Читать книгу The Collected Wisdom of Fathers - Will Glennon - Страница 9

Chapter 2

Caught in the Currents of Change

I was working out of town for nearly two full months last year, living at a hotel where a lot of other men working on the same project were staying. It was kind of an unusual situation because we were all strangers, from very different backgrounds, but we would work together all day and then see each other at the hotel restaurant and bar each night. For the most part, they were men that normally I would probably never say more than a few words to, but because of the circumstances I ended up getting to know quite a few of them pretty well.

When the conversations finally got around to their children—which was only long after we had exhausted all the sports conversations we could come up with, and usually after a fair number of drinks-I can't tell you how many of these guy were just baffled, almost shell-shocked. They loved their kids, they would swell up with pride just talking about them, but at the same time there was this huge empty space. They'd joke about not being able to understand babies or teenagers, or about not knowing how to play with little kids. They'd tell me how “good” the wife was with their daughter, or their son, or their kids. They'd complain about not having more time to take the kid out to the ballpark. But underneath it all was this very sad sense of loss. It's like they knew something was missing but couldn't put their finger on just what it was or how to find it.

Something unusual has been going on recently—people are starting to talk about fathers. Unfortunately, as is so often the case when the bright lights of attention are suddenly turned on, much of the commentary is decisively negative. As noted in chapter 1, a flood of studies have been released, documenting in stark detail the absence of fathers, physically and emotionally, and bringing into sharp focus the increasingly long list of ugly consequences.

Mothers, who have traditionally taken the rap for screwing up the kids because, after all, they were there, are suddenly being afforded a little relief. The focus of blame is shifting to fathers because so often they are not there. Even the politicians are jumping into the debate, decrying “dead-beat dads” as the root of virtually all social ills, and calling for a “return” to family values.

Unfortunately, our first instinct when confronted with a problem—particularly one of the magnitude and with the implications as this—is to rush to assign blame. But if we look with our hearts instead of our fear, if we seek a path out of the suffering instead of simply a scapegoat, what we must face is that the absent father—both the one who is not physically there as well as the one who is not present emotionally—is a tragic consequence of the times we live in.

Like it or not, we are in the midst of a major economic, social, and cultural transition. The roles of men and women and therefore the roles of mothers and fathers are changing—and changing rapidly. These changes stem in part from new and often courageous choices being made by the emerging generations of women and men, and also in part from the very impersonal and inexorable economic shifts taking place. What we want, need, and expect from our most intimate relationships is being reexamined and redefined as we go. At the same time, women are moving into the workplace at an astonishing rate, out of both choice and necessity. The result is a boiling cauldron of change in the most vulnerable places in our lives; and one of the most visible casualties is the tragedy of the absent father, whether in another city, another home, another room, or simply always at work.

Change is difficult and painful. Painful because the ways of the past now appear sadly inadequate. Painful because what should replace the ways of the past is not at all clear. And painful because, regardless of the wounds, the constraints, injustices, or inadequacies of the “old way,” there were also benefits, particularly the comfort of familiarity. Painful or not, these changes are upon us. Whether we applaud, fear, or resent them no longer matters; they are here and we must deal with them.

Nowhere are the sweeping changes that have, in a few short generations, transformed the map of family structures more evident than in divorce rates. Today, half of all marriages end in divorce, and, for the most part, the children of divorce stay with their mothers. The fathers end up separated from their children, without any model or support system teaching them how to stay connected and, even more tragic, often without the emotional preparation or resources to fashion a new pathway back.

Although the sharp severance of divorce is frequently the wake-up call that prompts fathers to redouble their efforts to maintain a strong connection to their children, unfortunately, just as often it is the final push that sends an already precariously connected father out into a distant and lonely orbit.

