In this landmark case, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that a
man's constitutional right to privacy gives his right not to be forced
into fatherhood a higher priority than a woman's desire to be a
mother.
If the courts cannot guarantee single mothers added money --despite
the new liberal child-support statutes--the supposed "magic wand" of the
courts has proved even more useless in supplying the desired paternal
bonding. As a result, today's "non-marital" children are not much better
off than the illegitimate children of the past.
Ashley Avildsen and Jennifer Dorsey will not have to spend their
lives in a frustrated search for an unknown father like past generations
of illegitimate children. But they seem destined to suffer equally
devastating effects from being rejected for life by a non-caring one.
Mired in their mothers' bonding fantasies, they may even live doubly
burdened--struggling to live up not just to a famous father, but to a
famous phantom father.
As a mother and psychologist, it strikes me that these women have
deluded themselves by thinking of paternal bonding as a bargaining chip
like custody and child support. Parental bonding typically occurs through
a parent's being there and through the day-to-day caring for a baby-with
a woman's nine months of gestation often giving her a head start on
bonding. Regardless of the law, bonding is not an arbitrary entity,
something that can be ordered in or out of existence by word or
decree.
Nor is parental bonding by either sex dictated by a "lark of the
moment" from any vaunted "illogic of the heart," which was how Woody
justified his love affair with Soon Yi. Being a parent is not a part you
try out for, or can be fired from, with the ease with which Woody fired
Mia from her role in his new film.
A father's role has no understudy. It carries responsibilities that
can't be relegated, no matter how many psychologists and other
mental-health experts you turn to for advice. And it's certainly not
confined to playing Santa during holidays, as Woody seemed to imply with
his reiterated little-boy laments at being kept from buying Christmas
gifts for his children during the long months of separation from them
while authorities investigate the allegations of sexual abuse against
him. While parental bonding may gratify parental needs, its primary
purpose is to satisfy a child's needs
The law has traditionally recognized this by attempting to
determine custody and child support in conventional divorce cases in
accord with what the court deems the child's "best interests." But
despite the new laws that have given out-of-wedlock children new rights
to money and inheritance, these battling unwed parents seem to be mainly
committed to themselves rather than having their children's best
interests at heart.
Myra Prystay cannot have been thinking of her unborn child's best
interest when she insisted on having a baby that she knew Avildsen was
adamantly opposed to her having.
Woody could not have been thinking of his adopted children's best
interests when he bedded Soon Yi after he'd bonded with three of her
step-siblings. And Mia cannot have been thinking of her children's best
interests when she amassed all those children but depended on Woody's
money to support them despite the lack of any permanent committment
between Woody and herself.
But today's single mothers may be asking for the impossible when
they count on men cut loose from traditional legal and biological family
moorings in our new fatherless families to support their maternal urges
by bonding with their babies. As these women seem to forget, many such
men, with no family artifact to ensure they stick around at all, rather
than acting like dear old dad, are more apt to revert to the proverbial
cad.
I don't think the answer to all of these unprecedented legal cases
is to blame Murphy Brown for destroying family values-which never were
that ideal to begin with-or return to the bondage of traditional nuclear
families. But these cases show the need to begin to examine the nature of
bonding, and the wisdom of trusting it to occur in the legal vacuum of
today's fatherless homes.
As for Woody and Mia, I don't know what psychological baggage their
kids, including Satchel, will carry as a result of what even their judge
laments as their "unfortunate" exposure in the Woody-Mia mess. However,
judging by the bemused comments of several women outside the courtroom
after the hearing, Satchel seems destined to suffer more ridicule because
of his first name, and not because he bears Mia's last name instead of
Woody's.
"Satchel?" a woman kept saying to her friend. "Why didn't they call
him 'Valise?' Doesn't 'Valise' mean the same thing as 'Satchel?' " she
kept asking.
As for me, I have concluded that any blending was not in their
family but in Woody and the Knicks-size team of psychologists,
psychiatrists, and other mental-health workers he has depended on so
totally, for so long, and with such questionable results, to carry out
his bonding and other adult and parental responsibilities.
PHOTO: William Hurt's former paramour sued for more money--and
lost. (GAMMA LIAISON)
PHOTOS (2): Is he or isn't he?: Woody and Mia (left) are still
battling over his biological/adopted/not-yet-legal son, Satchel (right).
(RON GALLELA, LTD.)
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