Exposed: The Virus of Fatherhood

My last blog is seven months old. Lots of things have happened and I wish I had written more, recorded more, reflected more. The process of writing about being a father has helped me tremendously in coming to terms with questions, doubts and riddles I have had to confront about fatherhood and myself as a father. My last blog was particularly helpful to me in that I took the risk of being honest in a way I hadn't been honest before. It brought me further along the journey of fatherhood and of understanding a kind of crazedness that took hold of me in the wake of being "exposed" to a new baby. But I have to admit that it also undermined, if not destroyed, a more idyllic picture some others had of fatherhood and of me as a father. It probably destroyed my own idyllic view of fatherhood and myself as a father.

Lying awake on a recent camping trip with my three sons, with Gabriel my youngest sleeping tightly nestled into the curve of my body, my mind kept being pulled into a maelstream of thoughts about my experience as a father. It was a stream that, at times, seemed to take my breath away. The thought that kept coming back, the thought that made breathing possible, though not easy, was this one: "But I only wanted to help! I wanted to help her, Leslie, my wife. I wanted to be a good husband, a thoughtful partner. I wanted to disburden her, make it easier for her." Certainly I wasn't thinking anything along the lines of "I want to be a good father." It didn't even cross my mind. And when a good friend and her husband visited the day my oldest, Noah, was born and greeted me warmly with the word "daddy," I balked telling her in no uncertain terms that I was still Martin and not to be called by this new function that had recently been bestowed on me. Little did I know that already at that moment and increasingly so in the next months and years I would be continuously exposed to the virus of fatherhood. I had no idea that I would undergo one of the most effective forms of brain-washing and change of mental attitude I can think of.

Before I go into more detail about the ways in which I was exposed let me briefly describe how as a culture we help men avoid exposure: a) we tell them that there sperm is nothing but a minimal contribution to the life of the baby; b) we discourage them from showing up for prenatal visits; c) we enoucrage symbolic fatherhood (catching the baby, cutting the cord) but discourage actual fatherhood (doctor's visits, diapering, feeding, meetings with teachers, etc.); d) we make sure fathers go back to work no later than two weeks after the baby's arrival; e) we foster a complex system of concepts that is based on the distinction between a primary and a secondary caregiver (i.e., making the father as the secondary caregiver less important); e) we continue to depict fathers as incompetent buffoons who smear themselves with shit as they try to change a diaper, who vomit at the smell and/or sight of a full diaper who handle the child like a foot-ball, who sleep through the baby's crys at night; f) we tell the father to run for cover as quickly as possible. Culturally we do everything we can to inocculate fathers against fatherhood. It is a miracle (or is it testimony to the strength of the virus?) that more and more fathers are catching on to fatherhood. And they're not only catching on to it as a concept. No, they're experiencing it as a truly life-changing, personality changing, relationship changing process.

So, what happened to me? How was I first exposed? Well, there are plenty of "story-moments" to recount: reading to my first-born in utero, feeling him kick my hand in utero, looking deeply into his eyes seconds after he was born, cleaning him after he was born, hearing his voice for the first time, and and and. All of these are photo-op moments from a story perspective. They look like so many photos in so many fathers' albums. But I'm not convinced they really did to me what I call "exposure" or even "brain-washing." Too many fathers have these moments and, still, soon fall into a more distant relationship still. Too many fathers walk away (or are walked away) inspite of these experiences. These moments are not enough to create the kinds of bonds that are needed to keep a relationship going and growing. In the same way that a family picture may not be a realistic representation of the family, these moments are not a realistic representation of the father-child relationship.

