- Introduction - Page 16

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, became 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 enforced 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.

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 follow. 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 given.

Fathers today, young and old, have been dealt a very difficult hand. Because of the massive social and economic migrations over the past 100 years, as a group, we have been deprived of the