Fathers come to their children from the outside from the very beginning. We can participate in the progress of our wives’ pregnancies, we can place our hands in strategic spots to feel the kicks and jabs, we can listen to the swooshing heartbeat through a stethoscope, and now, thanks to the marvels of technology, we can watch
In some profound way, our biological placement in the process of birth mirrors the challenges we will face throughout our children’s lives. For most mothers, the primary struggle of parenthood is stepping back far enough to allow the child the room to grow and develop. The challenge for most men, on the other hand, is coming in close enough so that we can build a strong and lasting bond.
As surprising as it may seem, the most crucial time to impact your future relationship with your children dramatically is in the first few years of their lives. This is a time when love and commitment are communicated on the most basic level. A child’s infancy is a time of tremendous leverage. The foundation we establish—or fail to establish—will either allow us to build and maintain a close emotional connection with relative ease, or will instill a distance that will make our later efforts more difficult.
The birth of his first child is a pivotal moment in a father’s life. It is a time when he must choose—whether he wants to or not—the emotional orbit from which he will do his fathering. The newborn offers a father an opportunity, a doorway back to the emotional world. This is an extraordinary, and tragically, often-overlooked possibility. If we choose to open ourselves as widely as possible, to meet our children in the frighteningly vulnerable place from which they begin, it can reunite us with a time and place when we too felt completely defenseless, completely exposed, and completely vulnerable. In this manner, it can broaden us and make us wiser.
Pulled together at the moment of birth, father and child will either forge an unbreakable connection or begin drifting apart. This opportunity is fragile and fleeting, existing for only a brief moment before the mundaneness of daily life returns in full force. Once this time has passed, crossing the distance becomes more and more difficult. It can be done—distance can always be erased where the love and desire are strong enough—but it becomes more and more difficult as time passes.
Because of this, becoming a father is a precious and sacred time in a man’s life, but unfortunately, it is rarely acknowledged as such. We arrive at this moment almost completely unprepared—no wise, elderly male relative takes us aside and impresses upon us the importance of seizing the chance for deep bonding. Too often, the moment passes without our even understanding the opportunity that is already slipping away.
Fathering is one of men’s most important and certainly most difficult undertakings, yet most of us enter into fatherhood with only the most rudimentary concept of what is expected of us. From any rational perspective, fatherhood is a great mystery. We live in a society that prizes preparation, training, and expertise for almost everything, but leaves us woefully unprepared for the single most challenging task of all. The more information we have, the more clear it becomes how vitally important the father/child relationship is, yet the patterns of our society appear simply to assume that men have only a ceremonial role in the shaping of their children’s lives. We become fathers with stunning ignorance. And unfortunately, we are smack in the middle
Why did no one warn us? Although, in most cases, our initiation into the bewildering world of fatherhood was not something done to us intentionally, at the time, it certainly seems like a peculiarly cruel joke.
For the most part, as boys, we were rarely included in any infant-care activities and were unwelcome when adults talked about parenting issues. When a little brother or sister came along, we may have been placed ceremonially on a well-cushioned chair and allowed to “hold” the child for a few minutes, but for all practical purposes, the message came through loud and clear 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 were too tired when they came 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.
While this profound lack of preparedness is all too often a reality in the world of fatherhood, in the world of work, it never happens. Imagine for a minute being relatively young and a pretty good salesman, though still fairly inexperienced in the working world. 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 no doubt conclude that this guy is nuts. You are no more prepared to be chief financial officer than you are to do the brain surgery your boss obviously needs!
Although we dedicate the vast resources of our educational system to preparing us for the tasks we will face later in life, not only do we not teach our sons the skills they will need to be good fathers, we act as though fathering skills are instinctual 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 a
Men also don’t have the ritual support that so many women have. 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 unobtrusive 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.
So, until we as a society finally figure out that being a father deserves the energy and preparation we can give it, the least we can do is dedicate ourselves to a rapid trajectory of on-thejob learning, and that includes talking to every good father role model we can find.