What really got me "hooked" was continuous care for my son. The circumstances of Noah's birth(viz. I had just become a graduate student again, we were used to living with very little, my wife was dealing with the beginnings of (post-partum) depression) gave me time and forced me to step up to the plate of continuous care of my child. That is when and how I became a father. Night after night of lying with him, holding him on the couch (just like Gabriel was lying next to me in the tent), soothing him to sleep, often with my finger in his mouth (as he would only suck on Leslie's breasts or my finger, not a pacifier). Hoping, too, that Leslie would find some rest and sleep (yes, during those first nights and days, my taking care of Noah was still very much guided by the idea of "giving mom a break.") Day after day of putting on him those bulky cloth-diapers, cleaning them out, washing them, hanging them up in our back-yard (four lines of lightly stained rectangular pieces of white cloth billowing in the wind). Day after day of pushing him in a stroller to a near-by park and, there, doing the same things (the things he liked) over and over again. And, not to forget, having him on me in the sling virtually anywhere I was going. Noah accompanied me to the store, to teach, to study and even to mow the lawn.

My exposure to Noah, in other words, was relentless. At some point it caught. I realized I could no longer step away from the plate. Nor did I want to. What seemed like a responsibility at first, something I had to do to make things easier for someone else, had turned into something so routine, natural and joyful that I would not for a second think about giving it up anymore. So, when our second son Jacob was born two years later, my exposure to Noah had formed me in a way that seemed irreversible. For one, my sleep-patterns had changed. I was sleeping very lightly, waking up at the slightest stir from either of my sons. I also had begun to snore quite badly (likely a side-effect of the light sleeping patterns and my exhaustion).

About six months after Jacob was born I took them both to Europe to visit my family and to celebrate my grandparents' sixtieth wedding anniversary. A unique experience in so many ways, but especially in as far as spending time with my sons was concerned. We were together virtually the whole time. They relied on me completely and the bond and need for that bond became even more reinforced. My state of exposure only increased. It was during this trip that I recognized for the first time a secondary pattern of exposure, viz. that I was seeking it out rather than just passively receiving it. I wanted to feel the pull that comes from my sons, wanted their trust in me as their provider, protector and loving father. It was a kind of wanting that goes beyond the mere expression of a wish. Rather, it's the kind of wanting that comes in response to a felt lack. I was missing something, missing being with my children. And so I sought out as many moments as possible to be with them. It hardly felt like a choice anymore.

Gabriel was born seven years later. My sense of wanting to be with my children was still there, but it had also changed significantly. This change was about choice. Over the years, wanting to be with them had changed into choosing to be with them, and, more important, choosing to be with each other. Their ability to choose, i.e., their ability to be independent, added the joy of a mutually willful and mutually intentional being together. Gabriel's birth felt confusing. The old sense of passive exposure to something I couldn't avoid came back fast. There was no choice in it, only a magnificently powerful pull towards him. No longer was the question even one about "helping" Leslie. Rather it was about the sweetness of the connection with Gabriel, the sweetness of my submission to his presence. But, despite the clarity I have achieved about this now, it felt deeply confusing at the time. A kind of partum experience seemed to take hold of my relationship with all three of them. With Gabriel it was the old, and somewhat familiar sense, of wanting to be with this baby. But with Jacob and Noah it was a new sense of parting that had to do with me being pulled back into a relationship with their baby-brother while, at the same time, releasing them into a greater and wider realm of independence. I was becoming afraid of losing them all. That night, when Leslie and I wrestled over who should hold Gabriel, was, for me, about that fear. A primordial sense of my own passing role as a father, a sense of my eventual death and my sons needing to be in the world without me, a sense of needing to cling to my son(s) and never give him(them) up took hold of me more powerfully than I had ever experienced it before.

Why does nature do this to us? Why does this process come as the promise of "forever" only to quickly morph into "for a while?" And, if this has to be so, how are we to bear the pain of this change? For me this pain has never (and, I suspect, will never) resulted in discouraging my sons from being independent. I am not a "clingy" father. But my exposure to this virus cannot be made undone. Below my jubiliations about their bountiful steps towards self-sufficiency I often hear the grieving tone of a another voice. It is about a man who is still deeply connected to his sons and who will not stop feeling the depth of that connection. It's about a man who sometimes finds himself with the odd and very sad thought of his sons being without a father when they themselves are old and fragile.

