We know that raising children is the central experience of life,
thegreatest source of self-awareness, the true fountain of pride and joy,
the most eternal bond with a partner. We know that being a father is
life's fullest expression of masculinity. So why did so many men forgo
this for so long, and will the current crop of postpatriarchal fathers
fare any better?
FOR A COUPLE OF hundred years now, each generation of fathers has
passed on less and less to his sons--not just less power but less wisdom.
And less love. We finally reached a point where many fathers were largely
irrelevant in the lives of their sons. The baby was thrown out with the
bathwater, and the pater dismissed with the patriarchy. Everyone seemed
to be floundering around not knowing what to do with men or with their
problematic and disoriented masculinity.
In addition, over the same 200 years, each generation of fathers
has had less authority than the last. The concept of fatherhood changed
drastically after the Industrial Revolution. Economics suddenly dictated
that somebody had to go out from the home to work. Men were usually
chosen, since they couldn't produce milk. Maybe they would come home at
night or just on weekends.
As a result, masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic
involvement-that is, skills at fathering and husbanding -and began to be
defined in terms of making money. Men stopped doing all the things they
used to do. Instead, they became primarily Father the Provider, bringing
things home to the family rather than living and working at home within
the family.
This gradually led fathers to find other roles to fulfill when they
visited home after working somewhere else: Father the Disciplinarian:
"Wait till your father comes home!" and Father the Audience: "Tell Daddy
what you did today."
FATHER THE PROVIDER
If all father's functions were economic, if all his status was
measured by how well he provided, the rich and economically powerful
father became a potential tyrant; but the father who wasn't rich and
famous was an inescapable failure, a disappointment, a buffoon. The
father's position in the family was no longer determined by how well he
functioned as a father, but was scored by his status in the eyes of the
world, in a set of economic contests in which there were few men winning
by being the richest of them all, and most men losing.
Once a father had moved out of family life and became part of the
work crew, family values ceased to be his primary definers of himself. He
adopted instead the values and job descriptions of the other workers. His
work ceased to be something he did for the sake of his family and became
work for the sake of work.
He didn't slow down when he'd achieved a level of sufficient
comfort; instead, he strove even harder to get the approval of his fellow
workers and to earn glory in their eyes. He worked because he worked;
that was what he did because that was what he was. He was no longer
paterfamilias, he was homolaboriosus. In the endeavors and identity
dearest to his heart and heaviest on his schedule, he was a working man,
and his family should understand that their claims on his time came
second best.
In his mind, he had moved out. He had gone to conquer the
world.
FATHER THE SUCCESS
When society decided that raising children was women's work and
that making money was the single-minded point of men's lives, fathers
became too busy for their children and boys began to grow up without
fathers. That would not have been critical if there were uncles and
cousins and grandfathers and older brothers around to model masculinity
for boys. But our ideas of mental health and the goals of the housing
industry required that families trim themselves down to the size of a
married couple and their children.
Reducing the family to such a tiny, isolated, nuclear unit made it
mobile enough for the purposes of industrial society. Workers were no
longer rooted in the land or community. Now nothing came between a man
and his job. Companies could extract the utmost loyalty from employees by
making them a part of the family of work and cut them further away from
the family of home. Men on the Daddy Track were severely penalized, much
as women on the Mommy Track are now.
The children of this generation may grow up with the idea that a
father's life is his work, and his family should not expect anything more
from him.
I recall one man, talking about the problems of his son, saying, "I
don't know what Betty could have done wrong raising that boy. I know it
wasn't anything I did, since I was busy working and left it to her. I
barely saw the kid so I couldn't have done anything wrong."
FATHER HUNGER
Life for most boys and for many grown men then is a frustrating
search for the lost father who has not yet offered protection, provision,
nurturing, modeling, or, especially, anointment. All those tough guys who
want to scare the world into seeing them as men and who fill up the
jails; all whose men who don't know how to be a man with a woman and who
fill up the divorce courts; all those corporate raiders who want more in
hopes that more will make them feel better; and all those masculopathic
philanderers, contenders, and controllers--all of them are suffering from
Father Hunger.
They go through their adolescent rituals day after day for a
lifetime, waiting for a father to anoint them and treat them as good
enough to be considered a man.