One of the secrets about good fathering is that it is primarily about feelings. His child’s infancy is the time in a man’s life when he is given the opportunity to return, fully and completely, to his heart. After spending much of the previous two or three decades learning how to conquer and control our feelings in order to operate effectively in the world, fatherhood presents us with the sudden and scary opportunity to become reacquainted with that inner part of ourselves.
Life has a way of delivering lessons in a form that we can handle. Reintroducing a man to his emotional side can, as most women will certainly attest, be a very tall order. But when the teacher is his very own tiny, helpless infant, the process can be simple, painless, and a source of immeasurable joy, as many of the men I have spoken with can attest. Cradled in the security of mutual, unconditional love, it is the single safest emotional relationship most men will ever encounter.
Interacting with an infant is the most introductory course in deep emotions imaginable. Add to that the fact that we are starting with the real basics—infants need to be held, fed, stroked, talked to, played with, bathed, and comforted—and you get to practice all you want without fear of rejection. You know going in that every touch, every funny face, every hug, every tickle, every time you say “I love you,” every time you watch your child’s latest accomplishment with wonder, your child is blossoming with your love.
A child’s infancy is a very physical time, so dive in and enjoy it. From feeding, diapering, and bathing to tying on those tiny booties and trying to direct a flailing hand down a shirt
Infancy is truly a time of miracles. Your child’s mind and body are growing at such a dramatic rate that he or she is a new person every day. The tiny hand that waves aimlessly around one day is purposefully (and gleefully) dropping peas off the high chair tray the next. Overnight, all the gurgling and lip-smacking turn into distinct sounds, then words, then demands. The helpless, wiggling infant, whose sole method of getting anything accomplished is to cry, transforms before your very eyes (and long before you are properly prepared) into a marvel of locomotion, knocking down anything and everything in its path and turning any bottom shelf into complete disarray.
Although babyhood may appear to be a period of great fragility, in fact it’s a rough-and-tumble time of constant creation and discovery. No father worth his salt would allow his child to disappear on a long journey of exploration unaccompanied, which is exactly what happens if you don’t make a conscious effort to dive into fatherhood—by becoming a master of the quick diaper change, learning the intricate flight patterns for spooning mashed peas into an anxiously circling mouth while enthusiastically babbling nonsense, locating every ticklish spot on your child’s body, and reading A Fly Went By 700 times without appearing to lose interest in how it turns out.
As new fathers, we enter this moment of our lives profoundly unprepared. If we have a supportive wife, if we can find the courage to overcome our fears and insecurities, if we are lucky enough to have male friends to encourage us in the process, we have the opportunity to begin again—to participate actively in the miraculous process of creating an individual. And in so doing, we are taken back and allowed to relive, re-create, and refashion those parts of our own being that no longer serve us well.
It seems important to start with this, the deepest truth of fathering—that your children can take you back and can set you free. From here, we can begin to create the intricate web of connections that bind us to our children. It is never too early to begin but, because of the miracle of love, it is also never too late.
If we are failing our children, it is not because we don’t love them, not because we don’t want to be the best fathers we can possibly be, but rather because the rules have all changed and no one bothered to tell us, much less give us a copy of the new rule book. We feel, as one man said, “a little like a character in a Twilight Zone episode. One day I just woke up in another dimension, where no matter what I tried to do, it turned out to be the wrong thing.”
At the heart of the problem is our collective difficulty in dealing with things emotional, an inhibition that robs our children of one of the most essential resources necessary for building a healthy, self-confident personality—our heartfelt, feeling presence.
Under normal circumstances, our strength as problem-solvers would rise to the occasion. However, growing up male has ill-prepared us for dealing with this one—we have a very limited emotional vocabulary and little experience, much of it negative, in emotional dialog. It is one of the problems that helped get
Because we, too, for the most part were raised to follow a similar code of emotional silence, we find ourselves untrained, unsupported, unsure, and uneasy in the crucial task of emotionally nurturing our children. But this is precisely what we are being called upon to do.
