Father’s Day: How-To Guides, Too Much Advice, and Manliness

I was once reasonably dignified. I dressed like a gentleman and luxuriated in the cultural heritage of Western civilization. My three places of residence—my home, my office, and my mind—were free of clutter and arranged so as to allow me both to make the most of my days and to begin to venture out into intellectual life. Then I became a father. One afternoon, I was changing my infant son’s diaper when he began micturating. Not in a feeble stream, but in a great, turbo-charged geyser, like one of the fountains in front of the Bellagio. As was his wont. So I reached over, cupped my hand above his manhood, and waited in quietsatisfaction as he peed on me. I was pleased—genuinely pleased, the way I once might have been, say, after finishing Middlemarch—that my reflexes had prevented him from spraying the wall and nearby bookshelf. The dismantling of my dignity took three weeks, more or less. I don’t keep strict count of these things. Not anymore. This is about when I started to realize that the primary effect of children is to take things from you. It begins with sleep, time, and dignity and then expands over the years to include serenity, sanity, and a great deal of money. I am making an observation here, not complaining. It’s just what they do. In that way, children are like the aging process itself: an exercise in letting go of the ancillary parts of your existence until you are stripped bare, and what remains is your elemental center. Your soul. I’m told Jews see something of this in the Suffering Servant songs in Isaiah. Christians know it as the Way of the Cross. A consultant from McKinsey would call it addition by subtraction. I’m not going to lie to you. In fatherhood there is much—so much—to be lost. But there is much to be gained, too. For example, while it may seem diametrically opposed to the indignities of the job, fatherhood is the wellspring of a quality critically important to our culture: manliness.

One area where manliness has yet to storm the beaches, however, is the literature of fatherhood, or, more precisely, the how-to guides for expectant fathers. That such a genre should exist in the first place–it didn’t until a few years ago–suggests that today’s father is believed to play quite a big role in the life of his new, even prenatal, child. The expectant-fatherhood books can offer quite useful practical tips, but their ideal father is so fully a part of the pregnancy one suspects he’s suffering from womb envy. Indeed, the new dad prescribed and celebrated in the half dozen or so new or newish books I surveyed does not occupy his own, separate sphere of influence in the making and rearing of children. He is in fact in competition with the mother, for respect as a parent and for time with his child. He is a persistent agitator for public recognition of his thoughts, his feelings, and his role as a parent.

“I won’t lie to you,” one friend told me a few weeks ago. “The first three months just suck.” I should point out that I hadn’t actually asked him to proffer his wisdom as the father of a 15-month-old, but I have learned that being in the presence of an impending new father causes even the most reticent of men to soliloquize about paternity. It was this fellow’s view that God had blown it, that the true gestation period of a baby is really 12 months, and that basically, infants come into this world only half-cooked. They don’t want to be here, they’re not ready to be here, and they punish their parents for forcing them to come out too soon. Interesting theory. Thanks a lot.