It was so hard. When my wife and I broke up, it was like the earth opened up and destroyed everything. My children were very young and my ex-wife was very bitter. She wanted revenge, she wanted money, and she wanted to hurt me. The only way she knew how to get at me was to keep me from my kids. She wouldn't let me see them; when I stopped by day care to see the kids, she called the police and said I was trying to kidnap them. It got so horrible that I finally decided to leave town in the hope that things would quiet down.

When I called a few months later to try to work out some kind of visitation schedule, she accused me of abandoning them. I know I'm far from perfect and I screwed up enough myself, but she made it so hard I finally gave up.

Divorce statistics do not begin to reveal the challenge we as fathers face. For even if we are not physically separated from our children, what is expected of us as fathers—from our wives, from our children, and even from ourselves—is very different from the model we grew up with. Traditionally in this culture, our role—stoic, brave, silent—has been defined by emotional distance. Not that we didn't each have a deep well of feelings, but far too often those feelings were locked away in an inaccessible place. Too many fathers are skilled in work, in providing, in disciplining, but are untrained, unsupported, unsure, and uneasy in the crucial task of nurturing. The distance our fathers accepted as natural and appropriate is now threatening to unravel the very social fabric of parenting. The simplistic response to this by many men is an angry rejection of the “old ways,” most often expressed in some variation of “I won't make the mistakes my father made.”

My father is not the warmest and most expressive guy in the world, but he has kept his mind open and has accumulated a lot of wisdom in his years. One day, shortly after my son was born, my father and I were talking. I got somewhat carried away with my resolve that I would not be as emotionally withdrawn as he had been. He listened politely and then said, “Son, I've made my mistakes as a father; now it's your turn.”

It is true that if we are smart enough, courageous enough, persistent enough, and vigilant enough, we won't make the same mistakes our fathers made—we will make our own mistakes. But before we toss out our fathers with last year's calendar, it might help to remember that they grew up in another time, and in a very real sense pioneered a new era.

This is more true today than it has ever been. Television, jet airplanes, telephones, copiers and fax machines, personal computers, the list goes on and on—all are essential fixtures in our lifetime that did not exist when most of our fathers were growing up. And, of course, their most important lessons about fathering came from their fathers, many of whom were born in the nineteenth century. We can turn our backs in hurt and anger at the fathering style we were handed, but that would be wrong, it would be wasteful, and it would be disrespectful.

I tried so many times to get through to the old man. I tried logic, humor, veiled threats; I even tried taking away the thing he wanted the most—contact with his grandchildren. He's just scared. The rules have changed, and he thinks that for him to even admit that there may be another way to do things than the way he did is to admit he was wrong. I don't expect him to change who he is; I just want him to accept me for who I am.

Despite what anger or sorrow we may have at how we were fathered, we can't afford to carelessly discard the hard-won lessons of our fathers. We need to take the best of what they gave us as we plot a course toward a new kind of fathering—one built on strong bonds of love, that is expansive and courageous, and that will bring us back into the richness of a deep emotional connection with our children.

If we ask people to select words to positively describe what it means to be a mother, invariably they come up with such terms as nurturing, compassionate, caring, and comforting. For father, the words are protector, provider, responsible, dependable, hardworking, and problem solving. Those characteristics fit well with our culturally projected father images, such as those portrayed in Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Ward and Tom are portrayed as kind and understanding men who are primarily problem solvers, that is, men who diffuse and avoid emotional situations by presenting real-world solutions.

If we combine the above terminology of mother and father qualities, it makes up an impressive resume for good parenting. Traditionally, however, that list has been divided up by gender, with women assigned the internal or emotional tasks and men assigned the external tasks of dealing with the outside world. This division has deep roots in our history but, for better and for worse, it is rapidly deteriorating. The radically changing nature of what it means to be a man or a woman is not news, but it is a constant source of challenge and opportunity.

My father was a true believer in a clear and rigid division of labor—there was women's work and then there was men's. He went to work, paid the bills, and took care of the yard, while Mom did all the cooking, cleaning, and housework. What is weird is that my sister being a lawyer and me cooking for a living doesn't seem to bother him at all. It's like his rules stopped with his generation.