It is always difficult to make a change, because it’s new, because it’s different, but mostly because it implies that the way we used to do things was all wrong. In practice, things don’t really work that way. What was appropriate forty years ago may not be appropriate today. Largely because we have had virtually no training for what is being asked of us, this particular transition for men is even more difficult and confusing than most. The temptation is to long for the illusory comfort of some past golden era. But fathering is too important to treat so cavalierly. We must face who we are and where we are right now. Like it or not, whereas our fathers pioneered a new technological era, we now blaze a trail on the frontier of human relationships.
There is a scene in one of the Star Trek movies in which Captain Kirk says: “The situation is grim and the odds of succeeding are slim—sounds like fun.” This pokes fun at the swashbuckling nature of the early Star Trek TV show, but it is also speaking to the fearless adventurer within each of us. Historically, it wasn’t that long ago that, when fathers were called upon to be protectors, it was in deadly serious physical combat. Whether it was battling a group of marauding bandits, a rival tribe, or an organized army of invaders, fathers fought to protect their children.
This is a characteristic of fathering that we are comfortable with; it is the most visible and receives the most attention. Along with the ability to solve problems and resolve conflicts, a father’s role as protector is something we as a society have traditionally appreciated; it is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of father love.
But in the final analysis, the most important quality of a good father at this point in history is the capacity to communicate and share deep feelings with our children. That’s because the heart of fathering is fathering from the heart. It is about how our children feel—about us, about their own self-esteem and sense of self-worth, about the value and importance of their unique personalities. It is about how effective we are at helping our children understand and embrace their own feelings. These are the most precious gifts that we can give our children, the resources that will allow them to live rich and full lives.
Although fathering on the day-to-day level is often about doing—something for which most of our fathers prepared us very well—on the fundamental level, it is almost exclusively about feeling. This crucial truth is easy for us to dismiss or ignore. Because it seems to come more naturally to us and because we are better at it, we tend to elevate the role of father as teacher to the position of highest importance. We focus on the need to teach our children good, effective behavior so that, whatever they do in life, they will do it well.
As men, we tend to define ourselves by the work we do. I am a carpenter, a lawyer, a manager, a mechanic. But obviously, we are much more than that. We are fathers, husbands, lovers, sons; we are members of a broader community; we are individuals with our own beliefs and convictions. Ultimately, when we
Once again, we are being called to fight for our children, only this time the battle is in a decidedly different arena and will not be waged with muscle and weapons. We can draw on the courage and determination of the generations of fathers that have gone before us, but we must develop new and different skills. This time, the enemy is all the nameless and faceless pressures that push us away from a deep connection with our children. Our battle is about feelings—ours and theirs. Ultimately, it is about becoming conversant enough and comfortable enough with our own emotions to be able to receive and nurture the feelings of our children.
This, then, is our challenge: to become emotional warriors, to return to the heart of fathering. We must approach this challenge with determination and the conviction that, by focusing our efforts here, at the very core of what it means to be a father, we can rewrite the rules and transform the landscape of parenting.
Communicating our love to our children and acknowledging their importance in our lives is an undertaking of enormous significance—for our children, for our own well-being, and for generations of fathers to come. Historically and socially, we are conditioned to put aside our feelings in order to fight. The purpose for which we must fight is to become fully engaged with our feelings in order to reinstate ourselves in our proper place in our children’s lives. The effort requires courage and determination, for this is new territory, and we will no doubt make mistakes.
It is also an endeavor that still, despite the pioneering work of many fathers, runs counter to what is expected and accepted. “Out there,” in the world, the business culture still expects us
There is a subculture in the working world made up of men who have chosen to sacrifice any and all genuine human interactions for the sake of business success. Many in this group rise to important positions precisely because they are willing to sacrifice everything, including their relationships with their wives and children, to succeed. Unfortunately, these are sometimes the very people with whom the rest of us must somehow deal; and, all too often, the only way they know to defend their own choices is to be absolutely cutthroat in their dealings with any man unwilling to make the same sacrifices.
Make no mistake, this is and will continue to be a substantial obstacle. For a man who has chosen to sacrifice family life for the sake of his job to see another man refuse to make that sacrifice and still be an effective worker starkly reveals the unnecessarily tragic folly of such a decision. Because of this, there will be plenty of men out there who will go out of their way to make it more difficult for you.
