Those who seek to expand the definition of "fathering" to include caregiving tend to emphasize male distinctiveness, like supposedly male qualities of rough physical play, risk-taking, and careless housecleaning. Another group tries to extend the definition of "mothering" to include men, which severs the mothering role from biology and sets up "mother" as a role into which either a man or a woman can step.
Meanwhile, many of the growing number of breadwinning, non-biological lesbian parents are calling themselves "lesbian dads." "In our family, on Father's Day, we celebrate me," writes blogger and self-described lesbian dad Polly Pagenhart. "My 'fatherhood' of our child is strictly social, invisible to the state until petitioned for as a would-be 'second parent,' and marginally visible to many even afterwards. But it is the result of an accretion of daily work on my part, ever-changing and, I pray, lasting my entire life. The older our daughter gets, the more I'll learn about what my sort of lesbian fatherhood means, to me and to her. Right now, it's not so complicated."
"Not so complicated?" My friend Jessica Mass disagrees. The non-biological, breadwinning mother rejects that idea that she is fathering, despite the many feelings and tasks she shares with the traditional fathering role. "I remember during the labor just feeling really useless," she says. "After we got home, we had this situation where she was in bed with him and I was on the couch. I was just like, 'Are you OK, can I get you anything?' That surprised me. Because I think culturally we're trained to assume that that's what the father does. In the movies, the mother does stuff and the father runs around looking silly and saying, 'Are you OK?'"
"I did feel silly," continues Jessica, "but I definitely didn't feel like a father, because I'd grown up learning to be a mother. Growing up and in our relationship, it was always my intention to have a baby. I think anyone who gives birth has this very instinctual knowledge of what that baby needs, but I didn't know how to make myself a part of the nourishing of this little person. We had both grown up believing that this is the mother's role, and she was doing the mother's role, but I wasn't going to do the father's role. To call myself the father felt like that was a further step away from being the parent, from being the mother."
Such comments reveal how much we have in common, we parents, queer and straight, men and women. Those of us who have stepped into nontraditional gender roles are often just as confused (albeit happily) as the conservatives who say that we are destroying the American family. Like Adam and Eve -- or, in some cases, Adam and Steve, or Eva and Eve, or Eva and Eve and their donor Adam and his boyfriend Steve, or Adam and Steve and Adam's ex-wife Eve -- we're all in a brave new land and struggling to find names for things and figure out which apples we shouldn't eat. All we have -- and I know that I write this at the risk of sounding ridiculous -- are great feelings of love.
It's sentimental to say, but I really think that that is what matters most. I understand the urge to pull the boundaries back to some imaginary paradise, so that the family takes on a more familiar, comfortable, supposedly traditional shape, and yet I personally don't want to go back to the Old World. I'm not even sure where it is: somewhere to the Right, maybe, behind the Wal-Mart? Thanks, I'm happy where I am, right here in San Francisco, that Babylon by the Bay. I don't believe that the family is "under attack" or "falling apart" -- I believe that it is evolving in response to changing social conditions and that failure to evolve will result in obsolescence.
Today we know that women can advance through the workplace, and, in the process, change it. We also know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that men can and do take care of children and homes -- and in the process, create new ideas of the home that scholars like Barbara Risman, Kyle Pruett, and Andrea Doucet have observed, documented, and interpreted. We know that men can, in a sense, mother -- that is to say, nurture children, day-in and day-out. Today the real question is, can more men mother? Will the number of hours men spend on childcare continue to grow? Will we see more and more stay-at-home dads on the playgrounds?
Maybe. I hope so. What will help that to happen? The research conducted by Daly, Pleck, and Maurer strongly suggests that dads need more positive role models in the form of other men who are willing to speak about their experience with caregiving and parenting. But they also need the support of the women in their lives, who must open the gates and let men into worlds that were once the exclusive domain of mothers. For many women, this is easier said than done, and it raises more questions than answers. But more critically, society and workplaces must continue to evolve to accept caregiving as an essential part of human life -- a process that can only be helped along if more and more men have a stake in the issues championed by the Mothers Movement.
Today when I take my toddler to the playgrounds, I no longer feel like a spy, an interloper, or an anthropologist. I am unambiguously happy and I do feel like a parent; I look around at the other parents, moms and dads, and I see my community. I believe in our creativity and resilience, because experience and science tells me that's who we are, and I believe that we will develop new forms and understandings and names that will be every bit as comfortable and familiar to our grandchildren as the nuclear family was to our grandmothers and grandfathers. We're not at a stage where it pays to limit our options. I say we throw open the gates and let everyone in who loves and cares for other human beings, and let's see what happens.
Mmo : may 2007 |
