.
I knew of Fuzhou
before our daughter was born there. The city’s name hung in the air of my
father’s study when I was small, together with the smoke from his pipe that
curled around other names I heard spoken there: Tientsin, Guangzhou, Xiamen,
Shanghai, Hankou, Nanjing. Interesting names, having something to do with his
work, but also printed over the old postage stamps he collected in rows of
black binders, names spelled in different European languages – Foochow,
Futschau, Fou-Tchéou – and stamped over the images of European sovereigns who
cleared the way before everything affixed to them.
One year after
bringing Mei Mei home from the once treaty port and now affluent modern city of
Fuzhou on China’s southern coast, memories like this take on new significance.
They are a link to my daughter, a rationale for why it is I who am her father
and not someone else, in the absence of any knowledge of who her biological parents were.
After the first traumatic months – the gorging and recovery from
undernourishment, the surgical removal of rotten teeth and the repair of a
cleft palate, the fearful howling and tentative attachment, the rotation of
various therapists through the house on a weekly basis – after all of this,
something akin to normalcy has settled upon our household. It no longer feels
like we have a boarder on the third floor, a small Queequeg coated in layers of
dust whose pointed teeth were carved by cavities rather than a Maori chisel.
I begin to consider
all the ways in which our daughter now fits ‘naturally’ into our family and its
history. I return to my philatelic memory and wonder, was it pure coincidence,
that I knew about Fuzhou and treaty ports long before I knew about other
things? Or that we would one day travel there to adopt our daughter? My
first sense is that it is coincidental, without a doubt. Families are matched
with children from across China; we could easily have been called to a place
that had not been a treaty port and that I had not heard of when I was
small. My frail effort to establish some sense of ‘deep’ paternity with
Mei Mei, something besides the legal kind that is embedded in all her
documents, is no more than a mythopoetic effort to compose a few harmonies from
a mass of moderately random experience.
Perhaps this is my attempt
to create the kind of link, the sense of connection, that is unselfconsciously
affirmed whenever a child is said to resemble a parent, or a grandparent, or to
have a certain trait that is reminiscent of how so-and-so used to tilt her
head, how she used to laugh, or how she used to notice this-but-not-that about
the world. In all of these ways we claim direct physical embodiment of our
ancestors. They are, in a sense, inside of us forever. A state of holy
communion that has long been the objective of ritual: when we consume the
divine, we are at one with it. We are not alone.
This sense of
belonging probably won't be available to Mei Mei.
Then again, obviously we are surrounded by people most of the time. Why limit
oneself to the ancestors and their embodiment in our DNA? As I have learned
from my uncle, who has been slowly but steadily tracing out our ‘family tree’,
it is tempting to be selective about who we identify with among our forebears.
When for a brief moment it seems as though a great great grandfather was a
learned rabbi, a man respected by his community, or that another was a dandy, a
cosmopolite and worldly success in the constrained world of the Czars, I become
excited. I become less so before the photographs – a majority – of less distinctive
though no less closely related folk.
Not only that, but
the complexity of descent over more than a few generations quickly becomes
boggling, and the notion of ‘family’ empties of meaning as the general
promiscuity of the human race becomes evident in the ever-ramifying branches of
each single ‘tree.’ I strongly suspect that few people care much about knowing
their ancestry beyond their mother, father, and grandparents – the people they
have personally known in their lives – because to go further back makes the
arbitrariness of our kinship structures plain.
So my
philatelic connection with Fuzhou may not be so meaningless. Or, at least, no
more meaningless than my (fictional) claim to be descended from a grand rabbi
in one line, rather than a serial embezzler in another, or any number of
similar choices of identification. Perhaps I carry something that was part of
them; but I also choose among them like so many books, some of which I wish to
read, and others, not.
Mei Mei doesn’t have
quite the same selection of books to choose from. A wing of
her library was destroyed when she was orphaned. But multiple wings have
been added since, with the prospect of still more to be built in the future. There
are many volumes at her disposal. Whether she will grow to be more concerned
with the ones she has lost, or with the ones she has gained, I can't predict.
Then: It did not hit me like it did the women in the crew. For them, it
was an (albeit lily- white) explosion. It was a profound shifting in how they
publicly expressed culture. I noticed it in bits and pieces. The women who once
where the backbone of our ‘zine making and distribution empires, now could not
be found to bum a ride to Insty-Prints to make copies. They used to
emcee—introducing the bands. They now had bands of their own, and they were
playing better and with more ferocity than the dudes they once supported. It
wasn’t like it was an all out gender mutiny. It was not a split, but a forced
reckoning—we had to notice the girls. They were no longer support staff to the
indie/punk-culture male ego DIY-industrial complex. They were Riot Grrrls.
