Fathers and Sons (Part Two)
Excerpts from a memoir-in-progress
Today I’m sharing the closing sections of “Fathers and Sons.” If you have not read Fathers and Sons (Part One), please start there.
Section III follows a scene in which my father gives me a risky challenge while gathering firewood in an implicit test of my manhood.1
Fathers and Sons (continued)
III.
The lesson I was to learn from the firewood caper was that my father was still in charge even if I’d outgrown him in stature. In that way it was also meant as a biblical lesson, like the impossible demand God makes of Abraham, whom he commands to sacrifice his son Isaac as a burnt offering.
Abraham scales a mountain with Isaac, knowing he must bind his son to a stack of wood, slaughter him with a knife, and torch the body. That an angel spares Abraham from this grisly task at the last moment, pointing him toward a ram that just happens to be trapped by its horns in a thicket nearby, is cold comfort. There is no reason for the offering other than that God demands it. Had Abraham failed the test by questioning its terms, he would have been forced by some brutal means or another to learn the lesson: the Lord provides.
The most generous of interpretations — that Abraham’s faith was so strong that he never really believed he would be asked to sacrifice Isaac in the end — begs the question of why the masquerade was necessary in the first place, why God the Father would create such a pretext for testing Abraham’s fortitude. My father understood himself to be cut from the Abrahamic mold, which explains why many tests of manhood from my youth could just as easily have done me in.
The logic seemed to be that if I couldn’t survive the test, I didn’t deserve to survive at all.
Just as God the Father provided for Abraham, the story goes, so an earthly father is to provide for his family. Although the provider narrative has been outmoded for at least two generations, I can count on two hands the number of wedding toasts I’ve heard that recount a (somewhat) friendly gauntlet thrown down by the father of the bride to the prospective groom. At least three of those stories, including a toast at my own wedding, have featured a pile of firewood that needs splitting, and that — once reduced to kindling — serves as proof of a suitor’s fitness to marry.
In truth, my ex earned more as a magazine editor when we married than I did as a college professor. And that was nothing new. Even as far back as the 1960s, more married couples in America depended on two incomes than those supported by a single earner. Now dual-income households are a clear majority.
The Lord does not provide, in fact. Women and men both do. For every sole male earner there are two or three women who fill the breadwinner role or contribute meaningfully to it, and more all the time.
I see as much of myself in the women who raised me as I do in the men, which has made me a better father to my daughters. But after we knew we would add a son to the family, I began to wonder why being a girl in the most empowered sense of the word necessarily meant being a rebel, and whether the rebel spirit in its broader sense might be just as easily bequeathed to a son who had, as yet, no knowledge of privilege.
I have endeavored, imperfectly, to model a feminist ethos as a father. Yet my visceral response to a hand-me-down toddler top with the slogan “Boys will be Boys Good Humans” is to wonder why my son needs to advertise a corrective message about gender before he can even speak. It is a curious tension, because I find little to defend in the way I was socialized as a boy or as a young man. Yet I want my fathering to be warm, not strident, and for my son to understand his body as a gift, not as a problem.
I want all of my children to realize their passions as people, for my son to identify as freely with stories about mothers and grandmothers as he does with the lore of male forebears.
It is a grief to know that my son will not be born free, as Rousseau would have it, but will instead be born into a history in which men have too often played the villainous role, that he will inherit this history whether he likes it or not, and must decide what part he intends to play in the history yet to be made. I expect he will struggle, as I have, with the tension between self-realization and humility, the knowledge that he must not only make a way for himself, but also make way for others. But I hope these will be questions that he and I can puzzle through together and with the help of others, rather than tests that he must survive or else be cast aside.
Perhaps that is the first step away from the Abrahamic code: to begin with the question and not the demand.
IV.
The week before my son was born, a polar vortex descended on central Iowa and much of the northern Midwest. Temperatures plunged to record lows, as cold as 40 below zero with the windchill. I shoveled the driveway so many times that the approach became a tunnel, mounded on either side by nearly six feet of ice and snow. When my ex’s contractions came close enough, we bundled our daughters up and sent them home with a friend and then inched out of the driveway as I craned my neck around the snow mountains to watch for traffic.
Read on to hear how my son’s birth gave me hope for breaking the cycle of my own childhood.