EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Cover Story
|
||||
|
For many reasons, as pointed out in Greg Blake Miller's "New Dad" cover story, men feel compelled to do something. As told by Miller and other writers in this package, the role of father is both embracing and ever-expanding, even frightening. "I love fatherhood!" exclaims our cover subject, John T. Anderson. But writer Marc Ferrero clearly regrets not having a better road map to the University of Daddyhood. The voices you hear are all over the map, even contradictory. The modern dad's role clearly needs more time to evolve, at a moment in time when he finds it hard to even breathe. Don't despair. Embrace the phrase from our expert, Greg Bishop: "It is a call to manhood." If you are still, well, despairing, remember that this struggle mirrors the "career vs. stay-at-home-mom" debate, only this time it's the "Y" chromosome set that's in flux. True, that doesn't make parenthood easier. But rebellion is a cyclical thing. One has to wonder, especially if you're a fortysomething mom, why dads don't learn from the phenomenon, born of the women's movement, that swept through American families a generation ago. Moms have, as they say, "Been there, done that." Now they say, "Good luck." Here is their timetable from lessons learned: The '60s mom: The decade was the discovery phase for women. They untied their aprons and began to explore the possibility that they could find personal fulfillment outside of their homes. Dads, on the evolution chart, you're here, asking the question, "Perhaps there's more waiting for me back at the ranch?" It's Mom's story, in reverse. For whatever reason, you all want to have what moms no longer wanted. The '70s mom: It took more than a few years to break out of the "housewife" role and start hacking away at the glass ceiling of corporate America, a quest that, thank goodness, there are still women focused on breaking. The pilgrims of the decade opened the door for a new generation of women, who naturally assumed that a career was what would define our success. For you dads, this is the next phase. You'll cash in the career, like an increasing number of fathers are doing, and feel the same fulfillment moms experienced by acquiring their own attachü cases. The '80s mom: The term "supermom" was coined, and it became the standard by which many were judged. If moms COULD do it all, those who didn't were considered lazy. Fathers, expect that if you shun the 24/7 dad thing, people will wonder what's wrong with you. "Mr. Mom" has become an endearing term. Get going, and live smart. The '90s mom: Be careful what you wish for is the lesson learned. This was the era of job sharing, the start of telecommuting, and the admission that women could have it all, just not at the same time. Moms began to return home, to start their own businesses. To "renest." Dads...you'll get tired of the laundry, just like moms did, and you'll wonder why you left that corner office complete with secretary, benefits, and a healthy 401(k). After all, college tuition is looming. The kids get more pimples, more expensive, and need even more guidance. The millennium mom: It's taken mothers more than 40 years to figure it out. It's not about what we SHOULD be. It's about what we WANT to be. It's about what's right for you and your family, not about conforming to society's definition of a parent. Maybe this discovery can save fathers a couple of decades. Recently I read somewhere, or everywhere, that there has appeared on this earth a New American Father, active and involved in ways the Old American Father never was. As a New American Father who is the son of an Old American Father, I do not believe in such a being. My Old American Father, as it turns out, was active and involved in ways I can only hope to duplicate. Of course, he did not attend every soccer practice, dutifully looming like a Beefeater over my reckless sideline charges. He did, however, play catch with me when I got home, and talked about the Dodgers, and the economy, and the vagaries of the Cold War. He came to soccer games whenever he could. I suppose I didn't particularly need him at practice. By the way, Mom wasn't at practice either. I do not hold it against her. In May, Newsweek ran a cute little sidebar chart informing us that our fathers were Men in Gray Flannel Suits. They even ran the movie still of Gregory Peck as a visual aid. Apparently the editors failed to catch that "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" was a movie, and Gregory Peck is an actor. The sidebar was part of a cover package called "She Works, He Doesn't," in which a handful of stay-at-home-dads who once worked for dotcoms were called "girlymen" by their working wives. They also were reminded that the place should be spotless when the breadwinner gets home. The overall message of the package was, apparently, that our fathers were hard lumps of coal while we are soft lumps of tofu. At the same time, we've been told by any number of earnest little features and public service announcements that Fatherless Families Have Problems Fatherful Families Do Not Have. We are, of course, instinctively aware of this, because we are fathers, and our vanity prevents us from considering ourselves useless. The earnest rhetoric on the importance of being Dad is fraught with all sorts of Gothic alarmism. Only our