I tried so many times to get through to the old man. I tried logic, humor, veiled threats; I even tried taking away the thing he wanted the most—contact with his grandchildren. He's just scared. The rules have changed, and he thinks that for him to even admit that there may be another way to do things than the way he did is to admit he was wrong. I don't expect him to change who he is; I just want him to accept me for who I am.
Despite what anger or sorrow we may have at how we were fathered, we can't afford to carelessly discard the hard-won lessons of our fathers. We need to take the best of what they gave us as we plot a course toward a new kind of fathering—one built on strong bonds of love, that is expansive and courageous, and that will bring us back into the richness of a deep emotional connection with our children.
If we ask people to select words to positively describe what it means to be a mother, invariably they come up with such terms as nurturing, compassionate, caring, and comforting. For father, the words are protector, provider, responsible, dependable, hardworking, and problem solving. Those characteristics fit well with our culturally projected father images, such as those portrayed in Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Ward and Tom are portrayed as kind and understanding men who are primarily problem solvers, that is, men who diffuse and avoid emotional situations by presenting real-world solutions.
If we combine the above terminology of mother and father qualities, it makes up an impressive resume for good parenting. Traditionally, however, that list has been divided up by gender, with women assigned the internal or emotional tasks and men assigned the external tasks of dealing with the outside world. This division has deep roots in our history but, for better and for worse, it is rapidly deteriorating. The radically changing nature of what it means to be a man or a woman is not news, but it is a constant source of challenge and opportunity.
My father was a true believer in a clear and rigid division of labor—there was women's work and then there was men's. He went to work, paid the bills, and took care of the yard, while Mom did all the cooking, cleaning, and housework. What is weird is that my sister being a lawyer and me cooking for a living doesn't seem to bother him at all. It's like his rules stopped with his generation.
Over the past thirty years it's become obvious that women are no longer content to live within the boundaries of traditional gender roles which severely limit the scope and magnitude of their dreams. What is now becoming evident is that men also cannot continue to blindly play out their appointed roles without increasingly disastrous consequences to their own emotional health and to that of their children.
It's hard. I have everything I'm supposed to have, from the good job, nice home, and new car to a loving wife and two beautiful kids, and yet I feel trapped in a vise that just keeps getting tighter and tighter. My job brings in good money, but it takes all my time and drains all my energy until there is nothing left. There has to be more to it. There has to be a better way.
When we examine social evolution in more detail, at least some of the reason for the urgency in dealing with the changing role of fathers begins to emerge. For although the traditional roles of mothers and fathers may appear clear and defined, in practice they were never as stark nor as isolating as they appear to us today.
Until relatively recently—the past hundred years or so—men and women carried out their roles in close and constant contact with each other and with their children, whether on a small farm or running a small business or shop. Indeed, for most of our history, men and women worked side by side—undertaking different tasks, but performing them in a manner that involved continuous interaction, feedback, and assistance.
Dad was indeed the protector and provider, but he was also right there, downstairs in the shop or out in the field, preparing it for next season's crop. More often than not, Dad was there every day for the noontime meal, as well as for breakfast and supper, and the opportunities (and indeed the obligation) for children to spend time with Dad by helping out in the fields or in the store were common.
Fathers fulfilled their role in frequent daily contact with their children, and that contact nurtured the kinds of emotional connections that can only come with the investment of time. That began to change in our great-grandfathers' and grandfathers' time, as swelling waves of refugees fled the poverty of the countryside to find work in the factories and offices of cities around the world.
Increasingly, this new economic reality found fathers leaving home early in the morning and not returning until late at night. The thread of daily contact with their children was lost, as was the constant contact between husband and wife. The division of labor between men and women, which in the past had existed as a relatively intimate partnership, become a division in time and place as well. Fathers were increasingly removed from the home, and mothers became more isolated from the workaday world. This everyday forced distance became the true rupture with the past.
It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this change. For in building and maintaining close personal relationships, time is a key ingredient, and it is our time with our fathers when we were growing up, as well as with our children as they are growing up, that has been taken away from us.
My father never got over the Great Depression. He had a small business and, almost overnight, he lost it all. He lived every remaining day of his life terrified that he would not be able to provide for his family. The irony was that because he worked so hard to give us what he thought we should have, he was never home. In the end, it killed him.
We don't live our lives in isolation from these larger social conditions. We don't make the rules and we aren't even given a decent map to go by. The vast flow of history, with its wave after wave of social and economic change, has established the conditions under which our lives must be lived. We would like to believe that we have more control over our lives, but time and experience prove to us again and again that the most we can do is choose how we will respond to the circumstances we are presented with.
Fathers today, young and old, have been dealt a very difficult hand. Because of the massive social and economic migrations over the past hundred years, as a group we have been deprived of the daily close contact with our fathers and our children that many of our grandfathers and most of their fathers enjoyed.
Separated from both our fathers and our children, we have been cut off from the heart of the fathering traditions of the past, and have been handed a decidedly garbled message about how we should go about being good fathers today.
Mostly we are unsure of how to proceed. The message that comes through the loudest and resonates the strongest is that we must be protectors and providers. The image of the father as protector and provider is so deeply ingrained in our cultural heritage that it feels as though failing at this means risking one's identity as a man. And so we throw ourselves into the role with fierce determination, as though fulfilling this aspect of our identity as fathers is enough.
When my wife got pregnant with my first daughter, I thought my life was over, and in many ways it was. Any thoughts I had of being able to finish my education or consider music as a career were gone. I was still very much in love with my wife and wanted to love my new daughter, but my job was precarious and my skills were pretty minimal. I was afraid we were about to enter a life of poverty and insecurity. The only thing that kept us going was my committing to seventy-hour workweeks for almost ten years. My wife and I once calculated that I had seen my oldest daughter awake less than twelve hours in the first five years of her life. I will never know if I truly foresaw that miserable fate or if this was just a self-fulfilling prophesy.
For most men, it is when our children are very young that we need to work the hardest. We are new on the job, often insecure about our work identity, and need to put in long hours to become better at what we do, to become more valuable to the company, to be recognized