Well, not exactly Riot
Grrrls. Many of the women of the crew were waiting for a critical race element
that barely manifested. They were Riot Grrrls, but they were also young women
of color. Many of them had a difficult time reconciling the two. They were at a
crossroads between bell hooks and Bratmobile, having a difficult time
discerning which had the greater pull, and which would be a more useful
politics for their futures.
Needless to say, this
played havoc with trying to hook up. Tattoos, Doc Martens, and being surly were
no longer enough. To step correctly to a woman, we had to be versed in
women-centered politics and cultural implication. We just couldn’t know about
certain bands or artists, we had to know why they were important. And if these
bands or artists had even a tangential tendril of misogyny dangling, they got
the boot. They were excised from the new cultural-canon, only to be spoken of
in whispers of disgust.
This new reality forced me
to understand what a feminist-politic meant. Having grown up in a profoundly
matriarchal environment was not the education you might think. It was a given
that my aunts, mother, and the over-boss that was my grandmother were running
shit. It was just how it was. But when confronted, or asked for support, I had
no idea what I could do to back up this phoenix rising among many of the women
in my life. But I would learn. I had to learn. I had to act. It was Revolution
Girl Style Now, for real.
I do not feel that I am in
any way qualified to talk about what feminism is. What I am qualified to impart
is how I learned to be an effective ally (and eventual feminist). This
consciousness transformation was not as hard as it sounds. I started with a few
simple rules:
-I removed woman/girl-demeaning language from my vocabulary. This
was the most demanding piece of my transformation. Hate and disrespect is so
insidious because it colonizes your language, and reifies their negative
influences every time you speak.
-If anyone around spoke disrespectfully to or about women and
girls, I’d speak up. If speaking up didn’t work, I’d knuckle up.
-I shut up and let the women in my life be the experts on their own
existence. I followed their lead to address their needs.
I still follow these rules
to this day—well, I don’t knuckle up as much as I used to because my ally
vocabulary is light-years more sophisticated than it used to be. But I will put
foot-to-ass if I need to.
In retrospect, I can
experience the effects of the Riot Grrrl explosion as advanced training in how
to be a good partner and a good father to my daughter.
Now: I’m writing this circa twenty-years since my initial encounter
with Riot Grrrl (and three days after my daughter’s fourth birthday). I write
this with an aching nostalgia. There was an urgency that popped off back then,
a sense of kicking norms in the crotch and striking out into wholly brand new
territories. New maps of expression were being drawn, a new language being
spoken. I don’t feel that now. My daughter came home one day singing Justin
Bieber, talking about wanting to be a princess, and knowing who Nicki Minaj
was. Are you kidding me? What happened to all the Bodysnatchers, The Selecter,
Bad Brains, M.I.A. that I’ve been feeding you? I felt all of who I was, whom I
wanted my daughter to be, spill out into a murky puddle of senseless pop stool.
I know she’s only four, but still.
Warrior training starts young.
It is a very difficult
parental realization when you have to come to terms with the idea that your
children are people. People with her or his own wills, desires, and tastes in
everything from food to the culture they consume. Parents are also in constant
battle with the influences that your kid runs into when you are not around
them—when there are at school, at friend’s homes, or child care. You can expose
them to all you want, but they are in charge of whether or not they give a damn
about your recommendations. This was a bit disheartening. However, I no longer
have to worry about this, or about going overboard with trying to expose her to
all of the things that I think are vital and necessary.
The only two things
that I have to do are act and speak with respect and integrity. My only mission
is that every word I utter, every action I take, affirms her as a girl, but
does not lock her into being so. She sees and hears how I speak to her mother,
and the other women in her life, and finds comfort and solace in this. I am in
no way a saint. My latent misogyny can flare up from time to time (usually when
I’m not in love with myself or jealous of my wife’s accomplishments) but I
think I walk the feminist ally line often enough because my daughter will tell
me how different I am compared to other daddies. She says this with a smile and
a headbutt. No more validation is needed. My daughter shows me daily that what
I say and what I do matter to her. She reaffirms that I am having both an
affect and effect on her life.
While she may have ripped my musical heart out
by singing Justin Bieber, she repaired it—instantly—by singing “Monkey
Man”...the The Specials version. Here is a different accounting of what I mean:
Once upon a time, my
daughter wore dresses. Nothing too frilly, or pink, or taupe, just nice little
sun dresses. Then, as she got older and started to have a say in what she wore, and the great dress-rebellion of 2011-2012 began. After showing her photos of her
in dresses (and noticing the turned up nose as she perused the pictures) I
asked her, "Why don't you like dresses anymore?" With no beat missed,
she stares at me, "How am I supposed to save the world in a dress? I need
a bow and arrow and a tiger." Revolution Girl Style Now. For real.
