Fatherhood

My granddaughter’s fifth birthday has prompted thoughts about fatherhood. I can’t speak for motherhood, of course, although it’s probably true for mothers as well, but if my experience is any indication, fatherhood is the experience that alters you more than any other in your life. Nothing is ever the same afterwards. It changes you even more than does marriage. After all, most of us have experienced living with other non-related persons of the same generation - roommates, flat mates, lovers – and learning to consider their needs and to accommodate ourselves to them, but these relationships are usually temporary. Even one’s relation to a spouse is not cut into stone, since divorce is relatively easy and commonplace if not painless. But you can’t divorce your children nor can they divorce you, even if one abandons the other. The relation is permanent.

How does it change us? For one thing, we learn what it feels like to be profoundly responsible for another human being. Of course in some sense we’re responsible for our spouses too but they’re not absolutely helpless at first, totally dependent on us. Before fatherhood, I imagined that one’s obligations to one’s children end when they reached eighteen, that one sort of forgets about them the way a cat does its kittens once they’re grown, that one stops worrying about them. What nonsense! One never stops worrying about one’s children, even when there’s no need to worry, even when the time comes for them to start worrying about you.

Fatherhood also gives us a stake in history, linking us to the generations that preceded us and to those that will follow. We begin to see our parents in ourselves, and later our grandparents in ourselves, and we see their characteristics in our children and grandchildren. And we become more tolerant of our parents and grandparents, forgiving them for their sins, real or perceived, hoping that our children will (eventually) do the same for us.

It’s ironic that helping to raise my children was the most important accomplishment of my life, more important than the papers and books published, more important than the dissertations directed, the students taught and counseled, the conferences attended, and the promotions received. It’s ironic because I didn’t realize how it important it was to me it at the time. I concentrated not on child-rearing but on my career. I don’t apologize; that’s just the way it was and probably would be again if I had a chance to live my life over.

Not that concentrating on child-rearing would have produced any better results. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but my children are no more neurotic than average – at any rate they’re probably less neurotic than I am - and none of them has yet to land in jail. Indeed I’m proud of each of them and proud of their children too. If I had concentrated more on being a father and less on my career, would I have been any better at fatherhood than I was? Perhaps in this case less was more.