Fathers have been getting drunk and leaving town for centuries when their babies are born: In spite of our storied propensity for engendering life, we do not always welcome it when it arrives, we kind of wish it would go away, we want to be left to our tools and our greasy hands and our shade trees, our violent metal and brief explosions, our gray primer and rust, our certainty of objects. The birth of a child means more life, more crying, more questions, more hunger, more lying and walking away, more required courses, more questions we cannot answer, more tests, more tedium, more teachers, more classroom sitting, more desolate afternoons, more diapers and howling, more unbridgeable gulf, more rules, more discipline, more silence. We do not like life in a lot of ways. For some of us men we like a few books, we like a little racquetball, we like maybe a sauna and some swimming, we like a long drive down a leafy road in a good truck, but we did not sign on for the entire program and it tires us out, frankly, and after the truck is parked we just want to lie down and go to sleep, and it is like this day after day for many of us men, which is why we father kids and go off into the woods, never to speak of it again until it comes up by a careless word or two in the supermarket, and there we are again, saddled with ourselves, bending under the incomprehensible load of what we have done—given life to a child who now looks out at the world and says, I don’t know, man, what you’re all so fucked up about, rage fiercely. Just wait, we say. Just wait.
Zo wrote to Tom, But why? What does it all mean?
Tom wrote to Zo,
All men struggle with issues of unresolved narcissism. Becoming a father is a crisis (and a particularly good example, by the way, of the Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis,’ which is composed of ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’.) Becoming a father offers men their best possible shot at working through and moving beyond their earlier narcissism. Some men experience fatherhood as a fabulous opportunity to finally grow up, and they do. In rising lovingly to the demands of being a good father, they are largely successful in shedding their multiple layers of narcissism. These men actually grow up.
A lot of other men go in exactly the opposite direction, regarding fatherhood as an intrusion, another demand in a life full of demands; and so they adopt either an attitude of indifference or outright hostility toward their children. Narcissistic issues in these fathers get worse, more entrenched; and often they are the great abandoners in life, either by actually physically abandoning their children—or, if they are so bold as to stay around, they abandon their children through complete, merciless indifference. The more primitive ones act out their rage fiercely and directly on their families in the form of physical and emotional abuse.
Zo wrote to Patricia, Why? Why is that? . . . Is it just that we keep going, because someone has to?
Patricia replied,
I think they imagine that women never tire, never feel the same desolation, never ask the same questions, never prefer isolation to the clutter and confusion of family life. They go on with their much higher incomes, their privileges, their self-indulgence, their presumptions, their prerogatives, to live as they please, for themselves, little imagining the hole they have left in another’s life, or the loneliness, desperation or poverty, born as a direct consequence of their undue privilege.
Title in memory of Virginia Tammy Wynette Pugh, Stand By Your Man, 1969.
