This week there was a minorstir among blogfathers at the release of a British study suggesting that men still aren’t all that willing to forego their careers for their children.
‘A Bristol University study found that although new fathers reduced their work hours after the baby was born, they soon returned to their old practices.
It found no evidence that men matched new mothers in combining part-time work with bringing up their children.
Fathers did not work shorter hours than childless men, the study suggested.’
I’m sure the response wouldn’t have been as emotional had the BBC been a little more thoughtful in introducing the study: ‘Modern men are unwilling to break with tradition when it comes to combining the twin roles of work and fatherhood, according to researchers.’
Neither is the media willing to break with tradition when it comes to discussing men and fatherhood. The article, and perhaps the study, seems to ignore the distinction between what men want to do, and what men need to do.
Do I want to spend eight hours each day away from my family. Of course not. I do it so that my family is stronger, so that Kelly can stay with Ian rather than him with daycare. We discussed which of us would stay home, and, as she was breastfeeding, it made perfect sense that Kelly stay home. When the buffet closed, it was also logical that Kelly continue to stay with Ian.
But not because I wanted to work rather than raise my son.
Dave Hill has a different slant on the results, and makes some good points:
‘Bringing home the bacon became a key paternal duty after the industrial revolution separated men’s labour from the home, and the legacy of this piece of cultural custom and practice is neither dishonourable nor likely to lose its purchase in a hurry. Also, to necessarily state the obvious, for as long as it is women, rather than men, who become pregnant, give birth and breastfeed, it is going to make sense for many couples for Mister rather than Missus to take on the (extra) burden of breadwinning after Miss or Master is born, especially as he is likely to be the bigger earner.’
And I certainly can’t fault his conclusion, which should resonate with any reasonable person:
‘In short, the road towards new and improved forms of fatherhood is a long and slow one, and it was always going to be that way. So it’s worth restating what the journey is for – or ought to be for. It is not, as the sneerers say, to turn men into women. Neither is it to destroy the “traditional” family, to “go against nature” in some way. It is to help with the still larger task of helping families become warmer, more stable, egalitarian and democratic institutions in which Dad is not a remote outsider.’
My very educated mother doesn’t like pizza all that much, so it shouldn’t surprise me that, after seventy years, she’s decided to stop serving it:
‘Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.
After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930.’
Read more → CNN.com
And the walls come crumbling down.
One of the pillars of my childhood education was that our solar system had nine planets. I drew them, wrote about them, and even made tasty models of them from Crunch Berries. All that effort, taken away by a mere technicality: Pluto’s orbit overlaps Neptune’s. And for that minor infraction, that one instance of celestial trespassing, Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet.
With Ian starting school, this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that my son is smarter than me, and will start to talk more slowly and use smaller words once he realizes that fact. But I could comfort myself in the constants: gravity, DNA is DNA is DNA, a negative times a negative equals a positive (say it!), and that our solar system is comprised of one star and nine planets. Nine!
The IAU has callously, thoughtlessly, driven a wedge between me and my son. Now, when talking about the wonders of the universe and the perfect plan of our Creator, I’ll have to censor myself, bite my tongue. He’ll feel the emotional strain as I come to the alleged end of our stellar neighborhood: ‘…Uranus, Neptune…nnn.’ Oh, the pain of changing that comma to a period.
I suppose the bright side is that Ian hasn’t learned the names of the planets, yet. His mental scarring should be minimal. A co-worker’s four-year-old daughter, however, is feeling less secure.
‘Mommy, Pluto is a planet. I know it.’
‘Well, honey, very intelligent people who know what they’re doing have thought about it, and decided that it’s not.’
‘I don’t like it.’
Science can be so…scientific. Won’t someone please think of the children?
You’d think a grown man would have better things to do than look for crudely-carved* rubber stamps hidden in logs, but letterboxing is one of my favorite hobbies.
Letterboxes are (surprisingly enough) little, hidden boxes containing a stamp and a logbook. You follow the clues, find the box, stamp its logbook with your personal stamp, and your logbook with its stamp. Letterboxes are hidden throughout the country in (generally) public places, like zoos and parks. There are also virtual (online) letterboxes, postal letterboxes, and even letterboxes hidden within other letterboxes.
I like riddles and puzzles. More than that, I really like hiding and finding, knowing secrets and clues. National Treasure will never be a classic, but I loved every minute of it.
What’s really appealing about letterboxing is that it’s entirely family-friendly. All you need is a logbook and stamp to spend a fun afternoon with your kids, exploring the lesser-known areas of your community and solving puzzles. The clues will often involve local history, and every now and then require a compass.
