A Father's Journal, Vol 2, No. 1
July 13, 1995
My Father My Pirate
When I was told I'd have to wear the black eye-patch for at least two days I must have looked discomfitured, for the nurse, in a very nursey nurturing way, smiled and chirped in a sing-song voice, "you can just pretend you're a pirate."
A pirate, sure, I said to myself. "Yea, a pirate," is what I said, and tried to smile, but it made the patch itch. Paying on the way out, the receptionist also commented on my piratical appearance.
A pirate is not how I see myself. I make and sell jewelry for much of my time, when I'm not raising my daughter or feeding the cats or trying to take care of my relationship with Nancy, my partner. And the patch, big and black and mysterious, entered my life in the middle of a sea-side craft show where we were trying to sell our jewelry to beach goers far more interested in the sun and sand than in our shiny bobbles. The pirate in me was ready to take hostages even before the patch.
Instead, I was confined to a chair in the back of our booth. I found that with one eye patched the other worked less that half as well. I had hazy feedback from the covered eye and so found it difficult to focus on anything for long, such as customers uninterested in our work or a toddler far too interested in the other artists fragile works.
So I was given to a forced period of reflection.
Here I was, a beached pirate, dependent upon my partner for economic survival, unable to care myself, much less my energetic child. Stripped, as it were, of the vestiges of traditional manhood. And, I am chagrined to admit, I found it maddening.
Despite the best efforts I can muster, to be thoughtful as a father, to reflect on my roll in society as a man and shun the onerous obligations of "manhood", it is surprisingly easy to wound my mysterious masculine pride. I had thought at first that the lesson of the eye patch would be something about the interesting interdependence of each eye and hence each of us, or some such zen-like drivel. I now conclude that the lesson has more to do with my own hubris at supposing for a moment that I could let down my vigilance against the oppression of cultural norms.
It is like this. I have a friend, call him Chuck. Chuck's in his mid-twenties and had recently received his BA and so was looking for real work. When his girlfriend found she was pregnant, Chuck seemed to embrace the challenge, perhaps drawn to the tidy roll fatherhood often appears to provide. They moved in together. Time passed, things changed, now Chuck is living with friends. When I heard his daughter was born, I tried to talk to him about it all, knowing his experience was vastly different than mine, but assuming we could find some commonality in both having daughters. He balked. Apparently he sees little of the girl.
How could a man, a thoughtful intelligent man, I asked myself, withdraw so from his newborn daughter. This is a part of that epidemic we hear about of fatherless households. Are we not able as a gender to extend ourselves beyond the limits imposed by traditional, distancing male roles? And (here's the hubris) if I can do it why can't Chuck?
Well, I now see that maybe I'm not so good at it after all. It is a tricky bit of work to shed those masculine roles and not feel just a wee bit naked and exposed. It can almost go without saying that we are presented with few if any models in our popular culture of men who do not, by the end of the half-hour segment, resort to some refuge of masculine simplicity, the punch, the beer, the sexist remark. There must be some out there, but one grows tired of the search, and simply turns the TV off, cancels the subscriptions, and stays home.
(Despite concerned about on-line pornography, I do believe that part of the appeal of the internet is that the various exchanges one has do not in any way have to reveal one's gender. Quite the freeing experience.)
As fathers, men face frequent choices regarding how they are going to behave towards their offspring, and what messages they intend to convey regarding gender roles. Children are of course phenomenally perceptive and pick-up the slightest of deferences and derisions, quickly determining who in the home has the power in which situations. Our most subtle prejudices, perhaps hidden successfully from ourselves and our partners, will be dug up, like hidden treasure, by our watchful children.
Given these assumptions, it seems well nei on impossible to convey to our kids any appreciable degree of gender equality, we new fathers being under such scrutiny and simultaneously so unadvanced. And if these handicaps are not enough, we often find ourselves so deeply exhausted by the new 24 hour responsibilities of parenthood, especially if we try to share those evil nighttime feedings, that the part of our selves that monitors our own behavior may inexplicable fall asleep, leaving us adrift, no pilot at the helm, vulnerable to the viscisitudes of our usually chained piratical selves.
How can we even be held accountable for our own behavior?
Of course, all men and women are not pirates down below. Some have found a peace and a place where they can mold a new way of being, a less gender-specific set of roles. But most of us wrestle daily with the simple minded demons of cultural blindness, barely able to hold in our consciousnesses the complexities of our daily interactions. It is a beastly burden t o have to look deeply into each and every relationship we have, ferreting out those awful little sexist moles.
But it must be done.
Maybe Chuck's reticence to discuss his new daughter was less about his playing out some stoic male role than it was about he and I subtly comparing our experiences, competing, in a very male way, for who was the better father. My busy ferret seems to have found another serving of hubris for me to swallow with my humble pie.
Fatherhood has the potential to shatter our visions of ourselves. We have the chance to crumble and rebuild, to mirror something different in our society, or harden and maybe abandon the challenge. I am daily forced to look more closely at myself in these early months of my daughter's life than I've ever dared look before. Exhaustion sometimes leaves me feeling emotionally malnourished, unable to care for myself. Vulnerable to the slightest slight. All fears amplified. Perhaps fatherhood is about learning not only to care for a child but aquiessing to being cared for back.
The black patch held my daughter's curiosity briefly, but she quickly moved onto more pressing matters. She is learning to speak and has identified the moon.
"Moo," she says, pointing into the darkening sky. "Moo!"
And if I kneel next to her with my one half-good eye, I can see a blur, and I take her word that it is not the same old glow that I've come to expect in a night sky. This is something new and wonderful and she is giving it to me.
"Moo," I whisper back in her ear.
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