about parenting issues. When a little brother or sister came along, we might have been ceremonially placed on a well-cushioned chair and allowed to “hold” him for a few minutes, but for all practical purposes, the message that came through loud and clear was that when Mom (occasionally with the assistance of Big Sister) was dealing with the babies, the best all-around strategy was for us to be somewhere else—preferably harmlessly entertaining ourselves.
Nor did many of us have any real models for what a father is supposed to be. Our fathers, all too often, were not around. Either they were at work all day and sometimes until well into the evening (so they were too tired when they were home to really interact), or they were not even in the same household. And when they were around, they were generally uninvolved in the down-and-dirty parenting tasks. How many of us over the age of twenty-five can remember our fathers doing laundry or picking us up from school? On the day-to-day level, most of us grew up in a world where the nuts-and-bolts of parenting was done by women. Our chins and bottoms were wiped, our food prepared and served, and our scratches and bruises attended to and kissed away—mainly by Mom, but often with help from Grandma, a handful of aunts, and occasionally a big sister.
Our experience of fathering was usually restricted to predictably narrow areas: Dad firmly held the expectations that you were supposed to live up to; Dad lowered the boom when you really screwed up and was the one you went to when you had a big problem that needed solving; and every now and then he was the one who would take you on a special outing.
Given this cultural background, it is certainly understandable that we would arrive at the gates of fatherhood woefully unprepared. What is difficult to understand is how, as a society, we could somehow silently conspire to bring one man after another to the brink of the most important job in his lifetime not only without preparing him, but without even talking to him about it.
My wife tells me there is nothing subtle about me, including my dreams. The day after my son was born, I had this dream where I am at a Dodger's baseball game and sitting in box seats right on the third-base line. The pitcher has gotten into trouble, and the pitching coach comes over to my box seats and says, “You're going in for him.” The whole stadium is looking at me and waiting for me to get my butt to the mound so the game can resume, and I am glued to my seat in terror.
When it comes to small children, this father's dream is all too often a reality; however, in the world of work this profound lack of preparation never happens. Imagine for a minute being relatively young and a pretty good salesman, though still fairly inexperienced in the working world, and the president of your multinational corporation calls you up to tell you that you've just been promoted to chief financial officer. After a momentary fleeting fantasy of the big raise and leap in status, you would no doubt conclude that this guy was nuts. You were no more prepared to be chief financial officer than you were to do the brain surgery your boss obviously needed!
We have dedicated the vast resources of our education system to prepare us for the tasks we will face later in life, but not only do we not teach our sons the skills they will need to be good fathers, we act as though fathering skills are instinctive or biological, and will simply emerge automatically, like a new mother's breast milk.
It doesn't work that way. When an infant cries, nursing mothers often experience a responsive leaking of breast milk; there are, after all, some powerful survival-of-the-species factors at work in that relationship. Unfortunately, a father does not automatically know what is wrong or what needs to be done when a baby cries. Fathering is a skill that must be learned and, for the most part, is one we don't bother to pass on.
Men also don't have the ritual support that so many women do. When a baby is born, grandmothers, sisters, and female friends all come out of the woodwork to hover and coo over the new addition, while the exhausted mom is alternately encouraged into her new child-care duties and pampered and fussed over by the temporary support team. It is a momentous occasion to cross over that unspoken borderline between being one of the women to being one of the mothers. It is observed and acknowledged in hundreds of small ways, from baby showers to visits from all the female relatives. It is not as though anyone decided or intended to exclude the new father, but the focus is clearly and specifically on mother and child—Dad is somewhere unobtrusively in the background.
The minute a man faces the most momentous change he will ever encounter, he is pressed by tradition, by circumstances, and often by his own fear into assuming a quietly receding position.
While reason and compassion dictate that the new father should be ritually welcomed and as emotionally propped up and supported at this crucial juncture as the new mother is, he is often ignored, left to deal with his insecurities with stoic silence or nervous bravado.
Even if men are properly prepared in the diaper-and-bottle department, we are still woefully unready for the sudden and dramatic realization of the awesome responsibility we have just taken on. You can do what you can ahead of time to prepare yourself, but nothing will make you ready for the impact of the feelings that are suddenly unleashed. This is your child, and it is your responsibility to protect her, to make sure that nothing bad ever befalls him.
The first time I had a chance to even stop and think about what had happened to me was about three months after my daughter's birth. I felt like I had been hit by a runaway truck and dragged for a mile. I never thought that my feelings of love would be so strong. I never realized that such a tiny little thing could so completely drain my energy. I never believed the comfortable routine I had built up with my wife and buddies could be so totally shattered. And I never could have imagined how frightening the weight of responsibility would be.
If there is any instinctive “father response” bred into men, most fathers would probably conclude that it is the overpowering urge to protect, at all costs, the helpless infant that has suddenly become their charge. It is a rare father who has not experienced that powerful rush of adrenaline at the door to fatherhood, and the strength of those feelings raises the odds dramatically. What prior to your first child's birth was a logical understanding of the extra financial burden you were about to undertake, coupled with a vague notion of the time and energy commitment that would be required, is suddenly elevated to life-and-death issues-this is your child, and your sense of duty and responsibility expands almost beyond bearing.
Ironically, men's response to this protective impulse often leads us into a series of actions and reactions that draws us farther and farther away from the real tasks of fathering. Becoming a father is almost always frightening, and, when our sensitivities are raised so quickly and dramatically at the birth of our first child, often our initial response is near-panic. Right when the arrival of our child has opened up emotional channels into the most vulnerable part of our heart, we are suddenly placed in a situation in which we don't understand the procedures, much less the rules, and we are hit with a very real and practical expansion of our job description.
Add to that a wife who is, at the very least, temporarily out of the job market, and you have a prescription for a large sack of emotional and financial burdens that men often find hard to carry. But carry it we must, because it is our job, because we feel it is our responsibility as men, even if we are not at all sure we can measure up. It can be a terrifying beginning, because if we can't protect our new family from even the insecurity caused by its inception, we will have failed before we've even begun. In the midst of this swirl of fear, our immediate response is to grab hold of anything that appears solid, and more often than not, that means putting up at least a pretense of being strong. We want our wives and babies to feel our protective strength, not our quivering insecurity. And often, that's what our wives want from us, too.
I remember lying on the bed with my wife just before our baby was born six years ago and telling her how afraid I was of not being a good father, of not being a good provider. She absolutely freaked out. “You can't be afraid!” she screamed. “I'm the one who's scared.” I learned then to keep my mouth shut.