A last reflection coming from the philosophical corners of my brain; it is about the term "virus." I have asked myself, why I chose to describe fatherhood in terms of a disease. It wasn't until I was already in the middle of writing that something about that word occurred to me. The word "virus" and the word "virile" have a common root: vir. This root is a Latin word for "man." Is it possible that exposure to this virus is about our manhood? Is this virus perhaps underming our manhood in one way and rebuilding it in another? Being exposed to the virus of fatherhood, then, would be the ultimate process of "deconstruction." It would be a destruction coequal with a construction. In becoming fully exposed and attached fathers we are becoming different and new men.

Hormonal Fathers

About ten days after my third son Gabriel was born, something happened that likely has impacted the way I think about myself and others as fathers. It certainly has had lasting ramifications for my marriage.

Gabriel was born by Caesarean Section. Ten days after his birth means, in other words, about five days after my wife and Gabriel had come home from the hospital. It was the middle of the night. Gabriel had already begun to sleep through long periods of every night, but he didn't quite yet make it through the whole night. My wife had nursed him just a little while ago and he had fallen asleep fast. Just about forty-five minutes later he woke up again. I picked him up and started walking with him, humming quietly. Just as I was leaving the bed-room, my wife said "give him to me." I responded saying he was fine and that I would just rock him a while. "Give him to me," she insisted. I said "No, I want to hold him. He is fine,and besides, you need your sleep" and walked out of the room. What ensued was an almost unreal seeming pursuit. My wife got out of bed and slowly, because of her incision from the c-section followed me through the house first saying I should give him to her, then screaming, then wailing. I finally surrendered him. I was sobbing. He was crying again (he had immediately calmed down when I first picked him up). My wife turned her back to me and started comforting him. I stayed back, attempted to calm myself, trying to understand what had happened.

The most poignant part of what I realized was, perhaps, this: the whole time through this incident I heard two voices. One kept saying "give him to her, she is the mother, he should be with her." The other kept asking "But why? He is fine! I just can't give him up right now. I want to hold him!" I also felt a tremendous amount of shame, feeling that I had broken an unspoken contract that supposedly exists between every woman and her non-pregnant partner. Essentially this contract says

"I am the birth mother. This child was with me for nine months. Therefore I'm closer with him/her and should always be the first to have him, when he is in distress."

My wife has recently retold this story emphasizing those aspects that give the impression that I acted like some kind of a baby-thief. Someone who carelessly and selfishly took the baby and, not paying attention to the mother (who was in pain and far from being completely recovered), refused to surrender the baby to the person who should rightfully have him. I feel the sting of humiliation and embarrassment in this description because it so accurately matches what one of the voices I heard at the time seemed to say to me. That voice also says "Fathers should never be so arrogant to think that they can do what a mother can do."

But the problem is, aside from my wife being so very upset about this and me second-guessing myself as she was following me throughout the house, nothing felt wrong about the situation. In fact everything felt as it should. I was rocking Gabriel, he was falling asleep in my arms. I felt a seemingly un-ending rush of love for him. I felt connected and inseparable. After nine months of waiting for him, he was finally here. He had been born into the emptiness I had been feeling throughout the pregnancy and he was beginning to fill it.

This doesn't mean that I would, at all cost, want to do and be everything for him. If my wife had picked him up first, I would not for a second have argued about it with her. But this time I had picked him up, had begun to soothe him; and the small bond of 'parent-comforting-fussy-baby' that forms and increases in strength every time we pick up our babies and children to comfort them, this small bond had already begun to develop in those first minutes. It is, in a way, no different from the first few moments when a mother has her baby latch onto her breast. The connection is beginning to form. It would simply be cruel, if someone tried to take the baby away at that very moment. And so, every time I sit down with Gabriel to eat, read, sing or just diaper him, this bond is there immediately. I don't like for it to be disrupted. Disruptions range from being told he shouldn't eat what I'm feeding him to having his brothers interrupt the reading with questions about something unrelated. Disruptions also include another person talking to him, while I put a new diaper on him. Diapering makes for an intense connection with our babies and toddlers,as does all physical contact with them.