It takes considerable courage to walk through that wall of fire and remain committed to being a feeling man. Even in the best of work environments, it is rare that a man will find true support for career sacrifices made in the name of good fathering.
In some sense, the external obstacles we must confront will be the easiest to manage. They are, at least, easy to identify, and we can fall back on our more familiar male problem-solving skills to get around them. The internal obstacles are more difficult both to identify and to master.
One of the thorniest issues stems from the sad truth that, in today’s world, men are not rewarded for being good fathers, but rather for making lots of money and wielding lots of power. We may deplore the heartless, superficial nature of this pecking order, but can we resist the sirens’ call? Like those mythical beauties whose songs lured sailors onto the deadly rocks, the attraction of status is tempting. Raised on the importance of competition and striving for excellence, can we refuse to compete in the arena? We know it is distorted and out of balance, but we also know that this is where the public rewards are handed out.
This is a delicate issue. Working and achieving are important; they are necessary to being a good provider. And, if we are lucky, it can be through our work that we make a contribution to and thus our mark in the world. The trick is to accomplish what we need to without crashing on the rocks of total self-absorption.
For many of us, the most difficult obstacle will be our fear of our own emotions. In his first inaugural address, Franklin D. Roosevelt reminded Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” For a man, it is much easier to rally to that call to courage when the danger is from the outside; when the danger appears to well up within our own hearts, however, we are not at all sure we have the resources to persist.
Our cultural stereotypes portray women as too focused on emotions, and men as largely oblivious to the world of feelings. The theme recurs with as much regularity in domestic quarrels as it does in bestselling books and comedy routines. That’s because, as much as it is a gross overstatement, it is also substantially true.
If we, as fathers, are to make this journey, we must admit up front how difficult it is for most of us to be willing to feel—
A good part of the problem is of our own making. For a world of reasons that psychologists would be more than happy to explain, most of us developed quite early the habit of avoiding our emotions by simply repressing them. We shove them down into some dark space, where we hope they will stay—and they do for the time being. But emotions have their own rhythm and cannot be ignored so easily, at least not permanently. Eventually, they come out—one way or another.
The net effect of tamping them down is much like overinflating a tire—the ride gets more and more jarring, and the pressure mounts to the point where you cringe at every bump in anticipation of a blowout. After years of allowing the pressure to build, it can take considerable courage just to be willing to acknowledge and examine the feelings that have been bottled up for so long, and even more courage to actually feel and express them.
Men tend to be pretty good at analysis, but it helps if what we are analyzing can be seen, touched, measured, and examined. Emotions are more like energy than anything else. Although we can see their effects, we can’t see emotions themselves. They pulse, vibrate, and crackle like an overloaded transformer, but we cannot get our hands on them. We can sense their tremendous power, but it cannot be controlled or harnessed. Entering the world of our own emotions, therefore, can be every bit as frightening as the idea of holding 10,000 volts of electricity in our hands.
Ironically, one of the miracles of our emotions is that they allow us to experience things vastly beyond the limited capacities of our physical selves. Our emotions, our extraordinary capacity to feel, constitute the expansive energy that makes up our essential identity—the core of who we are. Everything we are flows from that source—what we want and need in life, our desires, our hopes, our dreams. In a very profound way, each of us is truly what we feel.
Once we are willing to enter this world without reservation, we discover (to our great relief ) that, as overwhelming as it can feel, it is only a feeling. Not only can we survive, we can thrive as we become more and more comfortable in this venue. And for this we should be thankful, because the world of our emotions is a vastly complex and intricate one of which we can no longer remain ignorant.
We need to become experts—to learn how to harness this extraordinary energy and understand what we are feeling and why we are experiencing those particular feelings. We need to learn how to describe and communicate our feelings in a way that others can understand. These skills are critical, because they are the tools with which we will build a strong and lasting connection to our children.
If we imagine our emotions as high-voltage electricity pulsing within us, all that is missing is the connection—the circuitry— that allows that energy to flow back and forth between us and our children. Without this connection, we are like a power tool that is unplugged. We can be present physically, interacting with our children, but the powerful flow of our vital energy is missing—an emotional blackout. It’s like trying to drill a hole with a disconnected power drill—something may be happening, but it won’t be what you are trying to accomplish.
