Fatherhood can be boring and demoralizing, according to a new genre of confessional literature written by men who are willing to admit feeling indifferent towards their young children — or even positively disliking them.
A growing number of fathers are breaking with convention and speaking out about how a new baby does not always bring great joy. “I wrote my book because of this persistent and disturbing gap between what I was meant to feel and what I actually felt,” said Michael Lewis, author of Home Game, An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, published this week.
“I expected to feel overcome with joy, while instead I often felt only puzzled. I was expected to feel worried when I often felt indifferent. I was expected to feel fascinated when I actually felt bored.
“For a while I went around feeling guilty all the time, but then I realized that all around me fathers were pretending to do one thing and feel one way, when in fact they were doing and feeling all sorts of other things, and then engaging afterwards in what amounted to an extended cover-up.
“Fatherhood can be demoralizing. I usually wind up the day curled in a little ball of fatigue, drowning in self-pity.”
Lewis is just one father who has broken ranks recently to overturn what he says is “a great conspiracy of silence” between men not to admit to each other or to their wives the truth about the “potential misery of fatherhood.”
He admitted that, for the first six weeks of his daughter Quinn’s life, he felt nothing more than “detached amusement.” “The worst feeling was hatred,” he said. “I distinctly remember standing on a balcony with her squawking in my arms and wondering what I would do if it wasn’t against the law to hurl her off it. The reason we must be so appalled by parents who murder their infants is that it is so easy and even natural to do,” he said. “Maternal love may be instinctive, but paternal love is learnt behavior. And here is the central mystery of fatherhood: how does a man’s resentment of this … thing that lands in his life and instantly disrupts every aspect of it for the apparent worse turn into love?
“A month after Quinn was born, I would have felt only an obligatory sadness if she had been rolled over by a truck. Six months or so later I’d have thrown myself in front of the truck to save her from harm. What happened? What transformed me from a monster into a father? I do not know.”
Ben George, editor of the literary journal Ecotone, agreed that it is time for fathers to find the courage to stand up and talk honestly about “the dark moments of fatherhood.”
“The strong, silent father type became declasse a good while ago,” said George. “Gone are the days when it was acceptable, maybe even desirable, for a dad to be remote, enigmatic, impenetrable, emotionally inaccessible, unknowable.
“The job requirements for today’s father seem to have proliferated. They are unique to this age, achieving a precarious balance between manliness and sensitivity,” added George, who asked 20 fathers to write essays revealing the unvarnished truth about fatherhood for his new book, The Book of Dads, to be published later this month. “We need to admit that dads frequently experience the desire, at times, to be anything other than a father.”
One contributor to the book is Darin Strauss, the best-selling author of Chang and Eng, a book based on the life of the famous conjoined Bunker twins, which he co-adapted into a screenplay with Gary Oldman. “It’s different for women,” he said. “When my son was a minute old, my wife held him up and asked, ‘Don’t you love him so much?’ I didn’t really understand how she could ask such a thing. That purple squirming howler? ‘He seems nice,’ I said. Men, I think, need to be won over.”
Steve Doocy, the Emmy award-winning broadcaster and author of the forthcoming book Tales From the Dad Side: Misadventures in Fatherhood, believes he knows why fathers are so different from mothers. “New mums are better at parenting than new dads, but there’s a reason why: they are programmed to mother,” he said. “There is a mega-mother industrial complex made up of thousands of magazines, books, classes and TV shows that instruct women on how to raise the perfect child.
“Across the gender aisle, fathers are usually clueless about what to do. There are no special father TV shows, zero articles in men’s mags on ‘nine simple cures for nappy rash,” and certainly no practice-dad toys like dolls,” he said.
“A man doesn’t have much of a foundation in fathering. It’s more on-the-job training — and it starts the day he becomes a father.”
Dec. 16 to Dec. 22 Growing up in the 1930s, Huang Lin Yu-feng (黃林玉鳳) often used the “fragrance machine” at Ximen Market (西門市場) so that she could go shopping while smelling nice. The contraption, about the size of a photo booth, sprayed perfume for a coin or two and was one of the trendy bazaar’s cutting-edge features. Known today as the Red House (西門紅樓), the market also boasted the coldest fridges, and offered delivery service late into the night during peak summer hours. The most fashionable goods from Japan, Europe and the US were found here, and it buzzed with activity
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
These days, CJ Chen (陳崇仁) can be found driving a taxi in and around Hualien. As a way to earn a living, it’s not his first choice. He’d rather be taking tourists to the region’s attractions, but after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the region on April 3, demand for driver-guides collapsed. In the eight months since the quake, the number of overseas tourists visiting Hualien has declined by “at least 90 percent, because most of them come for Taroko Gorge, not for the east coast or the East Longitudinal Valley,” he says. Chen estimates the drop in domestic sightseers after the
It’s a discombobulating experience, after a Lord of the Rings trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film, set 183 years before the events of The Hobbit, is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists. Rohirrim, which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic
RSS