This episode also makes me think of hormones again. The research is still small that supports the possibility of hormonal changes in men who care for their babies and children. It is clear that it happens in certain mammals. To my knowledge there are two studies that have, with a very small sample size, researched this phenomenon in human males. But if I had to choose a label for my feelings, their intensity and their absoluteness, then I would choose the label "hormonal." I felt hormonal in a way that seemed to successfully short-circuit my frontal cortex and lead me directly down into a primal region of fathering and caring that had, up to this point, perhaps served as a source of my fathering, but that I had never encountered this directly before.

Further evidence that hormones might play a role in this is beginning with puberty I felt strongly also that I could be, would be and wanted to be a father. I have certainly not ever heard another man talk about this as something that they experienced as well. It might very well be that in my case becoming a man and becoming a father were synonymous because of the role my father has played in my life. The upshot of all this is that men can be affected by their future or present babies in ways that might make them seem irrational and, to some, perhaps even dangerous. We have yet to understand this phenomenon in men, not to speak of the fact that we have to find out how to respond to it. The article that can be accessed at this link might enhance our understanding somewhat. http://www.slate.com/id/2168389/

In Two Different Languages

My native tongue, German, has always been a strong part of my fathering my boys. I spoke to them in that language from the time they were conceived. I greeted them in German when they were born. I have spoken German with them ever since. German has created an intimacy for us that I have come to associate with being a father. It has connected my sons and me in ways that reach far into my own deep past, my childhood, my upbringing and my roots in Germany.

What about my wife? My wife understands German, but she generally does not like to speak it with me or the boys. On occasion she will speak a word with us. At times she may pronounce my first name in the German way, "Mahteen". For a little while my middle-son attempted to give her German lessons. However, her German is not bad. She took a couple of classes when we first met and she took private lessons from a fellow German student. Most of her German, to be sure, stems from having been around German speaking folks for the last twelve years (i.e., the time since our first son was born). When she speaks to them, she will speak English with them. All are fluent in English as well.

So, everything should be fine. But it isn't.

We spent this Christmas at my on-laws' house in NJ. Neither speaks German. For the past 12 years we have done while visiting with them what we also do at home. I speak German with the boys and Leslie speaks English with them. With one difference, however, I do a lot more translating for my in-laws and so do my sons. Yesterday, after what now looks like years of stewing, a pretty heated argument broke out between them and us. My in-laws felt offended, excluded and marginalized by my sons' and my German conversations and exchanges.

I took in a lot of information. Most importantly how important it is for my in-laws to connect with my sons and how deeply they feel disconnected from them when we speak German with each other. There suggestion to me, out of politeness, was to speak English only when they were around. I was shocked. Shocked by the contrast between their feelings, which make so much sense, and the seeming absurdity of their request when I listen to my feelings about it.

It was clear to me that they were well-meaning about this "German thing," but that they were not really getting it either. Mention was made of German things they had done to please me (i.e., get a tape made by a band with a German sounding name, marinated herring-filets as they're sold in North Germany). They offered how "impressive" they think my achievement of "teaching" them German is.

Did they know that in asking me to speak English with my sons they were asking me to give up my home? I mean not the home I still remotely have in Germany with my parents, sister and other relatives. I mean the home of my language! Did they realize that their request amounted to nothing else but a final refusal to enter that home? Did they know that my convictions, objectives and outlooks have a home in that language as well? Did they know that their request feels like a request to cut myself off from my boys? Did they consider that it was Christmas, a time of deep-seated rituals, songs and stories all mediated in German? Did they understand that, not having those songs, rituals and stories already made things emotionally complicated for me and that I am yearning to recreate at least some of it with my sons?

For a while I was considering giving into their request. Well, perhaps, I thought, this would be easier than it seemed. We'd just speak English with each other and then, when we're among ourselves, switch back to German. But I couldn't. And the more I thought about it, the more I recognized something I had never really figured out before about my speaking German with them: I saw my anxiety about losing them. I realized that this anxiety had been with me, and still is, since the time they were conceived them.

