Manhood for Amateurs, Part 3

[Soundtrack for this post: Flunk’s For Sleepyheads Only]

[Beer for this post: Southern Tier IPA (again)]

On to the second essay in Manhood for Amateurs—it’s called:

William and I

In this essay Chabon tells a story about how he is complimented in the supermarket for being a “good dad.” He talks about how the good dad standard is so different, and lower, than the good mom standard, and how fathers in the past had it even easier.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an experience similar to what Chabon recalls in his essay, how many times I’ve been stopped and praised for being a good dad when I’ve done, as far as I can tell, nothing to warrant comment (much less praise).

I’ve often thought about this double standard. The first time I really got it was when the three of us went to visit my mom for the first time since Carver’s arrival. My mom lives on the coast of Washington so we always fly into Seattle. On that trip we spent the night in Seattle at my aunt Merlee’s apartment, which we often do rather than tackle the four-hour drive on the same day as the flight. Carver was just shy of three months on this particular trip, and he still wasn’t sleeping much. My aunt’s apartment is all on one level and isn’t huge, so when Carver woke in the early morning, I figured I should take him somewhere so Anne, my mom, and my aunt could get a couple more hours of sleep. I took Carver to a Tully’s, which is a coffee shop chain similar to Starbucks, but much better. I got a coffee and bought the New York Times, and struggled trying to move my coffee and paper and get settled why carrying Carver. At some point one of the Tully’s ladies asked me something like this: “Oooohhhhh [spoken in that very sweet way that conveys that the speaker finds something adorable], are you watching the baby so mom can sleep in?” Yes. “OOOOoooohhhh [almost orgasmic], you’re such a WONderful dad! That is so sweet.” Almost from the moment she started asking, it was as if every woman in the coffee shop decided to eavesdrop and descend on me and Carver, cradling us in this ring of praise and adoration that seemed strangely tinged with lust. I knew that if it were Anne and not me no one would’ve even commented about her mothering. That was my first noteworthy experience with the parenting double standard, and I’ve benefited from it many more times since.

Chabon has this to say about how we as a society see mothering: “Good mothering is not measurable in a discrete instant, in an hour spent rubbing a baby’s gassy belly, in the braiding of a tangled mass of morning hair. Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself. We do not judge mothers by snapshots but by years of images painstakingly accumulated from the orbiting satellite of memory.” Good fathering, by contrast, apparently just means sticking around and seeming to be content with very limited parenting responsibilities. In some subcultures, it seems good fathering simply means still being around by the time the child is born.

Chabon also has this line about his father’s parenting: “My father educated me in appreciating the things he appreciated, and in ridiculing those he found laughable, and in disbelieving the things he found dubious.” As a father and a son, I find that to be a remarkably apt description of fatherhood.

I have always thought that both of my parents were pretty good parents, but that’s based on an extraordinarily limited sample size. They’re both imperfect and a little nuts, but my guess is that that describes just about everyone. I don’t have any reasonable complaints.

I have worried about being a horrible father for about as long as I’ve recognized that I might someday be a father. When I was in high school I developed a theory that parenting styles skipped generations. I used my own family as an example. My paternal grandfather was, in my young eyes, a harsh, mean, and scary man, and thus probably a bear of a father. By stark contrast, my father was, at least in my eyes, understanding, kind, and laid-back perhaps to a fault. My theory was that my father didn’t want to be like his father, so he was much easier going. My fear was that I would be like my grandfather, because I had a nice father and didn’t appreciate what it was like to have a harsh father. By that time I could see parts of my grandfather leaking through me: a fierce temper and an occasional severe lack of patience with others.

It has become clear to me in the last 15 years that I will not be my grandfather, but I will not be my father either. I have my own still developing way, and while I rarely manage to meet my own standards for what I expect from myself as a father, I do recognize that I am, relatively, probably going to be pretty good at it.