Dylan and I.

“The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” – Michael Chabon

I’m reading Michael Chabon’s reflections on Manhood, i.e. being a husband, father, and son. The first chapter sums up the mixed bag of emotions that is fatherhood. He retells a story of holding his son while in the checkout line at a grocery store. The lady behind him in line tells him what a great father he is. And he begins to think how terribly little it took to impress this lady with his great fathering skills.

Holding his child?

I feel the same. I am gone 8-10 hours a day at work. And I can come home and lay on the floor with my son for 5 minutes and I become a hero. I can carry him through a store on my shoulders and the world wants to swoon in my glory. I take him to the Aquarium or on a hike on my day off and I’m crowned some mixture of the Nobel Peace Prize and Father of the Year.

They don’t see that every day that after I crawl on the floor for 5 minutes that I’m bored and tired enough to retreat to my computer in a glaze of indifference. They don’t know that I give him a ride on my shoulders in order to avoid his stubborn fussiness from having to ride in a stroller. They don’t realize that the Aquarium and park are more for my sanity as a father than his enjoyment as a son.

Yet . . . by most standard definitions of a father, I am perceived as a good one. Minimum effort and maximum reward. This makes it all the more curious as to why most fathers suck. I give 10% effort and become a saint. If I’m giving 10%, what are the rest of these dads giving?

And yet it all pales in comparison with the real saint, the one who is closest to deity.

“I define being a good father in precisely the same terms that we ought to define being a good mother – doing my part to handle and stay on top of the endless parade of piddly shit. And like good mothers all around the world, I fail every day in my ambition to do the work, to make it count, to think ahead and hang in there through the tedium and really see, really feel, all the pitfalls that threaten my child, rattlesnakes included. How could I not fail when I can check out any time I want to and know that my wife will still be there making those dentists’s appointments and ensuring that the there’s a wrapped, age-appropriate birthday present for next Saturday’s pool party? All I need to do is hold my kid in the checkout line – all I need to do is stick around – and the world will crown me and favor me with smiles.

The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many mothers. Lucky me.”