frantic, ceaseless, hands-on involvement stands between our children and a jail cell. This message at least does us the favor of flattery. And we're buying it. The father of a 14-year-old suburban Eagle Scout recently told me that he comes to all his son's scouting events because parental involvement "keeps them off the street." What must an Eagle Scout do to win Dad's trust? I suppose fatherly worries about how the kids will turn out are nothing new. Adam himself must've been a basket case wondering where he'd gone wrong with little Cain. Still, when you read, say, "Fathers and Sons," Ivan Turgenev's 1861 masterpiece on the growing apart of generations, you're bound to see plenty of parental head scratching about the odd politics of post-adolescent sons, but not much reflection on the role of the fathers' child-rearing habits in shaping those politics. We have reached an age, 140 years later, in which every child is "at risk," perched in slippery shoes at the edge of an oblivion of bloody video games, improperly acquired firearms and desperate screeds on computer bulletin boards. What does it mean when our first response to the question of why we've enrolled our 5-year-olds in soccer, scouts, T-ball, football and karate (making sure, of course, that we are the coach, scoutmaster and sensei) is, "It keeps them off the streets?" When did we so lose confidence in our offspring and ourselves that we think a lapse of control will send our post-toddlers down some path-less-taken from which they can never return? And if it's true - if the world really is so threatening that we can't let the kids out of our sight - shouldn't we be considering a wholesale fixing of our society? Does anyone wonder how we let the world change so drastically that our grandparents' stories - our parents' stories! - of riding the streetcar to the ballgame with four friends on a Tuesday, stories located just a blip in time from where we are, seem as ancient as the tales of the Arabian Nights? And if society is not as poisoned as we think - if it turns out not to need such radical remaking - perhaps we should wonder whether we've all become a little too grand in our anxious assumptions of influence. Could it be those soccer field afternoons say more about our needs than those of our kids? Cover Dad John Anderson fits fatherhood to a 'T' By Craig Reem "I love fatherhood!" John T. Anderson shouts. He stands amid lots of parents at a Little League playoff game. It is the end of the season, his daughter is running around with friends, his son is beyond center field working on his pitching with four other boys, and his wife is watching the game at hand. Anderson, a Santa Ana resident featured on this cover, is a reason to be optimistic about the future of dads. It wasn't too long ago that fertility technology threatened to make the father irrelevant. If he wasn't needed to make babies, why bother? Some dads these days - emasculated by a society that tells them they are important while providing no applause meter - probably feel as relevant as, say, Father's Day. That is, they are important maybe a day a year. Yet Dad is irreplaceable, whether he fully understands that or not. Without him, there is, most often, much less. For those who know Anderson, husband to Robin and father to Corbin, 9, and Madisen, 6, it is incomprehensible to consider him not being there. "Being there every second of their lives, every second of their day, no matter what," Anderson, 35, an entrepreneur, says. "And, if you try, it's so easy." He reaches back to the moment his firstborn arrived. "I cried. It was just overwhelming, this loving bond." Anderson, the mentor, had some spotty male mentorship while growing up. One of the most meaningful was his stepfather, who was on the scene from the ages of 3-8. Anderson took in the attention and learned the importance of a male. Anderson is a fixture, and a teacher, at his son's numerous athletic endeavors - as an age-group sprinter and long jumper, an all-star in Tustin's Little League, a standout running back and a basketball player. On sunny days and gloomy nights, Anderson is present, providing not only support for his son but also joy and wisdom to the other boys on the teams. He's the guy who gives players nicknames. He's the eternal optimist, win or lose. "I never want my kids to hurt, and it makes me unbelievably sad, even in the little instances. "It's my mission to make sure they don't just come home and run out. I'm sort of the Mr. Mom." The 1983 movie of that title, starring Michael Keaton, had to be funny because it was the only way the public would accept an involved dad. Perhaps times are changing, where the fun remains but the strangeness of, say, father pushing the baby stroller while shopping at the supermarket isn't all about him slipping on a banana peel but rather picking the ripe cantaloupe. Greg Bishop runs the Irvine-based Boot Camp for New Dads, the largest training program for new fathers in the nation. The 13-year-old nonprofit's objective is to make certain "guys are ready to hit the ground crawling when their first baby arrives." Bishop believes that a dad's role in America "is evolving, so it's in flux, which makes it a little confusing. On the one hand, fatherhood as an institution has sunk to an all-time low. But there are men voting with their arms and hugs. We refer to it as the Renaissance of fatherhood." Then