Face it: fathers are not getting the clearest of messages these days. 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 our identity as men. And so we throw ourselves into the role with fierce determination, as though fulfilling this aspect of our identity as fathers were enough.
For most men, it is when our children are very young that we need to work the hardest. We may be new on the job, often insecure about our work identity. We need to put in long hours to become better at what we do, to become more valuable to the company, or to be recognized as an important employee. Out of fear, insecurity, and need, we put in long hours at work and have precious little time left to spend with our children.
Before we know it, the tiny creatures we brought home from the hospital are crawling, then walking, then running to greet us at the door each evening. And as they grow, so too do their needs—clothes, shoes, medical bills, braces, piano lessons, judo classes. This is also frequently the time in our careers when we have greater opportunities for advancement, and that, of course, means even more attention to work, more hours spent on the job, and more work being brought home to intrude on the few hours available for our children. Even men who start out intending to do things differently find themselves in the provider trap.
Because we love our children so much, we want desperately to be good providers, and so we work very hard at it. Then suddenly, we find ourselves deep into the middle years of our children’s youth, at a distance we never planned for or wanted. We find ourselves on the outside looking in at their lives—their rhythms and schedules—much of which is constructed without concern for our presence, because, in truth, it is very difficult to assure them we will be there. We try. We try to get to the soccer match, to show up at the parent/teacher night, to get home early so we can play catch, but it is very difficult. They learn to stop counting on us to be there in order not to feel the sharp sting of disappointment, and we end up feeling left out.
Time is important, whether we want it to be or not. The more time we spend working, the more energy we pour into our jobs, the more all-consuming they can become. Without our ever intending it, work can assume a larger and larger piece of our self-image. It can absorb so much of our identity that it becomes the only thing from which we can derive satisfaction, the only place we feel appreciated. If we are particularly good at our jobs, they can also become the place where our accomplishments are honored and acknowledged—the center of our feelings of self-worth.
The less time we spend at home, the less familiar it becomes. We lose track of what is going on in our children’s lives. We don’t know the names of their friends or their enemies, what they like or what bothers them. It can be very disconcerting to listen to an explanation of an event of crucial importance to your six-year-old and realize that you know neither the landscape nor the actors.
This lack of involvement, like a small crack in the windshield, can widen and worsen if left untended, as our children begin to
express their anger over our absence in any number of creative ways that are guaranteed to make time spent at home even less enjoyable. This can become just one more pressure pushing us farther away, or it can be the wake-up call that something needs to change. Fathers need to be alert to all the pressures pushing them into a one-dimensional role and then resist like mad!
Unfortunately, we don’t all have the ability to restructure our work life unilaterally and still be able to pay the bills, but we are all faced with the same dilemma. For the most part, the very job opportunities that allow us to provide for our children threaten to pull us so far apart from them that we may lose the very thing we are working so hard to maintain—our family. And until recently, there was very little acknowledgment of this issue by employers.
Balancing work and family life is a very real and difficult problem with no simple solutions. We cannot return en masse to the days of small shops and single-family farms; those options are no longer economically viable on any large scale. Nor can we simply quit our jobs or abandon our children. Broadening the awareness and sensitivity of employers to the problems fathers face and demanding and getting flexible work schedules, and more realistic paternity leave and child-care policies will take considerable time and effort.
It feels for all the world as if we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, being slowly ground into pieces. And recent changes in our economic landscape are not making things any easier. The growing pains of a truly international economy have forced a wave of corporate downsizing, which in real language means that fewer good jobs are available; and the lucky ones who have those jobs are being increasingly called upon to work
Given all these factors, being a father at this moment in history is no picnic. We are understandably expected to provide for our children and attacked as deadbeat dads if we fail. At the same time, we end up sacrificing precious time with our children in order to provide for them, and then come under criticism for not being with them enough.
For many men, it feels like an impossible situation—and there are no easy fixes on the horizon. Yet this is the hand we have been dealt, and the stakes are far too high to walk away without trying. For, as great a social tragedy as the absent father has become, it is so much more a personal tragedy for our children, who are growing up without our support and nurturing, and a loss for those of us who are severed from the miracle of our children’s lives.