We took Ian earlier this week, looking for a letterbox hidden in park near my office. The clues were a little too difficult for him, but he’s a pirate, and will always take time to look for ‘married treasure’. We asked him to look for landmarks disguised in the clues: fire hydrant, speed limit sign, third barbeque pit. He pointed, we followed; eventually we came to the box, hidden inside a group of rocks.
The only danger lies in combining a three-year-old with an ink pad.
As your kids grow, they can make their own letterboxes, carving stamps (it’s really not difficult) and writing clues. Ian’s helped me hide two boxes, and more are on the way.
To find letterboxes in your area, and for more information on getting started, visit Letterboxing.org and Atlas Quest. The northeastern United States seems to be especially active.
Who can resist the power of Donna Summer? Those first tenuous strings, the lilting flute, Ms. Summer’s voice shyly peeking from around the corner…
‘Last dance, last chance for love…’
You know why that flute is there? To give you time to get to the dance floor.
There’s no mistaking the introduction to that song with anything else, and my body tenses when I hear it. Not that I need any help, but the chances of me making a public nuisance of myself are greatly increased when disco is involved. If you’re an employee of Johnny Rockets, it’s a certainty.
Johnny Rockets is an international chain; a diner-style restaurant dripping with Americana, whose employees will spontaneously launch into a floor show at the drop of a nickel.
There are worse things than being forced to dance to Donna Summer.
We were there last weekend, milkshakes in hand, when Last Dance started playing. The employees gathered in the dining room, I started impatiently tapping my foot. They started dancing, so did we.
We all know that Ian loves to dance. Say what you will about the evils of television, but apart from Dirty Jobs and Thomas the Tank Engine, DirecTV also has XM Radio, and a 24-hour disco channel. It’s not free entertainment, but it comes close.
When the music started, so did Ian. He was limted by the booth, but he can get an amazing range of motion from just his head and shoulders. I grabbed his arms and started rocking back and forth, Ian giggling and pretending to pull away.
When Ian was born, one of the first rules Kelly established was that I could not use our son as a guitar. I broke that rule for the first time in three years.
The wonderful thing about being three years old is that you can do pretty much whatever you like, without being arrested or causing women to clutch their purses. So I lifted Ian and set him on the floor.
He stopped dancing. With a little encouragement, he started shaking his leg a bit, stomping a foot here and there. But his groove was far from on.
The music stopped, and the employees scattered from the floor as the next song started. Something by the Bee Gees, I think. I looked down, and Ian had flipped. Apparently his former co-stars had been holding him back, and he’d decided to save his reputation.
His arms flew, he spun in circles, his hips shook back and forth. He nodded his head and shuffled his feet. He may have bit his lower lip. All of this movement culminated in a serpentine full-body wave; one fluid motion that started at his head and went to his feet.
We howled with laughter. Only slightly less so did the people watching Ian. I knew he could dance, but I didn’t know he could do it well. Someone get this kid some tap shoes!
‘I want to explain the war on terror to my children, but I’m not sure how I can explain something to them that I can’t seem to understand myself….They seem to grasp what war is, but the concept of a man wanting to kill another man because he doesn’t like him seems to get a little blurry….All I have been able to do at this point is to reassure them that Daddy will protect them from harm, but is that true? I wish I had the answer to that question.’
Are our children safe? I suppose that depends on what we mean by ‘safe’. If we mean ‘invulnerable’, then, no. Even discounting terrorism, we’ve never been invulnerable. Bad things have always happened, with or without terrorists, politics, or religion. It’s the nature of the world. Terrorists are nothing but bullies with bigger fists, and bullies have been around since Cain met Abel.
I worry about my son; whether he’ll do well at school, whether he’ll be happy, whether he’ll be confident and proud to be who he is, whether he’ll finally stop falling flat on his face. Whether he’ll answer that gentle knocking on his door. But safety? I haven’t lost a wink.
Most of us live in areas which aren’t considered to be prime terrorist targets. The St. Louis Arch looks pretty on a postcard, but I can’t imagine any terrorist hating frozen custard that strongly. Security may have been tightened at a few strategic choke points, but are we safer at the mall now than we were before 9/11? Of course not. Nor, I believe, are we less safe.
On the whole, our children aren’t in any further danger than before. We’re simply more aware of its extent.
I can, and will, teach Ian to be aware and cautious, to think before he speaks, and to understand that his world is not the world. But that’s just common sense.