It is odd to see this as it is. At the same time it is the most normal and known feeling to me. It comes as anxiety to release them into a culture that to some degree still feels foreign and inhospitable to me. It is a culture that pledges allegiance to a flag and sends their children into unjust wars. It is a culture that proclaims itself highly ethical and moral but still hasn't come to terms with the holocaust-like treatment of Native Americans. It is a culture that proclaims itself to be highly religous but has little tolerance and interest in faiths other than their own garden-variety Christianity. It is a culture whose values I still can't trust. After almost 25 years!

This is, in a way, a chicken-and-egg situation. I can't figure out, if my anxiety is a result of my cultural observations or if it is the case that my cultural negativity is a result of my anxiety. Am I dealing with a prolonged case of post-partum anxiety? Have I been afraid of losing my children for the past 13 years? I am almost positive that this is the case. I realize that speaking my language with them has become some kind of insurance, or better some kind of immunization from this potential loss of my children.

What did I tell my in-laws? I told them that I respected and appreciated their feelings. I told them that I didn't want for them to feel or be marginalized by my German interactions with my sons. I told them, too, that the solution to this problem could not lie with me simply giving up speaking German with my sons while they are around. However, I told them, that I could see myself be less dominating in conversations. This means that I would interact with the boys less frequently, redirect them to their grandparents when they had questions and only answer questions that were clearly only answerable by me. I voiced my hope that this conversation alone might sensitize us enough to behave differently in our ways of interacting with each other.

My in-laws, to their credit, responded graciously. He pointed out, however, that I had all the power in this (meaning only I could decide to switch and that made them dependent on me). I thought, but did not point out, that he and she had the power of the dominant culture and language. A fact that would only be different, if we lived in Germany.

What is worse in all this is that it has made more visible a crack that is going through my relationship with my wife. I don't believe in relationships with no cracks, by the way. Relationships are like houses: when they settle cracks will develop along the ceilings, walls and floors. These cracks speak of incompatibilities, of arguments, of hurt, of confidence, arrogance, of a lack of understanding, etc. This crack is more visible and more in need of real construction work, though. It seems that my anxiety about losing my sons may have contributed to my wife's feelings of being marginalized. It may have contributed, even, to feelings that I was taking the boys away from her. This, I am certain, was never my agenda. She and I have mostly agreed on things, especially cultural politics, etc. Though we often do disagree on parenting issues (discipline, clothing, food, etc.). For my part I can say that my opinions about some of these issues (discipline and clothing are over-rated, food doesn't always have to be organic, etc.) are mostly just in need of a healthy compromise. They're not in need of dominance.

It's easy to see that speaking two different languages may increase the risk of the crack getting or seeming wider than it actually is. Differences of opinion suddenly more look like manipulation by the children as they attempt to speak to the parent with the more lenient attitude in that parent's language. They will also switch to that parent of the two who is less likely to fly of the handle, to be sarcastic or otherwise off-putting in their responses to them. Often, I have been the parent in the role to whom they boys switched. There are some famous examples to the contrary, however. When my sons wanted to join a community of internet gamers, I refused. They switched to my wife and she agreed. My sons wanted a new cat after our last one had died. I had said no, they appealed to her and got their wish fulfilled (that one made me mad, by the way). My wife has in the past more often agreed to McDonalds than I have. (Although my disagreement is in no way a claim to healthier food-choices at home.)

Imagine that these disagreements and moments of single parent domination always happen in different languages and it is easy to see that the language could be mistaken as a the culprit. It is easy to see, too, that especially with respect to their children (where couples need to show utmost unity), two different languages could amplify a sense of disunity and make it seem that the parents work against each other. Aside from the two languages, though, it is likely that the kind of anxiety I described above is one that other fathers feel as well. I do not believe that this is just about my being a foreigner (though that might add to it). Rather, I believe that fathers may have these feelings quite frequently. They begin to feel protective and quickly turn out to be over-protective. Paternal anxiety about losing their children may be a strong factor in how fathers act towards their children and their spouses

How can we begin to speak about this anxiety? It's something I feel. It is something that's real. Is it acceptable that, as a father, I feel these things? How might other fathers feel about this? How can mothers begin to understand this without feeling that fathers are trying to dig away part of their territory?