Over the past thirty years it's become obvious that women are no longer content to live within the boundaries of traditional gender roles which severely limit the scope and magnitude of their dreams. What is now becoming evident is that men also cannot continue to blindly play out their appointed roles without increasingly disastrous consequences to their own emotional health and to that of their children.

It's hard. I have everything I'm supposed to have, from the good job, nice home, and new car to a loving wife and two beautiful kids, and yet I feel trapped in a vise that just keeps getting tighter and tighter. My job brings in good money, but it takes all my time and drains all my energy until there is nothing left. There has to be more to it. There has to be a better way.

When we examine social evolution in more detail, at least some of the reason for the urgency in dealing with the changing role of fathers begins to emerge. For although the traditional roles of mothers and fathers may appear clear and defined, in practice they were never as stark nor as isolating as they appear to us today.

Until relatively recently—the past hundred years or so—men and women carried out their roles in close and constant contact with each other and with their children, whether on a small farm or running a small business or shop. Indeed, for most of our history, men and women worked side by side—undertaking different tasks, but performing them in a manner that involved continuous interaction, feedback, and assistance.

Dad was indeed the protector and provider, but he was also right there, downstairs in the shop or out in the field, preparing it for next season's crop. More often than not, Dad was there every day for the noontime meal, as well as for breakfast and supper, and the opportunities (and indeed the obligation) for children to spend time with Dad by helping out in the fields or in the store were common.

Fathers fulfilled their role in frequent daily contact with their children, and that contact nurtured the kinds of emotional connections that can only come with the investment of time. That began to change in our great-grandfathers' and grandfathers' time, as swelling waves of refugees fled the poverty of the countryside to find work in the factories and offices of cities around the world.

Increasingly, this new economic reality found fathers leaving home early in the morning and not returning until late at night. The thread of daily contact with their children was lost, as was the constant contact between husband and wife. The division of labor between men and women, which in the past had existed as a relatively intimate partnership, become a division in time and place as well. Fathers were increasingly removed from the home, and mothers became more isolated from the workaday world. This everyday forced distance became the true rupture with the past.

It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this change. For in building and maintaining close personal relationships, time is a key ingredient, and it is our time with our fathers when we were growing up, as well as with our children as they are growing up, that has been taken away from us.

My father never got over the Great Depression. He had a small business and, almost overnight, he lost it all. He lived every remaining day of his life terrified that he would not be able to provide for his family. The irony was that because he worked so hard to give us what he thought we should have, he was never home. In the end, it killed him.

We don't live our lives in isolation from these larger social conditions. We don't make the rules and we aren't even given a decent map to go by. The vast flow of history, with its wave after wave of social and economic change, has established the conditions under which our lives must be lived. We would like to believe that we have more control over our lives, but time and experience prove to us again and again that the most we can do is choose how we will respond to the circumstances we are presented with.

Fathers today, young and old, have been dealt a very difficult hand. Because of the massive social and economic migrations over the past hundred years, as a group we have been deprived of the daily close contact with our fathers and our children that many of our grandfathers and most of their fathers enjoyed.

Separated from both our fathers and our children, we have been cut off from the heart of the fathering traditions of the past, and have been handed a decidedly garbled message about how we should go about being good fathers today.

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 one's identity as a man. And so we throw ourselves into the role with fierce determination, as though fulfilling this aspect of our identity as fathers is enough.

When my wife got pregnant with my first daughter, I thought my life was over, and in many ways it was. Any thoughts I had of being able to finish my education or consider music as a career were gone. I was still very much in love with my wife and wanted to love my new daughter, but my job was precarious and my skills were pretty minimal. I was afraid we were about to enter a life of poverty and insecurity. The only thing that kept us going was my committing to seventy-hour workweeks for almost ten years. My wife and I once calculated that I had seen my oldest daughter awake less than twelve hours in the first five years of her life. I will never know if I truly foresaw that miserable fate or if this was just a self-fulfilling prophesy.