The other day I
found myself exclaiming to my two daughters, sixteen and fourteen respectively,
don’t have sex until you’re in your twenties, but here are some condoms.
I’m not sure if
there is a better example of sending a mixed message.
I should
explain. The other night I
discovered my oldest daughter had spent the night with her boyfriend.
Now, I have
consistently brought up sex with them and with their older brother who now
lives on his own with a gaggle of twenty something young men in West
Oakland. And I have consistently
been rebuffed, scoffed at, silenced by their stares, punctuated with a rolling
of the eyes or a sigh of exhaustion.
‘Dad, please…..’
But I don’t let
it stop me. I know I’m not someone
they want to confide in, and I actually cringe thinking about it if they
did. But I want to approach the
discussion of their bodies, their rights, sex in general differently than the
terse warning I received from my father to keep my dick in my pants or the
silence around the subject from my mother.
There is nothing
wrong with sex; it’s powerful and beautiful and a profound ritual of entering
adulthood.
Clearly, it’s
also something they see all around them so to pretend they aren’t aware of it,
even that they don’t have opportunities to engage in it, would be blatant
denial.
And parenting by
denial is never a good approach to raising children.
However, even
though I broach the subject any chance I get, we don’t actually talk as
directly as I’d like. And that’s
why I know I need help, from other adults in our lives to examples of people or
movements reclaiming the body, offering other ways to view sex, that might empower
young women.
Sadly, there’s
not a lot out there for them; besides a few adult women in their lives that
they can turn to in need, there is almost nothing in mainstream society that
speaks to young women about their growth and desires in sex positive, yet
realistic and honest ways.
So I find myself
saying things like, I don’t think you should have sex until you’re older;
however, here are condoms
But now I also
add every chance I get, and remember…
Remember…
Please, remember…
…you can always
stop, you can always say no, even after you’re in the car, in the room, out of
your clothes, in the bed.
No means no.
Stop means stop.
In an attempt to
provide those positive examples of body ownership and empowerment, I searched
out zines about self--defense, about sexual abuse, about sex positive
experiences, things written by other young women.
And then, I
rediscovered Riot Grrrl. The
ferocity, the anger, the arrogance.
There is one image of a group of young women holding hands, one without
clothes, across her chest and belly black marker declares: Every Girl is a Riot
Grrrl.
I played as
often as they’d let me Bikini Kill and other female bands as we would make
dinner or do our chores.
Maybe the
mantra: ‘who needs a boyfriend, when you gotta band,’ will seep in.
Let me back up.
I was not a part of the Riot Grrrl movement as it was born,
but I was a parent who was inspired by the relentless attention to power, to
consent, to self-empowerment.
In fact, fathering made me a feminist.
As a young
father with a newborn, I was served papers by the county of Santa Barbara to
officially notify me that I must “provide” for my child. I was served those papers, of course,
while I was rocking him in my arms, cleaning up the house I shared with my
girlfriend. The cop stood there,
scolding me that I should be out getting a job. At twenty-one, I said nothing back to him, afraid of his
power and authority.
Okay, I said and
shut the door.
But I was
fucking angry. I was a full time
student. So was my girlfriend. We
both had part time jobs. We took
turns doing what needed to get done; we switched it up when one of us got tired
of, say, balancing the checkbook (or more likely made too many mistakes). We argued and fought, but loved and
spent a lot of time focusing on what was important, our son. We sacrificed our autonomy or ability
to participate in things other 20 year olds were doing.
We were a tight,
angry fist of domesticity.
We struggled
with the decision to send our six week-old child to an illegal childcare center
that clearly had way too many children for one woman.
But we had no
other choice; she’s what we could afford.
Ironically, even
then, when I would walk up to drop him off the sitter would tell me I was
carrying him wrong. Time went on,
but the attitudes towards men as parents never seemed to change.
On the weekends,
I would bike around Santa Barbara with my son letting his mother sleep because
she was out till two in the morning selling roses to drinking partiers at the
bars along State Street.
Of course, I
will admit that balancing him, a year old baby, on the handle bars sans helmet
may not have been the smartest move a father could make. But the number of times I was told I
couldn’t parent was infuriating. I
was told I hadn’t dressed him properly, leaving home socks and shoes, or that I
knew nothing about his well being, despite being the one to take him to many
doctor’s appointments, or that I would hurt him or drop him, which I sometimes
did, but not because I was a man.
I was determined
to show them all wrong.
I took him a few
times to various classes during my first year at UCSB not because I had some
point to prove about young parents, but because I had no childcare and a number
of my teachers made no exceptions about attendance.
I remember
having to change him on one teacher’s desk after class, her face full of
disdain, her body recoiling; it was one of the most awkward yet proud moments
of my life. I didn’t then see the
irony in being so unwelcome with a child in that space.
