In the fall of 2005, I was more alone than I had ever been, and the least happy.
No, I'm sorry. That's not quite right: in fact, I was always, always with a baby boy and I had never been happier.
I took my infant son to playgrounds. In those sunny, desperate places I taught him to walk, his small fists clenched around my aching forefingers. Pushing a swing, I'd eye the mothers and they eyed me, or so I imagined.
I was typically the only father. The moms seldom spoke to me and I was frankly afraid of them. I feared -- it sounds ridiculous to admit -- that if I initiated a conversation, they'd think I was hitting on them. Deep in my bones, I felt that I didn't belong on weekday playgrounds. Not just because I was a dad; I didn't even feel like a parent, not then. I felt like a spy, an interloper, an anthropologist studying a lost tribe of stroller-pushing nomads.
It's not entirely correct that I didn't see any other dads. In fact, there were other stay-at-home dads, though all of us worked at least part-time. There was Nick, a contract archeologist, and Stefano, a former teacher getting his real estate license. I reflexively identify them by their jobs -- for are we not men? -- but in truth we were just as disheveled and discombobulated and underemployed as the moms. Moms clung to each other; we clutched at the straws of errant livelihoods.
We men tried to form a manly playgroup, but conflicting nap schedules meant that no more than two kids usually showed up at a time, which is hardly a "playgroup." And so I plucked up my courage and I set about finding mothers who could join us. I met Beth and her daughter Anna Priya at a music class. I met Karen and her boy Argus, and Jackie and her son Ezra, at the neighborhood playground. I met Spring and Astrid at the neighborhood farmer's market. I asked them for emails; and, after a moment's hesitation, they handed them over, and today, though I am no longer a stay-at-home dad, I feel very close to these moms, who provided me with guidance as well as friendship.
Dads were scarce on the playground, but in truth I wasn't alone. Generation X dads spend twice as much time with children than did their Baby Boomer fathers. The result is a huge generation gap (though, ironically, it was previous generations of fathers who pioneered more developmental and caregiving roles). When Kerry Daly of the University of Guelph interviewed thirty-two young Canadian fathers in the early 1990s, he found that many dads rejected their own fathers as role models. "In light of the perception that parenthood had changed so dramatically from the previous generation," Daly finds "a tendency to search for specific instances of good fathering behavior among one's peers."
At the same time, however, "the men in this study viewed their mothers and wives as providing some of the more practical and tangible guidance for how to provide care for children." One father tells Daly: "I think my mom for the most part did a better job of getting me ready to be a father. When the child came home, there was more input from my mother in helping me out on how to handle things; where my father was pleased for me, you know, 'it's your child,' and that's what I got from my dad."
Daly's findings are not isolated. In 2006, Trent W. Maurer and Joseph H. Pleck studied the connections between parenting identity, the feedback parents receive from others about their identity and behavior, and behavior by interviewing 47 fathers, whose average age was 38, and 56 mothers, average age 36. "The more involved fathers perceive other fathers to be," they conclude, "the more they attempt to model the level of that involvement (and the more models they have)." Maurer and Pleck suggest that such peer influence is one of the most decisive variable influencing fathers' caregiving behavior -- perhaps just as important as their wives' expectations.
Are men who take care of children mothering, or are they merely pushing the frontier of fatherhood into new territory?
It's not an idle question, for it goes right to the heart of the relationship between gendered identity and gendered behavior. 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
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