men, on the other hand, is coming in close enough so that we can build a strong and lasting bond.
As surprising as it might seem, the most crucial time to dramatically impact your future relationship with your children is in the first few years of their lives. This is a time when love and commitment are communicated on the most basic level. A child's infancy is a time of tremendous leverage. The foundation we establish—or fail to establish—will either allow us to build and maintain a close emotional connection with relative ease, or will instill a distance that will make our later efforts more difficult.
The birth of his first child is a pivotal moment in a father's life. It is a time when he must choose—whether he wants to or not—the emotional orbit from which he will do his fathering. The newborn offers a father an opportunity, a doorway back to the emotional world. This is an extraordinary, and tragically, often overlooked possibility. If we choose to open ourselves as widely as possible, to meet our child in the frighteningly vulnerable place from where they begin, it can reunite us with a time and place when we, too, felt completely defenseless, completely exposed, and completely vulnerable. In this manner, it can broaden us and make us wiser.
Pulled together at the moment of birth, father and child will either forge an unbreakable connection or begin drifting apart. This opportunity is fragile and fleeting, existing for only a brief moment before the mundaneness of daily life returns in full force. Once this time has passed, crossing the distance becomes more and more difficult. It can be done—distance can always be erased where the love and desire is strong enough—but it becomes more and more difficult as time passes.
Because of this, becoming a father is a precious and sacred time in a man's life but, unfortunately, it is rarely acknowledged as such. We arrive at this moment almost completely unprepared—no wise, elderly male relative takes us aside and impresses upon us the importance of seizing the chance for deep bonding. Too often, the moment passes without our even understanding the opportunity that is already slipping away.
When I think about it, I realize that I really didn't think a lot about what it would be like to actually be a father. Saying that now sounds absolutely idiotic, but I was really focused on my wife. Her pregnancy had been rough—nonstop morning sickness, daily afternoon headaches, and constant back pain and nausea the last two months. I was just trying alternately to comfort her, get some work done, and stay the hell out of her way.
When my son was born and the nurse asked me if I wanted to hold him, I realized that I didn't even know how. I couldn't figure out where to put the head or how to fit those tiny body parts into my very large and awkward-feeling hands. I also couldn't figure out how I ended up standing there so completely unprepared.
Fathering is one of men's most important and certainly most difficult undertakings, yet most of us enter into fatherhood with only the most rudimentary concept of what is expected of us. From any rational perspective, fatherhood is a great mystery. We live in a society that prizes preparation, training, and expertise for almost everything, but leaves us woefully unprepared for the single most challenging task of all. The more information we have, the more clear it becomes how vitally important the father/child relationship is, yet the patterns of our society appear to simply assume that men have but a ceremonial role in the shaping of their children's lives. We become fathers with stunning ignorance, and unfortunately the period of greatest nescience is the one we are smack in the middle of before we ever realize how ill-prepared we are: our child's infancy.
How come nobody warned us? Although in most cases our initiation into the bewildering world of fatherhood was not something done to us intentionally, at the time it certainly seems like a peculiarly cruel joke.
One day shortly after my daughter was born, my wife was dead asleep and I was trying real hard to do my part. After ruining two diapers and finally managing to get the third to sort of hang around my baby's hips, I just started laughing. I couldn't believe I could be so inept. I don't remember even having seen a baby being diapered. Babies were always fully diapered; when they needed changing, they were whisked away only to reappear in full plastic armor. I came up with the theory that all the women in the world got together and agreed to not let little boys in on any of the secret stuff about babies.
For the most part, as boys we were rarely included in any infant-care activities and were unwelcome when adults talked about parenting issues. When a little brother or sister came along, we might have been ceremonially placed on a well-cushioned chair and allowed to “hold” him for a few minutes, but for all practical purposes, the message that came through loud and clear was that when Mom (occasionally with the assistance of Big Sister) was dealing with the babies, the best all-around strategy was for us to be somewhere else—preferably harmlessly entertaining ourselves.
Nor did many of us have any real models for what a father is supposed to be. Our fathers, all too often, were not around. Either they were at work all day and sometimes until well into the evening (so they were too tired when they were home to really interact), or they were not even in the same household. And when they were around, they were generally uninvolved in the down-and-dirty parenting tasks. How many of us over the age of twenty-five can remember our fathers doing laundry or picking us up from school? On the day-to-day level, most of us grew up in a world where the nuts-and-bolts of parenting was done by women. Our chins and bottoms were wiped, our food prepared and served, and our scratches and bruises attended to and kissed away—mainly by Mom, but often with help from Grandma, a handful of aunts, and occasionally a big sister.
Our experience of fathering was usually restricted to predictably narrow areas: Dad firmly held the expectations that you were supposed to live up to; Dad lowered the boom when you really screwed up and was the one you went to when you had a big problem that needed solving; and every now and then he was the one who would take you on a special outing.
Given this cultural background, it is certainly understandable that we would arrive at the gates of fatherhood woefully unprepared. What is difficult to understand is how, as a society, we could somehow silently conspire to bring one man after another to the brink of the most important job in his lifetime not only without preparing him, but without even talking to him about it.
My wife tells me there is nothing subtle about me, including my dreams. The day after my son was born, I had this dream where I am at a Dodger's baseball game and sitting in box seats right on the third-base line. The pitcher has gotten into trouble, and the pitching coach comes over to my box seats and says, “You're going in for him.” The whole stadium is looking at me and waiting for me to get my butt to the mound so the game can resume, and I am glued to my seat in terror.
When it comes to small children, this father's dream is all too often a reality; however, in the world of work this profound lack of preparation never happens. Imagine for a minute being relatively young and a pretty good salesman, though still fairly inexperienced in the working world, and the president of your multinational corporation calls you up to tell you that you've just been promoted to chief financial officer. After a momentary fleeting fantasy of the big raise and leap in status, you would no doubt conclude that this guy was nuts. You were no more prepared to be chief financial officer than you were to do the brain surgery your boss obviously needed!
We have dedicated the vast resources of our education system to prepare us for the tasks we will face later in life, but not only do we not teach our sons the skills they will need to be good fathers, we act as though fathering skills are instinctive or biological, and will simply emerge automatically, like a new mother's breast milk.
It doesn't work that way. When an infant cries, nursing mothers often experience a responsive leaking of breast milk; there are, after all, some powerful survival-of-the-species factors at work in that relationship. Unfortunately, a father does not automatically know what is wrong or what needs to be done when a baby cries. Fathering is a skill that must be learned and, for the most part, is one we don't bother to pass on.
Men also don't have the ritual support that so many women do. When a baby is born, grandmothers, sisters, and female friends all come out of the woodwork to hover and coo over the new addition, while the exhausted mom is alternately encouraged into her new child-care duties and pampered and fussed over by the temporary support team.