Instead, at the
time, I apologized, backpedaled, afraid I was being disrespectful. I thought of my mother, doing the same
thing ten years earlier, telling me, a twelve year old, to stay in the car and
watch my brothers while she ran in to take her final test to pass some class
she was taking at the community college.
I realized then,
the strength she must have needed, a single mom, to continue her studies, to
persist despite the intense judgment society throws at parents, especially
poor, single moms on welfare like she was at the time.
Shit needed to
change. Even then, I wanted role
models. People unwilling to bend,
brazen, arrogant, relentless.
I was becoming
more radical in my politics trying to figure out my place in the world, my
mixed race heritage, my sense of class, and perhaps most profoundly my
definitions of manhood, of fatherhood, of gender.
How to relearn
gender?
After all I was
parenting a boy who would grow to be a man.
What kinda man
would he be? What kinda man was I?
The irony was I
began reading feminist theory in my classrooms and with my schoolmates, but I lived
it daily in my house with my girlfriend and my child.
My girlfriend
was a powerful, hardworking, woman from a poor background. She had that poverty mentality: work
yourself to the bone and never ask for handouts. But what was more stunning was that she had 100 percent
trust in me as a parent, as capable of soothing, calming, protecting, loving
our son.
She never
doubted even when I made mistakes.
No one else had
that kind of trust.
After two years
in Santa Barbara, we were leaving, heading for the Bay Area. For my last semester in the spring of
1992, I signed up for a Feminist Studies class; one of my last assignments was
to share with the class how the ideas we addressed might impact our daily
lives. It was a good assignment.
For it, I walked
in with my son, a diaper bag, filled with bottles and food.
This is how, I
said.
I got a B.
But another
student walked in with a bunch of zines, some 7 inches, and one bad attitude.
Riot Grrrl found
me.
It has stayed
with me all these years as I meandered through graduate school, as I reexamined
gender relations in my own relationships with women, as I became a father to
two girls, and as my children have grown up.
I was never a riot
grrrl but because of them I was forced to think closely about what I let my son
do at ten and what I let my daughters do at the same age. Because of Riot Grrrl, I challenged
myself to address sex in positive, open ways; I encouraged my son and my
daughters to speak with other adults in their lives if they couldn’t speak to
their mother or me.
Things can be
hard to discuss, but I want the courage to do it.
As I have
rediscovered Riot Grrrl while looking for things that might help my daughters
navigate their world today, I was reminded about their courage, their arrogance,
their fearlessness.
Because I know
that remaining silent, like Audre Lorde said, is dangerous; it’ll come back and
punch you in the mouth from the inside.
I know now what she
means by that; she means that what matters is communication, is taking those
risks to share the stories of who we are and what we believe.
So I work hard
to see my daughters both as young women and as individual people, not limited
to their gender, but not disconnected from it, to respect my children’s
autonomy and privacy as young people.
I am learning to let go of my kids and trust their power.
I am learning to keep on talking despite feeling
uncomfortable.
I am learning to listen to them.
I am still learning about myself through fathering.
Perhaps none of this is about sex education or being a man
in society today or about Riot Grrrl specifically; maybe it’s just the story of
one person simply learning to see himself and those around him as the complex
people they are: full of contradictions, fickle to a fault, sometimes brave,
sometimes inspired.
Trying to live a life worth living.
And of course, trying to hand my daughters condoms.
This is a post about not writing. It is not a post about writer's block. Enough has been written about that already. It is a post about people saying to me, "Hey, you should write about this, or you should write about that," and me saying, "Meh, I really don't want to," or "Maybe later," and this happening often enough that I begin to wonder why I'm not wanting to write so much and then deciding a good way to answer that question, which is a legitimate one, is to write about it.
So the basic question is, why the hell am I not writing about being a dad and stuff? I look back and see my last solid post, about Jr. and a balloon, was almost six months ago. I say solid, meaning not some kind of polemical thing intended to touch a cultural nerve and get people all pissed off and leave a million comments and maybe get the attention of the New York Times, or some random deposit of verbiage excreted by whatever onanistic satyr happened to frolic in my head that day, but a piece about life with children from a man's point of view that really reaches for some kind of truth.
A few reasons come to mind. Practical considerations can get in the way. I've been sick. In and out of the hospital. That will sap you of the will and ability to write more completely than anything I know. A couple of times when I was on really high-end morphine to kill the pain I started having really disturbing dreams and thought, "Hey, you should write about that." Then I came out of it and thought, "I'm not Charles Bukowski or William S. Burroughs or William Blake or Thomas de Quincy, who the hell needs to know about what my brain decided to do after four days on morphine when the anesthesiologist told me I had "mild hospital psychosis" because the walls were talking to me? I went days without seeing my kids and that sucked, so what was there to write about if this is a blog about life with children from a man's point of view? Etc. etc.