Anderson would be a Renaissance man. "You have to give them the best opportunity to be the best they can be," he says, standing up to show how he has taught his son to walk erect and confident. "You educate them on the rights and wrongs and how to accept disappointments and pitfalls." Do men like Anderson run the risk of trying to do too much, and failing? Says Bishop: "It's really a call to manhood, a time to step up." Responsibility, Return, Redemption The true story of a father with four children By Greg Blake Miller Corey is a Webelo, Devin is a Bobcat. Corey is 9 and Devin is 6. They have a big brother, Brendan, who is 13 and plays soccer as naturally as most people breathe, and with about the same frequency. Their half-brother Brian is 16 months old. Their father was far away. Now he is not. He is never far away anymore. Sean Regan is 38 years old. He is wearing a scout shirt and a scout scarf and a scout hat. One could call the pants scout pants, if there were such a thing as scout pants. The pants are profusely pocketed. Sean has a cell phone and several pens and a P.D.A. and a sheaf of papers on scout administration and another sheaf about how the earth heats up and shakes and bursts and mountains are made. The troop is learning geology tonight. Sean is in front of his house, climbing into the 4Runner. He sees his new neighbor. The neighbor has a baby. "How old?" Sean asks. "Fifteen months," says the neighbor. "Mine's 16 months." Corey and Devin are standing behind Sean in full scout regalia. The neighbor looks at them. "Well, I've got four," says Sean. "The one who lives here is 16 months." "Oh," says the neighbor. * * * Two years ago, when there were only three boys, the boys did not go to scouts with their father. They didn't do much of anything with their father. If they thought hard, though, they could remember him. Sean was a construction engineer with a Ph.D. and a big debt load and a big-time job with a big-time company that was fixing the mess in Chernobyl, Ukraine. They called it a hardship post, but the sort of things other folks called hardships didn't much bother Sean. He'd been with Army intelligence from 1982-87 and had later worked for Bechtel in Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan. He knew what it meant to leave behind the cozy cocoon of the West. The problem was, he also knew what it meant to leave behind three small children. And he was getting used to the idea. You try to anesthetize yourself to the pain of it, he says now. You try to steer clear of the depression. Sean saw 45-year-old construction millionaires drinking their way through endless evenings, peering down their glass at the long emptying tunnel of a childless future. He also saw the 45-year-olds with families back home slumped over the same tables, lamenting all that they were missing. He saw men on their third and fourth marriages, one per country on the international construction trail. He met an unmarried fellow who made regular recreational visits to Thailand, claiming it was better than girlfriends, marriage, dislocation, divorce. Sean decided not to pine for anything. He did his job. He tried to seal the poison in place. He coached a Ukrainian T-ball team. He fell in love. He started a new family. He wrecked his health. He came home, new family in tow. He faced the music. * * * We are half a mile from the elementary school multipurpose room in which the scouts will meet. The cell phone rings in Sean's 4Runner. "Five minutes," he says. "Yep. Bye." He hangs up. "It's the wife," he says. The mother of his first three boys is still his wife. The papers that say otherwise have not been issued. She meets him in the parking lot, tall, businesslike, pleased to see Corey and Devin. Brendan, the oldest boy, has come with her. They go into the multipurpose room to help their sons scout. The boys will be going home with their mother. Sean will go home to his baby and his baby's mother. The children are loved, all of them. Love is everywhere. Love spills out of boxes into other boxes. One can no longer file the love neatly. One seeks redemption but cannot, must not, must never say I wish I could take it back. Sean Regan cannot redeem himself before three boys by repenting of the fourth. He owes them all now. He plans to pay in full. He looks forward to it. * * * On Mother's Day, there is soccer. The day before Mother's Day there was also soccer. Most days, there is soccer. The 16-month old stays home with his mother, Lena, while Sean goes and cheers his big boys. He has missed too many soccer games, missed too much of everything. He doesn't want to miss any more of his big boys' lives. He doesn't want to miss things with little Brian, either, but he is missing something today. He is missing Mother's Day. Last night's game was a disaster. Brendan's team was ill-treated by the opposition and by the referees. The league has become too competitive. Too many resentments seethe. They boil into hatred. After a game earlier this season, boys were exchanging handshakes when an opposing player unloaded a roundhouse to the face of Brendan's teammate. Last night, Brendan's team fell once more to the slugger's squad. Brendan was so demoralized that he didn't want to go home to his brothers. He didn't want them to see him like this. Phone calls were made. Brendan went home with Sean. He played with his baby