Fatherhood: Both Joy And Burden

The other morning I drove to McDonald’s, bought two breakfasts and took them to a nearby elementary school. There I waited in a hallway with 15 or 20 other men.

We were a motley bunch, and I sensed our collective unease, as if without wives and significant others to lean on we were skittish and abashed in this place of children. Finally, the door to Ms. Stubbs’ kindergarten class swung open.

One by one, she sent the children out to lead their fathers in. When my little girl spotted me, she forgot to wait for her teacher’s prompting. Onjel ran and wrapped her arms around my waist.

I folded myself into a chair far below me and watched as the kids literally sang our praises. Each child recited the reason his or her dad was special (“He plays with me,” Onjel said), and they gave us drawings and pencil holders.

Later we sat outside beneath a shade tree and I had breakfast with my favorite girl.

Ms. Stubbs also organizes an annual tea for mothers. She says the kids love that, but nothing compares with the day the dads come. It’s a red-letter morn, a V.I.P. affair. The kids are extra excited. As she and I spoke on the playground, it wasn’t hard to see what she meant. The air was filled with the screams of kids on monkey bars and swings.

“Dad, look!” they cried. “Look at me, dad!”

There was something poignant about the way they performed for us, beseeched our attention. It was a reminder that we fathers are so often absent from the lives of our offspring. Not just the physical absence produced by divorce and desertion, but the emotional absence that can happen even when Dad is there. So many things claw at our attention - jobs, cars, wives, bills, sports - that our children sometimes become small voices, distantly heard.

But that’s a rationalization, isn’t it? Many things claw at women for attention as well, and yet, speaking generally, they remain more engaged in the lives of the children than we.

Yes, I know there are exceptions. But one feminist movement later, dads are still, at least in most two-parent households, likely to be the auxiliary parent. In trying to be anything else, a man strains against the weight of acculturation and, perhaps, even biology itself. A family counselor once told me men can be intimidating to children through no effort or fault of their own. She said we do it with our size, our physicality, the rumble of our voices.

Which may be true, but it’s also a convenient excuse.

Of course, it’s not like we’ve had many prototypes to learn from. On the one hand there is the media-promoted model of harmless, bumbling incompetence. That’s hard on a man’s dignity.

Then there’s the traditional model, all aloofness and unknowability. Dad as snowy alpine peak. That’s hard on a man’s heart.

And a child’s love.

Somewhere between those polar opposites lies a place I’m trying to reach. That I am not the only one may, perhaps, be imputed from the fact that every father with a child in Ms. Stubbs’ class showed up for the breakfast. Except one, that is, and he sent two grandfathers in his place.

It was a great thing to see. A yard full of dads and daughters, sires and sons. Made me realize that getting to that place between the extremes doesn’t entail some vaguely beneficent ideal of making time in my life for the kids. Rather, it requires undertaking the harder task of leaving my concerns behind to spend time in their lives, with them. To see the places where they play and learn and to show them by my presence that those things matter to me. Because how to get our attention is, it seems to me, the central question a child faces in the relationship with a father.

“Dad, look!” cried the children, swinging, sliding and climbing all across the yard. “Look at me, Dad!”

As my favorite girl scaled the bars, I made a point of watching her without being asked.

xxxx