But if you really have something to say, as all real writers do, you overcome shit like this. You write your unfinished symphony as you expire from tuberculosis knowing that your literary and musical friends will celebrate the publication of your score or verses or novel in the blazing light of the funeral pyre upon which your corpse is cremated on the beach at Viareggio. That's just the way it is. So there has to be a deeper reason. Hospital psychosis is not sufficient.
So when we get down to the deeper reasons, the emotional, existential, psychological ones, two seem most prominent. The first is the way the blogosphere, and maybe even the culture, is changing. The second is the way my family has changed.
How the blogosphere has changed: When I started doing this, I was alone in the house with an infant feeling overwhelmed and isolated the way every new parent does. I also felt a tad self-conscious about being a father who was staying home to take care of the kids. For all these reasons, plus the fact that I just tend to write about stuff, Daddy Dialectic was the perfect outlet. So I started telling these little stories that are variations on themes that, in some ways, are as old as the pyramids, or the hanging gardens of Babylon.
Were there other dads out there doing the same thing? Sure. You get a little community feeling from chatting with them. Some write stuff I like, some is not to my taste - no matter, let a thousand flowers bloom, I say - but I wasn't writing for other bloggers. I was writing for myself and for some unspecified lector or lectrice who kind of knew what I was talking about. Maybe this world wide web thing could bring us together in the anonymous, Platonic act of reading. That was, and still is, enough.
But a little while ago I looked around and thought wow, this has become an industry. It's a niche, the way there are niches for model rocket builders and stamp collectors and mercenaries and bondage fetishists. There are a million blogs by dads about life with children from a man's point of view. There are conferences in convention hotels, there are short films and documentaries and YouTube videos and rock songs and interviews on news shows; there are websites that rank the best websites, the blogs with the most hits, the funniest ones, the most progressive or the most Christian; there are debates about how to make dad blogs as popular as mom blogs (ex.: "How can we get men to leave more comments?") or about how to sell shit on your dad blog; there are blogs that are beautifully produced and customized like glossy lifestyle magazines featuring only three or four people; there are blogs by some famous dude who happens to have a kid and then instantly begins to write famously for the New Yorker or Rolling Stone about all the things everyone else has written about in a less famous way.
I look at this and think, Jesus Christ, how many times can someone write about changing diapers? Though this consideration does not seem to affect the general output of mom bloggers, which is like some kind of eternal, geological geyser, I admit that the geometric explosion of the dad-o-sphere leaves me wondering whether or not it is all rather trivial, and whether I have myself helped to perpetuate the triviality. There's a solution to that, which is to get more and more niche, to write about being a parent from more and more particular angles - black, Asian, gay, infertile, whatever - and that's all good but still at some point you run into the problems listed above, or the fact that, being none of the above, I should shut up. The world is going to hell, as you may have noticed; maybe we should start thinking more consistently about some of the reasons for why that is? Why are we spending so much time writing about being parents? Because we are not writing about Revolution? About God? About the conquest of Nature through science? Or self-liberation in the the endless play of Eros? Or because, in reality, we have control over so little else in out-of-joint world?
Don't feel like you have to answer those questions. They're the same ones I've been asking myself for a while now.
How my family has changed: The truth of the matter is, this is probably the biggest reason for not writing, and everything above is just grumpiness. We've adopted a daughter. I shared this impending development with Daddy Dialectic readers a while ago, and thought at the time that I would keep readers apprised of the entire experience as it unfolded, as many adoptive parents do. What happened is just the opposite.
For whatever reason, going through the adoption process has made me much more protective, much more circumspect, about the narration of my family life. When Spot was born, I wanted to talk about it, and people wanted to hear about it. When we adopted Squeaky, it became much more problematic. People still want to hear about it, but I'm not sure I want to tell them. Why not? I'm not sure. But it's a different ball game with Squeaky. She had a life before us, albeit not a terribly long one. She has biological parents out there somewhere. There are things about her situation that I feel should be disclosed at her discretion only, when she is mature enough to be aware of them, something which I feel is less of an issue for Jr. I knew Jr. when he was a zygote, I saw him come out of the womb, I helped to keep him alive from the very first hours. There is less of a blank space between us, we are more closely entwined, I exercise the right to speak for him with more confidence.
Not so, with Squeaky. I don't own her experience the way I own Jr.'s. Not that I actually say much about Jr, really; most of it is about what I think about Jr.'s experience. It's all about me. So he's safe. But I have yet to figure out a way to feel that way about Squeaky and her story. It certainly is a story that deserves to be told, but the learning curve of being father to a girl, an orphan, and an institutionalized child from another country with moderate special needs - all at the same time - is rather steep.
Seesaws, rocking horses, and merry-go-rounds can be lots of fun for children. But playground chess with your father-in-law is serious business.
