Death generates an amazing amount of paperwork.
When my father died—unexpectedly, aged sixty- four, nowhere
near ready—I was dropping off my son at school. After the initial downpour of
oblivious grief, bureaucracy had immediate demands. The family needed to
approve an autopsy, since he had died on the street, without witnesses, right
there in the open. His body had to be moved. Where? Under whose authority?
Somebody needed to sign for his recovered belongings. And, of course, there was
the obituary, which cost about $800 per paper—that’s how they get ya — enough
to give me pause even when directly confronted by the clearest evidence I would
ever receive that you can’t take the money with you. It’s almost as if the
world decides to support mourners by the arrival of a tidal wave of busywork.
Then in the afternoon I had to pick up my son from kindergarten and tell him
that his grandfather no longer was.
I dreaded it. How was I supposed to explain what made no
sense to me? My father and my son had been close. The night be-fore, they had
been out for ice cream. As I arrived at the school, I ran into my wife’s
cousin, a good guy whose own father had recently died. He had the misfortune to
ask a guy whose father had just died “How you doing?” I told him. Instantly he
stuck out his hand and shook mine.
It was weird. We laughed at its weirdness at the time. He
later told me he was embarrassed by the gesture. But I came to realize it made
perfect sense. He was congratulating me. That day, on that walk, I had become a
man.
As the patriarchy is slowly dying, as masculinity continues
to undergo a constant process of redefinition, fatherhood has never mattered
more. Having children has always been a major life marker, of course, but the
demise of other markers of masculine identity has given fatherhood outsize importance.
The old religious rituals gave way long ago. The post-dynamic-capi talism of
the moment has taken away the replacement methods of proving yourself. Making a
living is principally a sign of good luck. Owning property is a sign of your
parents’ status more than it is your own. Combat itself is now gender-neutral.
Only fatherhood is indisputably masculine, which is why when you ask men when
they became men, they usually answer when they became a father or lost a
father.
Men want kids more than ever before. Since 1965, according
to new research from the Pew Research Center, the amount of time fathers spend
with their children has nearly tripled. In 2011, the largest study of singles ever
undertaken showed that currently, young unmarried men want children slightly
more than young unmarried women do. Another study showed that men not only want
children more than women do but that they also become more depressed and jealous
when they don’t have them.
At the same moment fatherhood is gaining this overwhelming
significance in the lives of men, it remains widely mocked in pop culture.
Fathers on TV come in two principal varieties: Mr. Mom and fat pig. The most
popular shows of the past thirty years have all been about family and have all
had a failed dad at the center. The ur-fat-pig is Homer Simpson, a man who
worships a waffle stuck to the ceiling, but the purer expression is probably
Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, the farting, mentally handicapped narcissist whose
subsidiaries amount to $1 billion in revenue. The Mr. Mom type was defined by
the defeated, awkward, confounded Raymond on the ironically titled Everybody
Loves-Raymond. The loser dad was central to $h*! My Dad Says and remains a
staple figure today on shows like Guys with Kids. And a new brand of bumbling
dad on television is embodied by Phil Dunphy from Modern Family. I think of him
as the Labrador-retriever type — big, dumb, and cheerful. At least Modern
Family has registered the change.
The clearest evidence that the old bumbling father is doomed
comes from advertising. Last year, a Huggies spot that put its diapers “to the
ultimate test—dads” was pulled when it provoked outrage. Advertisers care
because cash is at stake. They have realized that the market for men who
consciously think of themselves as fathers and are passionate about that role
is considerable. Nonetheless, the engaged father remains an alternative form, a
remarkable phenomenon worthy of op-eds. The cool dad retains all the cultural
apparatus that status implies, with self-consuming, inherently narcissistic,
demanding poses that co-opt and then mock. That double process certainly
greeted Neal Pollack’s Alternadad when it came out in 2007. And now Kindling
Quarterly, a journal for design-conscious fathers, has launched, and I know I am
supposed to make fun. I mean, the first issue has a recipe for pumpkin gnocchi
and a (rather brilliant) reconsideration of Mr. Mom. It would be so easy. But I
won’t. Fatherhood is the one truly binding connection among men, and it’s too
important now. I feel bound to other fathers in a way that I really don’t
experience in any other capacity. If you’ve ever wondered why new parents are
so unbearable to be around, especially for people who don’t have kids, it’s
because they are overwhelmed by the strength of their personal transformation.
