Day of the dad

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — Last year when my father and mother-in-law were gravely ill on different continents, my wife and I spent a lot of time apart, taking turns traveling with one or both of our daughters. Solo parenting on a long trip is hard on everybody, innocent bystanders not least. But our respective experiences with such bystanders were very different. My wife by turns was tolerated, scrutinized and advised. “She’s not a monkey,” one concerned citizen told her when, with little Freya thrashing like a rodeo pig under one arm, she took Layla by a single hand and deftly swung her into a window seat on a packed flight. “You could dislocate a shoulder lifting a child that way.” Me, on the other hand, they pretty much consistently praised and marveled at, no matter what sort of outrage was unfolding.

I’ll never forget the long night flight to California that took off with me shamelessly squirting purple vials of liquid Benadryl into both girls, banked with Freya shrieking and pouring my $14 double gin and tonic into a sleeping passenger’s lap and nosedived with Layla marching down the aisle pounding knees and thighs with clenched fists, swiveling her head with a kind of mechanical malice to make eye contact with each victim as she delivered the same salutation: “I don’t like you, and I don’t like you,” and so on down the line. I was in the bathroom for much of that episode but saw some of it with my own eyes, and reader, I came this close to ducking back into the bathroom with my New Yorker. I don’t remember if I yanked Layla up by one or two arms but I do remember, as I hissed strong words in her ear, the look in everyone’s eyes. “What a wonderful father you are,” it said, “we just don’t know how you manage!”

Upon arrival I rose, a touch over-hastily, babe in arms, and smashed Freya’s head into the overhead compartment. Whoops. People winced, it’s true, but less in judgment than sympathy, more of which seemed directed to me than to Freya. “Good job, Dad,” the stewardess said without a trace of irony as I deplaned with both girls in grappling holds, and a murmur of warm assent and actual clapping rippled through the passengers behind me.

This is a great time to be a dad. You don’t have to be particularly good at it. Just show up at roughly the appointed time and you’re sure to be declared a virtuoso. Grandsons of men who spanked so as not to spoil, sons of men who peered quizzically at us over the tops of their newspapers, and grandparents, presumably, of men who will be asked to be not only willing but able caregivers in some truly post-gender future, we are the transitional generation. We carve our little niche in a sweet spot of low expectations.

Happy Father’s Day, guys! Enjoy it while it lasts.

I recently read — OK OK, clicked a link and skimmed — an academic study demonstrating “the common neural basis of maternal and paternal care.” Apparently a close look at our brains shows that they’re “sensitive to childcare experiences.” This is good to know. I had a hunch I felt something real for my daughters, but until the neuroscientists show up on the scene you never know if you’re just imagining things. And I’ll admit to a special frisson in thinking of my amygdala lighting up while I’m standing around at the playground being such a great dad.

I chanced upon that study in a Daily Beast piece that posed the pressing question, is 2014 the “Year of the Dad?” Evidence adduced in the affirmative seemed overwhelming, and included newly published books with titles such as “Dads Behaving Dadly” and “Dad’s Book of Awesome Projects,” a guy making a killing selling “themed lunchbox creations” on the internet, and of course, more studies and statistics, showing for example how girls who “see their dads folding laundry…are more likely to dream of becoming CEOs and firefighters.” 

I don’t want to short-change any of this. It’s gratifying to see everyone from laboratory scientists to marketing executives recognize and rebrand my efforts and contributions, for modern manhood offers few pleasures more rewarding than being part of a new viral meme. For sheer amygdala tickling, even neighborhood play dates and Parent Helper days at the nursery would be hard pressed to compete. All the same I have some misgivings. Is it pure coincidence that the year of the dad kicked off with the “Are Men Obsolete” debate? Is this “daddy track” we keep hearing about a euphemism for recession-era underemployment? What about the fine print in these studies we preen ourselves on? Don’t they basically say that stay-at-home dads are doing half as much work and twice as much kicking back as stay-at-home moms?

My father didn’t live to see this apparently watershed shed year in his gender’s history. My guess is if called upon to judge whether men were obsolete or rather had made this awesome evolutionary leap into artisanal lunchbox making, part-time blogging and full-time fathering, he’d had have thrown his hands up and called that a distinction without a difference. He never changed a diaper, and if somehow you tricked him into flying cross-country with small children and no woman to wrangle them, he, like me, would have briefly considered waiting out the catastrophe in the toilet, but then gone whole hog and just pulled the emergency door off and thrown himself out at 50,000 feet.

My dad’s book of awesome projects would have only one chapter in it: mowing the lawn. The revised and updated version might have an appendix on using a hedge-trimmer. Our lawn wasn’t very big and wasn’t very long and wasn’t even very green, he mowed it so damn much. It was more like a type of recreational outdoor shaving. When a man shaves three times a day you start to think it’s not even about the stubble, and my theory was that the roar of machinery, the clouds of dust and exhaust and the trusty pair of tinted gardening goggles all provided him a layer of protection against the rigors of domestic conversation. Indeed his nocturnal wear — sleeveless undershirt, black nightshades and airport runway-grade earmuffs — so strongly resembled his yard-work get-up that you half-wondered if he spent his hard-won slumber mowing dream lawns.

Something in him needed a buffer. Were he a Dickensian eccentric with land and idle time, he’d have had some remote growlery to retreat to. In our volubly inhabited suburban house he had to create a kind of inner space. He was good at it. Even at dinner he managed to abstract himself, gazing as if into an invisible telescope, diligently chewing and absent-mindedly pushing things away from his place at table. A family sport of ours was to crowd him with butter plates, candlesticks, coffeepots and so on and watch him push them back dreamily. We’d gradually accelerate the mischief until he snapped to conscious attention, then we’d wave and cheer. Like whale-watching, the game was to get a mysterious, seldom-seen creature to breach the surface and show himself.

I’ll tell you what I think is ripe for a rebranding: my father’s generation. He worked his ass off at a job he endured more than relished; he was a lawyer, and rarely spoke about his work, and refused to let us come see him in court. By means of that vocation he provided his four children with a sense of stability that began in material terms and matured into psychological and finally spiritual ones. We knew who we were. He paid a price for this in domestic ease and intimacy with us. I suspect many men of his age and class did.

Robert Hayden’s great poem “Those Winter Sundays” recalls a father from a different class and a different time, a now-demolished Detroit ghetto in the early 20th century. Its stanza divisions and near-rhymelessness half-disguise that it’s a sonnet — traditionally a form of love poetry — and aptly enough it’s about the kind of love that reveals itself only slowly, in time and in memory. The adult speaker recalls Sunday mornings when his father “with cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze,” and how “no one ever thanked him.” Those fires, literally and metaphorically, helped drive out the bitter cold and “chronic angers of that house.”

Our house was California warm and for the most part free of anger. We knew little of our father’s weekday labor, what in him it may have cracked, or not. Our home produced more comedy than poetry, and I like to imagine Edward Learish revisions, with obsessive mid-morning lawn-mowing in lieu of banked fires at dawn. But Hayden’s haymaker of a closing couplet — “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” — stays. It is, on this day as well as any other, a landed punch in the midst of memory’s slapstick.