At a playground in a Vacaville mall, my father-in-law Barry and I played chess with pieces the size of toddlers. Five of us were on our way back to San Francisco from Tahoe, and after four days of in-laws and three hours in the car with fourteen-month-old Sam, it was time for a break. Following six inches of snow in the mountains, the sunshine was welcome on the checkered board, but there was a chill in the air, as Barry plotted black and white revenge for a slushball in the ear.
Surrounded by wooden rocking horses and noisy children, Barry huffed and puffed around the oversized board, while I coolly repelled his black queen with white pawns. After ten moves his queen looked spent. I rocked back on my heels, surveyed Vacaville’s spacious and navigable Nut Tree Mall, and wondered whether to celebrate the victory by visiting the Gap or New Balance. His queen was pinned between my rook and his king. It looked all over. He shoveled a bishop in the middle, but I advanced another white pawn and pinned that too. I was just musing whether a quick or elegant finish would be more fitting for super-competitive Barry, when I realized that his queen and rook were lined up to checkmate me.
The sun seemed brighter, and I squinted hard at the board. Losing to my father-in-law was not an option. I wouldn’t hear the end of it in thirty years. In the distance, children looked faceless as they played on a steel seesaw. I could sacrifice a rook, but that wouldn’t shift the queen. Then my wife, Fitzsimmons, walked up.
“Can you take Sam?” she said.
“Sure.”
I retracted my queen, blocking black’s threat and threatening a queen swap. Barry backed off, but the danger was still there, so I pushed the white queen forward again. What just happened? Two moves ago, he was dead meat, now it was me on the rack.
“Have you got him?” asked Fitzsimmons.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got him.”
Even if Barry traded queens, I’d still be ahead. Nothing to worry about. I posted Sam between my legs and pointed to the white knight.
“See the horse, Sam?”
The knight looked like the seahorse in his Fabulous Fishes book, the same curved neck with the sculpted markings. But it was still parked in its starting position, like an undriven Ferrari. As my baby Bobby Fischer toddled away to play with the oversized checkers set behind us, I took Barry’s queen with mine.
“Oh, you haven’t just done that,” he said.
He took my queen with his rook, then I snaffled a bishop with my pinning pawn. Ten minutes of tension, then thirty seconds of bloodbath.
“Now what do I do?” he said, and he pushed forward a rueful pawn.
This was what I’d been waiting for. With no queens, it would be just the guys, king on king. And while my rook controlled the center of the board, his king was out in the open, exposed. Then I turned round and realized Sam was gone.
“Where’s Sam?”
“Dunno,” said Barry. “Didn’t she have him?”
“No.”
My eyes whirled round the playground. Hundred yards long. Forty yards wide. Fences with gaps. Quarter of a mile away, the thunder of the freeway. I could feel the blood pulsing behind my eyes, the heat rising in my temples. What had Sam been wearing? I couldn’t remember.
I spun around. The nearest exit was only twenty-five yards away. How long had he been gone? How long had I been thinking about beating my father-in-law? How long had I failed to notice my son’s absence? This was the kind of thing that happened to other people. Should I find a security guard? Tell an employee? Call 911? What would I say? “His name’s Sam. He’s old enough to walk, but not to run. Blue eyes, light brown hair, fat cheeks. Waves a lot.”
I strode away from the chessboard towards the center of the playground. I didn’t know what to do, I just wanted to make sure I could see everything. The mall was designed for entrances and exits. Not escapes.
It felt like a movie. The scene where the parent turns hysterical and starts shouting for their kid. Did Sam even know his name? Yelling would frighten everyone. But would it stop someone snatching him? His walking had really progressed over the last month. Could he have got onto the road? How fast does a car need to drive to kill a fourteen-month-old boy? My mouth tasted of metal.
Then, at the end of the playground, between the fence and the golden carousel, I saw him. Walking unsteadily, his hand held by the young woman in charge of the carousel. She smiled at me, blamelessly, as if it was she who should be grateful for the chance to spend time with Sam. He was smiling–he always smiles at strangers. He looked up at me and grinned. I picked him up and felt his weight on my chest, his cheek against mine, and my heart beating like a blacksmith’s anvil.
“Thank you,” I said to her.
Later, we will leave Vacaville, leaving behind the carousel, the playground, and the chessboard. Leaving behind a toddler-sized king penned by his own pieces into a corner and checkmated by the white knight. The car will feel quiet on the ride home to San Francisco. As we cross the marshes south of Napa, the sky will seem immense and I will wonder at how close I came to losing. After we unpack the car, I will try to recall the face of the carousel girl, and my eyes will fill with tears as I remember only her green baseball cap and red apron.
By the golden carousel, I picked up Sam and walked back to the checkered board, carrying him over my shoulder and rubbing his back.