We need to begin to redefine fathering in a way that makes sense at this point in our history so that it can provide the kind of reassuring comfort and strength for our children that it should. We need to search for ways around the seemingly impossible bind we find ourselves in so that, when we work, it is for a deeper purpose and, when we are home with our children, it is as the fathers we want to be. In order to do all this, we need to look a little closer at the factors that keep us separated from our children.
One of the best things fathers can do is start supporting and advocating for a more family-friendly work environment. This
means both moving toward a more European system with more time off, and encouraging and taking real family-leave time.
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, whom it is your responsibility to protect. You must make sure that nothing bad ever befalls him or her.
If there is any instinctive “father response” bred into men, most fathers would probably agree 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 them into a series of actions and reactions that draws them 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 hearts, 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 have failed before we even begin. 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.
Given all these realities, a new father can end up, not by design but by circumstance, withdrawing at precisely the moment when he should be reaching out. Feeling unimportant, left out, and frightened, he is apt to retreat into silent stoicism—feeling the enormous load of his newborn responsibility, but having no apparent support or acknowledgment from the outside and no ready avenue to relieve his burden.
This terror of the burden we have assumed is often just the first subtle push of what all too easily can propel a new father
into a trajectory that takes him away from his child. By shutting down instead of opening up, by pulling away toward the seductive safety of isolation instead of stepping forward into the frightening no-man’s-land of an infant’s very raw needs, a new father can unintentionally establish an emotional distance between himself and his child that will be difficult to bridge.
To some new fathers, witnessing the power of the mother/child connection can be so dramatic that they retreat out of respect rather than fear. Add to that the return these days to breast- rather than bottle-feeding, and men can find themselves in the very uncomfortable position of not being able to satisfy their crying baby’s very real needs. Whether out of respect, fear, or circumstance, the result is the same—the entrenchment of distance between father and child.
Ironically, our collective mythology about women being intuitive and “natural-born” mothers often contributes to nudging new fathers away from forming a strong emotional bond with their newborn children early on. Many new mothers express their own insecurities about mothering by being overly attentive and focused on their infant. This can come across to an often nervous and baffled father as a possessive and near exclusive takeover of all the nurturing and comforting roles. We men frequently contribute to this unconscious takeover because, after all, we are already feeling inept, and it suits our need for security to imagine that our wives really are “naturally” good at this sort of thing.
Mom takes maternity leave and spends her time in intensive training sessions. Fathers, on the other hand, rarely take parental leave and begin almost immediately to see and interact with their child in limited and repetitive ways. As a result, the new
mother quickly learns to interpret the cries and body language of her tiny infant. She becomes, through trial and error, in tune with the feelings and expressions of this emerging little person, while Dad lags behind.
When Dad is late in picking up the infant’s signs of need, Mom, who by now understands the signals, steps in to take over. Because children, like adults, naturally gravitate toward those who provide them with the nurture and comfort they need, before we know what has happened, our babies are crawling to Mommy for comfort, our toddlers always want to go with Mommy—and we’re left wondering what happened. The cumulative effect is the establishment of a polarization in which Mom assumes virtually all the roles of comforting and nurturing and Dad recedes into the distance—outside the orbit of the deepest emotional connections.
At the same time we are losing out on precious opportunities to bond with our babies. The first days of fatherhood are often taken up by myriad burdensome tasks, interrupted constantly. Whatever schedule we used to observe is blown to pieces. Waking, sleeping, eating, even limited conversation with your wife are now suddenly and completely at the unconscious whim of your child. Most men find themselves in the position of trying to smooth over all the interactions with the outside world, leaving mother and child within a hastily (and imperfectly) fashioned cocoon of protection.
Usually, this means that the careful division of labor with which you and your wife had become comfortable is shattered by the unbelievable level of attention a newborn requires. While Mom redirects her energy toward caring for your child, you find
It is an exhausting time, made even more so by the predictable late-night alarm clock of your hungry child’s cry. If the fatigue is being balanced by the emergence of deep emotional bonds between you and your child, it is only of passing consequence. But if the exhaustion is experienced only as the result of a very difficult job, as is so often the case with new fathers, the consequences can be lasting and tragic.
