tighter and tighter. My job brings in good money, but it takes all my time and drains all my energy until there is nothing left. There has to be more to it. There has to be a better way.
When we examine social evolution in more detail, at least some of the reason for the urgency in dealing with the changing role of fathers begins to emerge. For although the traditional roles of mothers and fathers may appear clear and defined, in practice they were never as stark nor as isolating as they appear to us today.
Until relatively recently—the past hundred years or so—men and women carried out their roles in close and constant contact with each other and with their children, whether on a small farm or running a small business or shop. Indeed, for most of our history, men and women worked side by side—undertaking different tasks, but performing them in a manner that involved continuous interaction, feedback, and assistance.
Dad was indeed the protector and provider, but he was also right there, downstairs in the shop or out in the field, preparing it for next season's crop. More often than not, Dad was there every day for the noontime meal, as well as for breakfast and supper, and the opportunities (and indeed the obligation) for children to spend time with Dad by helping out in the fields or in the store were common.
Fathers fulfilled their role in frequent daily contact with their children, and that contact nurtured the kinds of emotional connections that can only come with the investment of time. That began to change in our great-grandfathers' and grandfathers' time, as swelling waves of refugees fled the poverty of the countryside to find work in the factories and offices of cities around the world.
Increasingly, this new economic reality found fathers leaving home early in the morning and not returning until late at night. The thread of daily contact with their children was lost, as was the constant contact between husband and wife. The division of labor between men and women, which in the past had existed as a relatively intimate partnership, become a division in time and place as well. Fathers were increasingly removed from the home, and mothers became more isolated from the workaday world. This everyday forced distance became the true rupture with the past.
It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this change. For in building and maintaining close personal relationships, time is a key ingredient, and it is our time with our fathers when we were growing up, as well as with our children as they are growing up, that has been taken away from us.
My father never got over the Great Depression. He had a small business and, almost overnight, he lost it all. He lived every remaining day of his life terrified that he would not be able to provide for his family. The irony was that because he worked so hard to give us what he thought we should have, he was never home. In the end, it killed him.
We don't live our lives in isolation from these larger social conditions. We don't make the rules and we aren't even given a decent map to go by. The vast flow of history, with its wave after wave of social and economic change, has established the conditions under which our lives must be lived. We would like to believe that we have more control over our lives, but time and experience prove to us again and again that the most we can do is choose how we will respond to the circumstances we are presented with.
Fathers today, young and old, have been dealt a very difficult hand. Because of the massive social and economic migrations over the past hundred years, as a group we have been deprived of the daily close contact with our fathers and our children that many of our grandfathers and most of their fathers enjoyed.
Separated from both our fathers and our children, we have been cut off from the heart of the fathering traditions of the past, and have been handed a decidedly garbled message about how we should go about being good fathers today.
Mostly we are unsure of how to proceed. The message that comes through the loudest and resonates the strongest is that we must be protectors and providers. The image of the father as protector and provider is so deeply ingrained in our cultural heritage that it feels as though failing at this means risking one's identity as a man. And so we throw ourselves into the role with fierce determination, as though fulfilling this aspect of our identity as fathers is enough.
When my wife got pregnant with my first daughter, I thought my life was over, and in many ways it was. Any thoughts I had of being able to finish my education or consider music as a career were gone. I was still very much in love with my wife and wanted to love my new daughter, but my job was precarious and my skills were pretty minimal. I was afraid we were about to enter a life of poverty and insecurity. The only thing that kept us going was my committing to seventy-hour workweeks for almost ten years. My wife and I once calculated that I had seen my oldest daughter awake less than twelve hours in the first five years of her life. I will never know if I truly foresaw that miserable fate or if this was just a self-fulfilling prophesy.
For most men, it is when our children are very young that we need to work the hardest. We are new on the job, often insecure about our work identity, and need to put in long hours to become better at what we do, to become more valuable to the company, to be recognized as an important employee. Out of fear, insecurity, and need, we put in long hours at work and have precious little time left to spend with our children.
Before we know it, the tiny creatures we brought home from the hospital are crawling, then walking, then running to greet us at the door each evening. And as they grow, so too do their needs-clothes, shoes, medical bills, braces, piano lessons, judo classes. This is also frequently the time in our career when we have greater opportunities for advancement, and that, of course, means even more attention to work, more hours spent on the job, and more work being brought home to intrude on the few hours available for our children. Even men who start out intending to do it differently find themselves in the provider trap.
When my son was born, I was determined to do it differently. I took a six-month sabbatical from work to care for him when he was an infant. I did diapers, 2 a.m. feedings, stroller walks in the park-everything. Later, I was the only guy in sight at the day-care center. As he got older, I became increasingly concerned about our finances. We needed a house, I had to start worrying about college tuition…I ended up taking a high-powered, well-paying job two hours away from home. When I wasn't driving back and forth, I was flying all over the state, working sixty-hour weeks.
Suddenly, it was only my wife at my son's tennis lessons, baseball games, and school recitals. Ten years went by in the blink of an eye: We had financial security, but I missed out on a tremendous amount of my son's life. He never says anything about it, but I know he felt very hurt and abandoned.
Even when we are home, it is all too often in a state of utter exhaustion. We want, need, and feel we deserve some peace, some time to relax, to unwind and do nothing. To our children, however, that time is experienced very differently. They have gone all day without seeing, talking, or playing with Daddy, and children are not particularly patient. By time you walk in the door, tired, stressed, and in need of quiet, they are ready to jump you in an explosion of enthusiasm.
Sometimes I'd be so wound-up I just knew I couldn't handle the onslaught, so I'd call home and put off my arrival for an hour. Then I'd drive to this really beautiful park a few miles away and just sit there until I could feel the stress drain away. Sometimes it only took a few minutes, and then instead of dreading walking in the door, I couldn't wait.
Because we love our children so much, we want desperately to be good providers and so we work very hard at it. Then suddenly we find ourselves deep into the middle years of our children's youth, at a distance we never planned for nor wanted. We find ourselves on the outside looking in at their lives—their rhythms and schedules—much of which is constructed without concern for our presence, because in truth it is very difficult to assure them we will be there. We try. We try to get to the soccer match, to show up at the parent/ teacher night, to get home early so we can play catch, but it is very difficult. They learn to stop counting on us to be there in order not to feel the sharp sting of disappointment, and we end up feeling left out.
Time is important, whether we want it to be or not. The more time we spend working, the more energy we pour into our job, the more all-consuming it can become. Without our ever intending it, work can assume a larger