Читать книгу The Collected Wisdom of Fathers - Will Glennon - Страница 10

Chapter 3

Outside from the Beginning

I thought I knew what I was getting into. I really did. I grew up in the sixties, and most of my friends were in no hurry to have children. But almost for as long as I can remember, I had loved kids and couldn't wait to have my own. When my wife got pregnant, I read everything about parenting I could get my hands on. I'm probably the only person in America to have actually read Dr. Spock cover to cover.

We were among the first wave of parents insisting on natural childbirth back when only a handful of hospitals allowed fathers into the delivery room. We even briefly considered something called the “LeBoyer method,” which involved everyone speaking in whispers in a delivery room heated to body temperature and then immediately submerging the new child in a tub of 98.6° water. The idea was to make her transition from the relatively quiet and very warm, wet world into the noisy, cold atmosphere of a standard delivery room that much less traumatic.

I was totally into being a father and thought I was prepared—until moments after my daughter's messy arrival, when the nurse put this tiny little girl into my hands. I was so overwhelmed by the flood of feelings that I damn near dropped her. At that moment, the only clear thought I had was sheer disbelief at how I could ever have been stupid enough to think I was ready for this.

I was scared. I was scared I would drop her, I was scared something might happen to her, I was scared I wouldn't be able to provide everything she deserved, I was scared I would look scared when now more than ever it seemed I had to be strong and in control, and I was scared to death of how quickly and how deeply I loved this squirming little girl.

Fathers are different from mothers. It's so obvious that we don't even stop to think about what the difference really means. The relationship of a mother and her child develops quite literally from the inside out. For nine months, the mother and her child are together in a physical symbiosis that defies comprehension. On the most elemental level, they share in the miracle of creation, and the day of birth is but the first important milestone in their already established connection.

Fathers, on the other hand, come to their children from the outside from the very beginning. We can participate in the progress of our wife's pregnancy, 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 videos of our child floating gently within her embryonic world. But our experience is always filtered; no matter how we participate, fundamentally we remain on the outside. Our first real contact with our child is when we pick up our newborn and cradle her in our arms.

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 might seem, the most crucial time to dramatically impact your future relationship with your children 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 child in the frighteningly vulnerable place from where 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 is 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.

When I think about it, I realize that I really didn't think a lot about what it would be like to actually be a father. Saying that now sounds absolutely idiotic, but I was really focused on my wife. Her pregnancy had been rough—nonstop morning sickness, daily afternoon headaches, and constant back pain and nausea the last two months. I was just trying alternately to comfort her, get some work done, and stay the hell out of her way.

When my son was born and the nurse asked me if I wanted to hold him, I realized that I didn't even know how. I couldn't figure out where to put the head or how to fit those tiny body parts into my very large and awkward-feeling hands. I also couldn't figure out how I ended up standing there so completely unprepared.

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 to simply assume that men have but a ceremonial role in the shaping of their children's lives. We become fathers with stunning ignorance, and unfortunately the period of greatest nescience is the one we are smack in the middle of before we ever realize how ill-prepared we are: our child's infancy.

How come nobody warned 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.

One day shortly after my daughter was born, my wife was dead asleep and I was trying real hard to do my part. After ruining two diapers and finally managing to get the third to sort of hang around my baby's hips, I just started laughing. I couldn't believe I could be so inept. I don't remember even having seen a baby being diapered. Babies were always fully diapered; when they needed changing, they were whisked away only to reappear in full plastic armor. I came up with the theory that all the women in the world got together and agreed to not let little boys in on any of the secret stuff about babies.

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 might have been ceremonially placed on a well-cushioned chair and allowed to “hold” him for a few minutes, but for all practical purposes, the message that came through loud and clear was 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 they were too tired when they were 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.

My wife tells me there is nothing subtle about me, including my dreams. The day after my son was born, I had this dream where I am at a Dodger's baseball game and sitting in box seats right on the third-base line. The pitcher has gotten into trouble, and the pitching coach comes over to my box seats and says, “You're going in for him.” The whole stadium is looking at me and waiting for me to get my butt to the mound so the game can resume, and I am glued to my seat in terror.

When it comes to small children, this father's dream is all too often a reality; however, in the world of work this profound lack of preparation never happens. Imagine for a minute being relatively young and a pretty good salesman, though still fairly inexperienced in the working world, and 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 would no doubt conclude that this guy was nuts. You were no more prepared to be chief financial officer than you were to do the brain surgery your boss obviously needed!

We have dedicated the vast resources of our education system to prepare us for the tasks we will face later in life, but not only do we not teach our sons the skills they will need to be good fathers, we act as though fathering skills are instinctive 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 are, after all, some powerful survival-of-the-species factors at work in that relationship. Unfortunately, a father does not automatically know what is wrong or what needs to be done when a baby cries. Fathering is a skill that must be learned and, for the most part, is one we don't bother to pass on.

Men also don't have the ritual support that so many women do. 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 unobtrusively 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.

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, and it is your responsibility to protect her, to make sure that nothing bad ever befalls him.

The first time I had a chance to even stop and think about what had happened to me was about three months after my daughter's birth. I felt like I had been hit by a runaway truck and dragged for a mile. I never thought that my feelings of love would be so strong. I never realized that such a tiny little thing could so completely drain my energy. I never believed the comfortable routine I had built up with my wife and buddies could be so totally shattered. And I never could have imagined how frightening the weight of responsibility would be.

If there is any instinctive “father response” bred into men, most fathers would probably conclude 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 us into a series of actions and reactions that draws us 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 heart, 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 will have failed before we've even begun. 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.

I remember lying on the bed with my wife just before our baby was born six years ago and telling her how afraid I was of not being a good father, of not being a good provider. She absolutely freaked out. “You can't be afraid!” she screamed. “I'm the one who's scared.” I learned then to keep my mouth shut.

Given all these realities, a new father can end up, not by design but by circumstance, withdrawing at precisely the moment he should be reaching out. Feeling unimportant, left out, and scared, 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.

It was really frightening. My wife was so wrapped up in the baby that it never occurred to her that we were going to have a very difficult time making it on my salary. My daughter was so beautiful, I used to stand at her crib late at night, watching her. Half the time my heart was full to bursting with love and the other half I was fighting down bile at the sheer terror of the responsibility I had taken on.

This terror of the burden we have assumed is often just the first subtle push of what, all too easily, can propel the 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.

As I watched my wife breast-feeding our son, they seemed to be surrounded by some kind of beautiful, glowing light. It took my breath away, but it also made me feel so inadequate and so much like an outsider. I just thought the best thing I could do was to avoid disturbing them.

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-feeding 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 need. Whether out of respect, fear, or circumstance, the result is the same—the entrenchment of distance between father and child.

It was like there was some kind of unspoken language that no one ever taught me. She was such a tiny thing, and her very survival depended on someone understanding what she needed and providing it. At the time, I thought it must have been some magical genetic thing, because my wife—who frankly was never the most practical person in the world—suddenly seemed to understand exactly what this little creature needed. It wasn't until many years later that she told me how scared and inept she had felt.

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.