“Is he alright?” said Barry, reaching through fear for calm.
Hello readers, Ava here. I have asked Jeff to use his blogspace to insert some reflections about parenting in the post-industrial era. While Jeff’s perspective is written from the local, household influence, I’d like to write about the political economy of parenting in these post-industrial times. What I have found is that what distinguishes us from our parent’s and grandparent’s generation are the constraints that act upon us for which we have no control.
We moved for employment a year ago. Our house didn’t sell the first week on the market, or the first month, or the first year. To sell it, we will pay an ungodly amount of money to bring our total losses to an even more ungodly amount of money. And it hurts. Polly was born there. Pip took his first steps there. There were birthdays and holidays and visits from friends. I remember the weekend that Polly learned to wave and we had pizza at the kitchen table for dinner.
We now rent a two bedroom apartment, as described in Jeff’s post, On Wildness and Sharing Our Space. And while the location is wonderful, we are tired of being exploited in the shameful renter/tenant environment that clouds most places in America. Our lease was inaccurate when signed, we are responsible for maintaining a property that the owner avoids responsibility at all costs, and we are at the mercy of someone else’s schedule.
For the past two months, we have pursued purchasing another home. After signing a contract and getting it inspected, we found that the risk of potential repairs was too great. And we’re sad, because we feel we have done “everything right” and we deserve the security and stability that marked previous generations.
And this is the chaos of post-industrial parenting: the notion of doing “everything right” as causally related to security and prosperity is a myth. I know it’s a myth, I teach hundreds of students a semester that it’s a myth, and yet I don’t want to believe it. I want to believe that I can work harder and harder and it will result in a better life for my family. I want to believe that there is a “right decision” and a “right way” and that we are, indeed, doing things right. And the frustrating thing for the post-industrial parents is that we ARE doing everything right. It just doesn’t mean what it used to.
In explaining our ups-and-downs in the post-industrial economy, a friend of ours said of our vacant house, “Piss on the door knobs. It will make you feel better.” Well, as a nation, we’d better get ready for a whole lotta piss on a whole lotta doorknobs. Because there are a whole lotta post-industrial parents doing “everything right.” And we’ve got nothing to show for it but vacant houses with pissy doorknobs and a crumbling economy.
Seven months after my daughter’s second birthday, she snapped. Not the regular toddler tantrum that had become a regular occurrence in our home. Nor was it the ‘I’m going to run myself into a shelf, yank all of the boxes of cereal to the ground—and then dance on them’ whirlwind. It wasn’t even the ‘I’m going to thrash my arms and legs about on the floor, just like I’m at a Bad Brains show, and then I’m going to wail and force everyone in the grocery store to look at YOU’ type of snapping. Baby-girl elevated her game to the next-level. She snapped in that way that forces you to reexamine your parenting style and ability.
We were at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, in Berkeley when it all went bad. The park is kind of like a prison yard, especially during the Farmer’s Market: little pockets of the homeless in one section, families in another; skaters, folks who believe that Burning Man should never end, and people attempting to get you to sign something all dot the landscape. Tucked away, next to a fountain that has seen more piss than water, is a raggedy little park-ish play area that my daughter adores.
The centerpiece of this spot is a little saddleback climbing structure—the primary reason that my kid chooses this place over others. It was here where my wife and I discovered that our daughter is not afraid of heights, or jumping from them. It was here that she realized that she could climb up and over something—she didn’t have to go back the way she came. Revelatory. And it was here where she had her very first violent encounter.
It was a busy day, and the line to climb was longer than usual. I was completely impressed that the baby-monster was as patient as she was. I praised her repeatedly. In return, she gave me her smile—the one that she now uses to try and manipulate, but was fully genuine back in the day. Makes me fall in love every time she unleashes those perfect teeth and high cheekbones. In the middle of our little love-fest, it was her turn. Abruptly she mountain-goated up the wall in about two steps. Just as she was about to summit, some five or six-year-old boy grabs her hood, and yanks her backwards off the wall. When she slammed into the ground, I heard her breath forcefully escape—but she wasn’t moving. Not once, have I ever felt so fucking helpless. I froze: trauma-induced ossification. ‘She hit her head. She hit her head,’ was all I should think. Would she have a head injury? As a survivor of one, I knew how dangerous they were. Oh, God. What did I just let happen? (I always blame myself when my kid gets hurt).
She stood up, unsteady, but standing on her own. This made me feel like the ultimate in crap fathers because I had no part in helping her get to her feet. She looked around, and she seemed okay—I felt the lower part of my body begin to defrost and I slowly made my way over to her. Before I could ask how she was, she jumped on the boy. She must have been twenty-four, twenty-five pounds at the time, but she marshaled all of it to knock this kid to the ground. She then started punching him in the face. Not little kid punches, but very well executed pistons: Left, right. Left, right. Raining down hurt on this boy. And she wouldn’t stop.
