Perhaps my tendency to remember special occasions at the 11th hour is to blame, but this year the Father’s Day display at Target hit a new low. I spent well over half an hour picking up cards and putting them back before I found a single acceptable, sadly milquetoast card. A few were overly devout, or overly specific, but mostly what I encountered was beer jokes, fart jokes, and remote-control-controlling jokes. Circa 2009, the American father, as depicted in that particular cultural milieu, is a troglodyte — and pretty pleased about it.
If I’d been shopping for Hank Hill I’d have been in business. But in my experience, the dads of my generation are something else entirely, poised somewhere between the Neanderthals for whom the cards were meant and the role of primary, wholly evolved parent. Even though they may not do as much of it, or in some households anything approaching their fair share, they’ve got the feeding, the diapering, and the sleep-training down.
What they haven’t got, by and large, is the sense that their lives from now on are inevitably about compromise, their needs vs. their kids’, their employers’, their partners’. These fathers approach parenting as if it were a buffet. This used to piss me off big time, but more and more, I have come to see it as a trait mothers would do well to acquire.
I flashed on the card display the other day while reading Home Game, by best-selling author Michael Lewis, a New York Times Sunday Magazine contributing writer and the man who used to pen the column “Dad Again” for the online magazine Slate. Formally, Home Game is a memoir of Lewis’s three children’s early years, but its heart is an eloquent exploration of the emotional tug of war between new, heightened expectations of fathers and the seductive ease of the past, when the bar wasn’t just low, but subterranean.
Lewis does not apologize for being drunk when he drove his pregnant wife, former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren, to the maternity ward. So drunk he passed out on her hospital bed and very nearly missed the birth of his oldest daughter, Quinn. Two sober births later he is still living the moment down, still struggling with sloth and self-interest, but he has become a keen-eyed chronicler of human bonding.
“Here is the central mystery of fatherhood, or at any rate my experience of it,” he writes. “How does this… thing… that lands in his life and instantly disrupts every aspect of it for the apparent worse turn into love? A month after Quinn was born, I would have felt only obligatory sadness if she had been rolled over by a truck. Six months or so later, I’d have thrown myself in front of the truck to save her from harm. What happened? What transformed me from a monster into a father? I do not know.”
Except that he does. In fact, Lewis articulates that alchemistic experience with astonishing clarity: “The simple act of taking care of a living creature, even when you don’t want to, maybe especially when you don’t want to, is transformative. A friend of mine who adopted his two children was asked by a friend of his how he could ever hope to love them as much as if they were his own. ‘Have you ever owned a dog?’ he said. And that’s the nub of the matter: All the little things that you must do for a helpless creature to keep it alive cause you to love it. Most people know this instinctively. For someone like me, who has heretofore displayed a nearly superhuman gift for avoiding unpleasant tasks, it comes as a revelation. It’s because you want to hurl it off the balcony and don’t that you come to love it.”
Contrast this with the other hotly anticipated parenting memoir to hit the shelves in recent weeks, Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother. Also a reworked compilation of previously published work, much of it essays from Slate competitor Salon, this volume feels very much like a retread. Partly that’s because the so-called “momoir” genre is now old enough to have its own clichés, but truly, it also feels like Waldman hasn’t actually worked out the central conundrum she purports to lay bare. Where Lewis eventually found freedom in the culture’s low expectations, she responds to the stratospheric ideals of motherhood by both decrying them and then spending page after page justifying her parenting.
Waldman covers the customary bases: housework, breastfeeding, depression, in-laws, but all the while periodically letting us know that self-disclosure notwithstanding, her mothering is enviable. If the passage where she calls the gym teacher to complain that dodge ball is cruel doesn’t get you, you’ll likely choke on the opening line of a supposedly daring chapter on marital disagreements: “One evening not long ago, while enjoying a family dinner at the kids’ favorite restaurant, a diner owned by members of the band Green Day that specializes in meat loaf and milkshakes served by be-pierced young people suffering from a desperate surfeit of cool….” Who, exactly, is suffering from a surfeit of cool?
Waldman is married to celebrated novelist Michael Chabon. Their plan had always been for him to care for the kids during the day and then write, as is his habit, long into the night. But she envies her husband his time with the kids so much she quits her breadwinner’s job as a lawyer and herself takes up writing fiction. In the chapter where this transpires, we are treated to a recitation of all the ways in which parenting is harder than criminal defense. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to explore that envy, to take a long, honest look at mom’s desperation to hang onto the role of indispensable gatekeeper?
Recent years have seen a spate of “warts and all” mother memoirs, all purporting to lay bare the seamy underside of parenting. To my utter disappointment, most tiptoe up to that painful line but collapse under the author’s need to convince the reader that, unfair and unrealistic as our collective standards for mothers are, she’s really meeting them. It’s become something of a minor obsession of mine, this unwillingness to cast off chains in which we have bound ourselves.
Ultimately, what made Lewis’s the more interesting story was its resolution: Faced with a rigged game, he wrote his own rules. By the time his third child is born, Lewis is motivated not by his wife’s expectations or society’s, and not even by the simple reality that someone has to dig in and keep the family funny car on track. He is motivated, simultaneously, by devotion and selfishness, with no contradiction. “After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you are meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It’s only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.”
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