half-brother. He loves to play with his baby half-brother. On Mother's Day, Brendan's team wins, and Brendan plays no small part in the win. Again, for entirely different reasons, he comes home with Sean. He comes home with Sean because sometimes a boy wants to share a victory with his dad. The changes that can take place in 24 hours, Sean says, are the most amazing thing in parenting. Sean would not trade his chance to see these changes. He would not go away again. Not now, anyway. * * * Sean Regan comes from a family of builders and travelers. His grandfather was a mechanical engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project and later trotted the globe for Bechtel. His favorite uncle lived the same sort of life for the same company. Sean's father was a contractor, but having grown up on the move, he decided in adulthood to leave the traveling to others. In any case, he had a son to raise. When Sean was 11, his parents divorced, and his father was awarded custody. In the small Northern California town of Jackson, Sean learned the family business of building things. He worked on construction sites before he could grow peach fuzz. He learned to drive earth-movers. What he did not have to do was watch his father board international flights. The decade passed, and then another, and Sean had sons to raise, too. But there were those debts, unplanned, unwelcome, looming like a mugger. Hardship pay for a foreign posting looked like a promising way out. Besides, the wanderer was in his is blood, wasn't it? He was his father's son, but he was also his grandfather's grandson. * * * The Webelos are learning how mountains form. They follow Sean outside. They collect rocks. They come back sweaty and exhilarated. Inside, the Bobcats are making books about their family histories. Sean's wife helps Devin draw. There are three fathers around the table, helping their boys with arts and crafts. "I've got to go at 7," says one father to another. "Where you headed?" "Got a baseball game to coach." "Your older boy?" "No, he's tomorrow. These guys play today." The man's two sons are the only two Bobcats out of uniform. They're wearing red baseball jerseys with blue-and-gold scout scarves. The coach leaves. The father he was talking to, a powerfully built man named Todd, sighs and smiles. He knows what it's like. He's been coaching football, baseball and soccer for seven seasons now. This year he cut back to just baseball and football. And then there's scouts. The men here spend their lives at sports and scouts. "My wife and I had our first evening together in a month-and-a-half last week, our first chance to talk," says Todd. "We went to a movie." Next weekend is Scout Expo. There will be a massive campout at a tough urban park. Todd and his son Jacob will be there. So will Sean and Brendan and Corey and Devin. And that's not all. Sean will bring Lena and little Brian to Scout Expo. One might think campouts in urban parks aren't the ideal place to bond with one's 16-month-old. One might be wrong. The weekend arrives, the tents go up, the frankfurters hit the grill and the sleeping bags unroll. Lena loves it, the outdoors, the festive atmosphere, the madcap energy of Sean's sons. The big boys roughhouse with Brian as carefully as big boys are capable of roughhousing. Brian keeps making that happy squeak, the one he makes when he sees his big brothers. The action, the questions, the hopes and affections all revolve around Sean. It wasn't so long ago he'd been far away and alone and trying to save himself from recollections of family, the sort of recollections in which he'd seen other men drown. Now he is home, with not one family but two, and it is his responsibility - his responsibility alone - to hold it all together. He is doing what fathers do. He's just made it a little harder on himself. In the morning, they leave the park. The weekend ends. The big boys go home to their mother. Their baby brother stays with Dad. But next weekend there will be soccer, and scouts, and redemption, and exhaustion, and happiness. There will be happiness. FATHER KNOWS BEST? In this life, we can't cut to a commercial By Marc Ferrero Ward, Ricky, Rob, Ozzie & Ozzie...what do I have in common with these black & white, kitchen-counter TV or plasma-screen dads? Nothing! Except for, well, I'm a dad wishing I could have my own appreciative audience at my feet who would laugh and applaud when I do, or say, something brilliant. I'm just a dad in touch with a real world who can't be wrapped up like a 22-minute sitcom. Sure, surprises awaited me after I enrolled in the University of Daddyhood. For instance, there was nothing in my syllabus about the diaper changes after the kids went off mother's milk. Or that I, too, had a responsibility to handle some of the 3 a.m. cries and cradling. Why didn't someone write on the chalkboard that singing "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" in the lowest key of F minor actually quieted them down? I now realize I must have been absent that day from class (or in the cafeteria) because when it came to certain parental crises, I was totally unprepared. What would Ward do, I kept asking myself? Then it hit me! When the situation became really tough for him, the music would suddenly swell and we went to commercial. Perhaps there was a fatherhood manual entitled, "Daddyhood for Dummies," or even Cliff notes to