Above all, it’s important that our children learn not to be ruled by the uncertainties of life, and to place their trust in the one who can protect them, guide them, and who will never, ever, fail them.
I was twenty-five when Ian was born. Fairly young, I suppose, but certainly not the youngest father ever, by any stretch of the imagination. The national average can’t be much higher.
I’m sure it’s safe to say that fathers like myself take youth for granted. Our bodies still do what we tell them, and do so rather quickly. I’m out of shape for a twenty-eight-year-old, but the fitness I do have is able to take up the slack in raising a three-year-old, with little apparent effort.
Though, the horsey does tend to canter with the three-year-old, where it used to gallop.
As potential parents wait longer and longer to have children, youth can no longer be taken for granted. Ian will be twenty-two when I’m the age Rand Cooper was when he and his wife had their first child:
Fatherhood, I Now Learn, Is a Young Man’s Game By Rand Richards Cooper | The New York Times
‘Lying there, I writhed in a misery that verged on despair. For 72 hours life had been serving up sweet joy and exaltation, but right now all I could think about was my failure as a father. I recalled years of boyhood sports fun with my own father—epic battles of one-on-one basketball, marathon tennis matches on hot summer days, followed by a race to the beach and a leap into the water.
My child, I was convinced, would never have that with me.’
Ian started school last week, to the extent that a three-year-old can be a student. I briefly debated putting quotation marks around ‘school’—you can hear them when Kelly says it—but, considering our son kicked the Huggies habit for this, I’ll keep my punctuation to myself.
He has a backpack. He has a lunchbox. He has a teacher. For two mornings each week, Ian is in school.
Wednesday afternoon was our discovery day. Officially, we were supposed to be meeting Ian’s teacher, finding his classroom, and generally getting him acclimated to the school. Realistically, this was a chance for parents to scout the competition. Who’s talking, how well, and who’s doing what with the playdough.
I was amazed. Ian’s classroom used to house our church’s middle school youth ministry. Whatever their theology, middle school boys, en masse, smell strongly of feet. This room has literally been transformed into a breath of fresh air. Bright, yellow paint on the walls, with waves lapping against the cinderblocks. New tiles on the floor, new lights in the ceiling. A new ceiling, for that matter.
Along one wall is a towering, two-story—by toddler standards—playhouse, with stairs, a kitchen, and knee-high piano. The playhouse was obviously Ian’s first goal, just ahead of an urgent need to move the piano from the second floor into the kitchen.
A large carpet is spread in the middle of the room, lined with the alphabet and featuring a picture of Jesus, a la Matthew 19:14. I’ll be interested to see the pattern of wear at the end of the school year. Will the kids, like me, feel that there’s something intrinsically wrong with stepping on Jesus’ face?
My favorite area of Ian’s room (apart from the water play table), is a cozy carpeted and canopied bit of real estate that simply dares you not to read.
Each student has a hook for his or her backpack, labeled with a shape. Ian is a sea-horse. He has a matching sea-horse tied to his backpack. There is a sea-horse on the photo album that Ian’s teacher gave him, to be filled with photos taken in class. ‘I’m the sea-horse every day!’
I came to work late the next day, so that Kelly and I could take Ian to school on the first day. It went much as we’d expected. Ian put his backpack on his hook, walked into the classroom, and we ceased to exist. Really, anyone could’ve taken him to school. Auntie Julia, Bob the Builder, a mop.
I watched Ian’s eyes leap across the room, bouncing from the books to the toys to his classmates to the reading nook. Ian had woken at 5:30 that morning; he was excited.
I thought of Ian and school, and all the fun he was going to have. I thought of a little baby, flat on his back, his chest proudly proclaiming ‘I don’t floss’. I thought of that moment when Ian first turned his head toward his Daddy’s voice, and finally stopped crying.
I knelt and drew my son into a hug. ‘I love you, kiddo. Have fun, and be sure to listen to Mrs. H—.’ And I looked into his eyes—which is a parent’s way of letting kids know that something is important—willing him to feel the significance of this moment, to understand that the journey starts now.
He mumbled, ”Kay…’ His eyes slid to the side, searching for things that weren’t his parents. I gave him a noggin’ and tried to kiss him; he turned away at the last second, and I kissed his ear. We had to pull him back so that Kelly could get hers.
I wasn’t sad, but I felt…something. On the way to work, the only image I had in my mind was of Ian in a backpack, carrying his lunchbox. Walking away.