For most men, it is when our children are very young that we need to work the hardest. We are new on the job, often insecure about our work identity, and need to put in long hours to become better at what we do, to become more valuable to the company, 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 career 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 it differently find themselves in the provider trap.

When my son was born, I was determined to do it differently. I took a six-month sabbatical from work to care for him when he was an infant. I did diapers, 2 a.m. feedings, stroller walks in the park-everything. Later, I was the only guy in sight at the day-care center. As he got older, I became increasingly concerned about our finances. We needed a house, I had to start worrying about college tuition…I ended up taking a high-powered, well-paying job two hours away from home. When I wasn't driving back and forth, I was flying all over the state, working sixty-hour weeks.

Suddenly, it was only my wife at my son's tennis lessons, baseball games, and school recitals. Ten years went by in the blink of an eye: We had financial security, but I missed out on a tremendous amount of my son's life. He never says anything about it, but I know he felt very hurt and abandoned.

Even when we are home, it is all too often in a state of utter exhaustion. We want, need, and feel we deserve some peace, some time to relax, to unwind and do nothing. To our children, however, that time is experienced very differently. They have gone all day without seeing, talking, or playing with Daddy, and children are not particularly patient. By time you walk in the door, tired, stressed, and in need of quiet, they are ready to jump you in an explosion of enthusiasm.

Sometimes I'd be so wound-up I just knew I couldn't handle the onslaught, so I'd call home and put off my arrival for an hour. Then I'd drive to this really beautiful park a few miles away and just sit there until I could feel the stress drain away. Sometimes it only took a few minutes, and then instead of dreading walking in the door, I couldn't wait.

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 nor 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 job, the more all-consuming it 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 job, it can also become the place where our accomplishments are honored and acknowledged—the center of our feelings of self-worth.

I remember back when my children were growing up, I used to go out with the guys from the office for drinks every night. I'd be the first one to volunteer for the out-of-town business trip, the last one to leave the office at night. Now I want to go back, shake myself, and ask what I thought I was doing. The sad thing is I already know. I spent so much time at work and so little time at home that I was simply more comfortable at work. When I went home, it was like entering a foreign country run by a woman I no longer knew and kids I didn't know how to relate to.

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, whom they are feuding with, what they like, or what is bothering them. It can be very disconcerting to listen to your six-year-old explaining an event of crucial importance to him and realize that you know neither the landscape nor the actors.

Like a small crack on the windshield left untended, this lack of involvement can widen and worsen 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.

My business had reached a point where it was ready to go to another level completely, but to get there would have required me to be out of state on a regular basis. At the same time, things at home were not doing terribly well. My son was starting to get into trouble—nothing major, but it was very clear handwriting on the wall. I made a decision to restructure my business so that I would be able to spend more time at home. It meant less money, and at times I have had to really stretch to make it work, but I have never regretted my decision.

Unfortunately, we don't all have the ability to unilaterally restructure our work life 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 available to us that allow us to provide for our children threaten to pull us so far apart from them that we might 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, realistic paternity leave, and child-care policies will take considerable time and effort.

I really don't understand how the hell we are supposed to do this. It's like first we sat down and decided how we wanted to live our lives, and then we turned around and structured the real world in such a way that it would be impossible. My neighbor just got laid off, and he is such a wreck that his kids are tiptoeing around to avoid him. My company is doing so well that we are all putting in mandatory overtime, so I never get to see my kids.

For all the world, it feels very much like 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 longer hours. As fathers, we have to fight in an intensely stressful job market to find work that will enable us to provide for our children; and, at the same time, if we are successful, we must somehow resist the job pressures that pull us farther and farther away from them.

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 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 binds we find ourselves in, so that when we work, it is for a deeper purpose that can be achieved, and when we are home with our children, it is as the fathers we want to be. In order to be able to do all this, we need to look a little closer at the more personal factors that keep us separated from our children.