Watching my little wisp of a daughter handle herself against this big kid made me proud. When I find out that we were having a daughter, I made it my life’s mission to ensure that she would never be a victim of violence—at the time, not acknowledging that participating in a violent act, is being a victim to violence—but I knew too many women who have had their bodies and spirits violated, and this would not happen to my baby-girl. So to see her, without fear, standing up to and retaliating against a bully, made me feel as if I was setting her on the right track.
But something just felt wrong. I am no stranger to violence, nor am I opposed to it as vehemently as some of my more politically progressive friends are. I grew up violently, and have achieved a relative level of comfort with the act and all of the attendant spiritual mess that comes with it. I’ve been shot, stabbed; have a permanent scar in the back of my head from fighting racist skinheads—but this is my story, not my daughter’s. She (hopefully) will never have to live through one percent of the evil that I did.
I rushed to her, lifted her off the boy, and held her. I was surprised at just how strong she was. Then she said one of the clearest sentences of her life. Eyes wild, body continuing to thrash, at the top of her lungs: I want my justice! What the hell? What kind of concept of justice have we been teaching her? Not even bothering to check and see if the boy was okay, I broke wide and ran over to my wife who was dozing in the grass. She lazily looked up at me, saw that I was shell-shocked; looked at our daughter, saw that she was going crazy, screaming about wanting her justice. The look she launched my way was purely: what the hell just happened? I cannot even take a rest without you two getting into some kind of trouble.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the little boy, and whom I assumed were his parents, coming over to us. They were too close for us to make an escape that did not look obvious, so I braced myself for the eventual conversation. My default setting was “crisis, with a side of aggressive response” and this has me on edge, ready for confrontation. Always. Needless to say, it is a tiring way to live. I have been on a personal project to purge violence from my life—physical, emotional, verbal, all of it. Violence has no place for me, as a partner, or as a parent. This isn’t to say that I won’t protect my family, or myself but it is nowhere near the top 10 responses to confrontation—it used to be my first three choices.
I figured the best course of action was to meet them halfway, adopt a neutral stance, and let them speak first. See, I told you I’ve been working on it. What happened shook me. They were nice. They were more than nice; they were apologetic. They gave me the history of their son’s behavior and how his comeuppance was long overdue. That it was delivered by a tiny little thing made it all the more poetic. While we laughed and made small talk, I couldn’t stop thinking that our laughter and easy conversation was an endorsement of violent behavior. I mentioned this, and it kind of killed the mood. They awkwardly disengaged themselves, and my wife and I were left with how to redefine and appropriately teach what justice was. Like that would be easy.
We had to figure out a uniform way to discuss a concept that we didn’t even agree on. For so long, I confused justice with retaliation and revenge. But in my new social and psychic evolutionary state, I had absolutely no clue what to tell my daughter as my concept of justice was in flux. My wife comes from a profoundly religious background, but she was moving towards a more holistic spirituality, so her ideas around what is just were also changing. Why in the hell did we have to explain heavy-duty concepts so early in the game? As neither my wife, nor myself have parents, we’ve already had to explain death to our daughter after she asked about her grandmother and grandfather—her mother told her about heaven, and I told her about dirt and worms—can we get a break?
Despite all of this; all of this trying to be a socially and politically responsible parent; trying to get the more negative and destructive aspects of my upbringing to scab over and sink beneath the surface, lessening their influence on my present—there was still a sliver of pride at watching my daughter handle herself in that way. She was assured, confident, and fearless, traits that girls are very rarely allowed to cultivate, without great cost. Me and her mother’s ongoing project is to somehow extract the violence as a first resort, without affecting her confidence, fearlessness, and self-assuredness. We’ve been working diligently on this, but we may have pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction.
About a month after the park incident, we went to a birthday party. She was having a ball, until it was piñata time. We played zombies and dragons at home, so she’s used to all types of crazy stuff. But this particular piñata had an advocate that day, in the form of my daughter. The kids all took turns whacking this multi-colored fish. Whap! The last hit exploded the fish, and snacks and money spilled from the fish’s guts. My little baby-girl burst into tears. For about ten minutes she was inconsolable. When she finally calmed down, we asked her what was wrong. Through the remnants of her tears, she said: “Is the fishy okay? Kids shouldn’t hit the fish with sticks. Now all of his insides are on the ground.”
My wife and I had two completely different reactions: My wife was so proud that our daughter could show that type of compassion, even for something inanimate. I reacted to it as if her piscine concern was a form of weakness. I felt that all her blubbering was a sign of weakness, a loss of her fighting spirit. Needless to say, this is something else I’m working on. More later.