get me through. (I never found them.) Of course, being a man, I wouldn't have read the instructions anyway. How come no one mapped out in easy-to-understand graphics that girls' dresses button down in back and boys' shirts down the front? Here I am, asking yet again, is it all right that my 2-year-old son likes wearing Mommy's silk nightgown? Was that on the test? Was it a moment with Ward and June? How come nobody ever mentioned that when you go to the baseball game or that eagerly anticipated movie, Dad's job is to spend half the time in the concession line and the other half in the restroom? Or that after the kids saw the movie three times in the first week, your mission was to acquire every action figure in the fast-food restaurant set? Was fast-food in "Father Knows Best?" How was I to know that preschoolers could live for two years on a diet consisting of macaroni and cheese and goldfish crackers? No one ever explained to me how to act when my kids first used medical words to describe certain anatomical parts while at church functions. It would have been nice to know that my children would be adept at downloading songs and programming cell phones long before I needed to give them driving lessons. My education at the University of Daddyhood taught me many unexpected things, especially when my kids would stumble or encounter situations that were really difficult and I didn't always have the answers. I learned with them and found that sometimes admitting you goofed or even apologizing isn't so bad. Now if I can only live long enough to see the family curse live on and one day see them have children of their own. As for the diploma from U of D, I'm not there yet. Music swells and we fade out as I finally hear that canned applause. Does that mean I'm their hero? BOOKS FOR DADS As a dad who several years ago sat several times with his first-born to play the interactive CD-ROM, "Just Me and My Grandma at the Beach," there was great inspiration in opening up a book version from the same series. It is called, "Just Me and My Dad," by Mercer Mayer. In this adventure, it is the two of them on a camping trip. The story is fun...and blessedly short. (Golden Books, $3.29) "A Father is a Gift: Reflections on Love, Strength, and Wisdom." This slim book is, as advertised, a meditation about dads. Reading through the pages, there is a sense that dads really do make a difference. As one quote notes: "It doesn't matter who my father is, it matters who I remember he was." (Warner Books, $9.95) While this next book may seem an odd choice for this list, it isn't. "Baby Teacher: Nurturing Neural Networks from Birth to Age Five," is by former Los Alamitos High School Principal Rebecca Shore. Though heavy on the particulars of the brain - you might get too much about the thalamus - the point is driven home among the well-written prose and the medical facts. While you as a dad might think it's fine to let Mom take care of the specifics until Johnny can throw a baseball, it is not. In fact, the baby's ability to learn is phenomenal, and to consider this little thing to be too young for anything more than diaper changing is, as Shore puts it bluntly, a crime. "The role of adults in shaping a child's environment becomes critical," Shore writes, adding a few pages later: "A culture that expects more from its children may, in fact, get it." Take advantage of the first years, because they are more crucial than the Little League years. The curveball will come, but lost time cannot be recast. Memorize Shore's words, and act on them: "...With respect to brain development and building lives...the effects on a child's environment between the kindergarten years and high school graduation on their neural networks pale in comparison to the effects of the environment between birth and kindergarten." (The Scarecrow Press, Inc., $24.96). "How to Say It To Boys: Communicating with boys to help them become the best men they can be," by Richard Heyman. The book provides a roadmap to talking "man to man" about lots of things important to a boy's life. Sections include ages 0-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12, 13-15, and 16-18 years. While there are certainly specifics to each age group, the author lists these "communication practices" for every boy at any age: Love, accept, listen to, teach, praise, reward, encourage, follow, lead, understand, know and hug. Someday he, too, will be a dad. (Prentice Hall Press, $15.95) "The Man Who Would Be Dad" is by Hogan Hilling, one of Orange County's most visible dads - writer, speaker, trainer and stay-at-home parent. While this book is written in narrative form, the layout allows you to take a page at a time and consider the situation. Through sheer absorption of spending significantly more time with his children than most dads, he would have ample information to pass along. Through keen perception, the book becomes more than that. (Capital Books, $19.95) "Father to Son" and "Father to Daughter" are tiny companion books by Harry H. Harrison Jr. that provide reminders at each age stage. From a section on "Little Boys": "Take him for walks and introduce him to the world of bugs." From "Girls and Boys": "Remember, it's a good thing that the boys in her life think you are slightly unstable." (Workman Publishing Co., $7.95 each) - By Craig Reem |
||||
RSS Subscribe
Digg This ArticleSEARCH THE SITE