One day, we are living lives that we can trace with some thread of consistency. The next day, everything has changed so much we are mystified at how it happened. Somehow, the boundaries of our existence have expanded dramatically. We can feel the enormity of the transformation, but we have no reference for understanding it or anyone to talk to about it.
Indeed, for most us, the transition to fatherhood is like being dunked into a bath of ice water: one moment, we are young men concerned largely with our wives, our careers, and our leisure time; the next moment, we are fathers—not at all sure about what we are supposed to do, but with a very definite sense that the scope of our responsibility has just increased enormously.
The urge to provide and protect is very powerful, but don’t let it force you into a one-dimensional role.
One of life’s greatest mysteries is reconciling our existence as unique individuals with the reality that we are intricately connected to everyone and everything. We are, in fact, both alone and connected.
As men, we are intimately familiar with the first truth. Very early in life, we learn that we are on our own. We are schooled in isolation; we learn to accept it as a natural part of our existence, and we create a safe place inside ourselves to which we can retreat. From this place we can, if necessary, dismiss anything outside ourselves as unimportant. This ability of men to become islands unto themselves is also what allows us to pursue our dreams, interests, and goals with dogged determination. We can strip away everything else and bear down on precisely what we want.
This capacity to retreat to a place of our most basic needs is a powerful survival mechanism, and, as ruthless as it appears, it is very effective. Cross us, attack us, insult us, hurt us, and we can survive by retreating to this place, where nothing that the other person says or does is important. Unfortunately, although this skill can be very useful on the battlefield, it can be very destructive when employed with those we hold most dear.
The second part of the paradox of aloneness and connection is what has always caused us trouble. For we are very good at retreating to our island, but we are not nearly so skilled at extending ourselves to others, building a bridge to someone else. It is an undertaking that requires great faith and courage, because the very act of acknowledging our connection forces us to drop our defenses and makes us vulnerable.
The currency of that connection is love and, for most men, our love for our children is the safest and most stable place to begin. It is love that gives us the courage and audacity to extend our hands to another. It is love that grants us the courage to open the door to our inner selves and stand there, vulnerable and exposed in front of others.
It is in this space that we create the circuitry that bridges the gap between us. Here, we are able to share, at the deepest level, the most important aspects of who we are. And it is in this connection that we are able to receive the miracle of our children’s love.
Very few things that we, as men, will ever experience are as deep and powerful as our love for our children. It is an extraordinarily primal, almost visceral feeling, and we don’t always know how to react to it. For most of us, it is impossible to describe—we simply cannot find the words. Partly because of that, we resist talking about it. It resides inside us in a protected place, like a precious treasure that must be guarded.
Ironically, because we don’t talk about it, the feeling itself becomes more powerful and mysterious, making us even more unwilling to discuss it. We’re afraid that, if we try to talk about our love for our children, we will either stumble around, unable to find the proper words to convey the feeling, or, worse, that the sheer depth and power of the feeling will cause our voices to falter. Indeed, in many of the interviews I did for this book, voices cracked with emotion when fathers spoke about their love for their children.
Because it can be so overwhelming, too many of us assume that the mere existence of such a powerful feeling is sufficient for our children’s well-being—but it isn’t. That feeling, that unconditional love and commitment to our children, is the
We are all alone and we are all connected, but it is the feeling of being alone that will remain with us until we learn how to fashion the lasting bonds that connect us. We cannot experience the richness of being a part of something larger than ourselves, nor can we offer our children the security of truly feeling that they are not alone, without first being willing to take the risks entailed in learning to embrace and articulate our emotions.
This challenge cannot be avoided if we want to take our fathering seriously. For it is here, in the charged atmosphere of shared feelings, that we will truly meet our children. It is here, in the articulation of our deepest feelings, that we can weave the deep chords of strength that will sustain our children throughout their lives. And it is here, face to face with the unconditional love of our children, that we will receive the greatest of gifts.