Like teenagers who’ve lost their virginity, new parents have been inducted into
a secret, and that secret is all that matters to them! The secret seems, at
least for a while, to be the whole of the world.
Fatherhood is also classically aspirational. It’s a marker
of class, pure and simple. Fatherlessness is a real crisis even as fatherhood
gains this wild significance. In 2008,41 percent of births involved unmarried
women compared with 28 percent in 1990. Fatherlessness as a condition has been
linked with virtually every social ill you can name (the big exception being
lesbian families): Young men who grow up without fathers are twice as likely to
end up in jail, 63 percent of youths who commit suicide are from fatherless
homes, and 71 percent of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. What
these connections mean— particularly whether fatherlessness is a symptom of
poverty or a cause—is the subject of complex debate. Neither political party is
willing to deal with the consequences of the connections, though. The Left
looks the other way, fearing the stigmatization of single mothers and wallowing
in the vestigial critique of family structure as a whole. The Right loves to
talk about “family values” but lives in a fantasy about what those values are.
It is astonishing how much the conservatives of the moment talk about the
family and how little they understand about how contemporary families actually
work. I suppose they must retain their indulgent vision of 1950s men and women.
Otherwise, they might have to ask themselves what the cost of arresting every
black man who ever took a puff of marijuana and separating them from their children
might mean for those communities. They might have to think about maternity and
paternity leave.
If conservatives ever did stop to look at contemporary
families and contemporary fatherhood in particular, they might discover a
source of great strength. The appeal of fatherhood, its newfound position as a
requirement of the good life, is that it is a real duty.
It binds you to other people. It binds you, for real, to a
woman. It is the only thing that still can. Sex is basically an exchange of
pleasantries now. Marriage is instantly reversible, a negotiable contract. But
fatherhood is real.
Obama understands the craving for the bond intimately. The
most startling detail from Jodi Kantor’s marriage biography, The Obamas, is
that the president eats dinner with his family almost every night. No doubt he
enjoys the time with his girls. But he must understand how much that gesture
represents the ideal of a new masculinity — he’s a father as much as he is a
president. He embodies the transferred status of fatherhood nearly perfectly:
Once the president was the Father of the Nation. Now the president must just be
a father.
On the day of my father’s death, as I walked to pick up my
son, I had no idea what I was supposed to do, and I also knew that whatever I
would do would matter enormously to my son. Naturally, I tried to imagine what
my own father would do. His importance in my life had never been more vivid. We
rarely agreed about politics or anything like that, but we were both smart
enough to recognize that we weren’t supposed to. He grew up in poverty, managed
to educate himself through the military, was very interested in poetry, became
a venture capitalist and then a professor, and walked the eighty-eight-shrine
Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku in Japan. His own father died when he was eight,
yet he managed to turn himself into a man of the world. I have always been
interested in political systems that enable personal growth like his and in
definitions of masculinity that empower people to break out into the world, as
he did, rather than curl away from it. But on the way to the school, such
subtleties didn’t matter. The switch that had flipped was binary. My father had
always been there when I needed him, right up until that moment.
I brought my son back to the house and sat him down in the
living room with his mother. I told him his grandfather was dead. He wanted to
know if that meant he would never see him again. I said yes. Then he started to
weep. The lesson was harsh for a six-year-old: People are there and then
they’re not. He threw himself into my arms. I was his father. And all that
meant, right then, was that I was there. I was there for my son. I would be
there until I wasn’t. And that was enough.
by Stephen Marche
Esquire, June/July 2013
Esquire, June/July 2013
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