The Unmade Bed

by Stephen Marche

  Men want to be fathers more than ever before. They also fail at fatherhood more than ever before. The increased symbolic value of fatherhood has arrived in the middle of an accelerating crisis of fatherlessness. The number of American families without fathers has grown from 10.3 percent in 1970 to 24.6 percent in 2013; that percentage has more or less stabilized over the past five years, at the level of about a quarter of all families, which means that in 2016, 24.7 million children in the United States were fatherless. In the United Kingdom the number of families without fathers is increasing by twenty thousand a year, leading to the existence of “father deserts” in poor areas, where fewer than half of families include a father. Every country in the EU has followed this trend toward fatherlessness, as have Canada and Australia.

  Only the most callow and naïve can see this development as some kind of fluid redefinition of the family structure. It’s a social disaster. Fatherlessness as a condition has been linked with virtually every social ill you can name: young men who grow up without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail; 63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes, as are 71 percent of high school dropouts, 85 percent of children diagnosed with behavioral disorders, and 70 percent of all juvenile detainees. Fatherlessness correlates to higher aggression, lower achievement in school, significantly higher rates of delinquency, and increases in criminal activity. Psychoanalysts have identified the effects of “father hunger” in the night terrors of eighteen-month-olds.

  In a 2014 study of more than 40 million children and their parents, researchers at Harvard examined the relationship between economic mobility and a series of factors, including racial segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure. Overwhelmingly family structure was the strongest connection. The crisis of income inequality and the decline of social capital are the subjects of wide-ranging, furious debates, and the quality of schools is the main subject of almost all local politics. But family structure matters more, much more. The researchers themselves were surprised at the strength of the connection: “The fraction of children living in single-parent households is the strongest correlate of upward mobility among all the variables we explored. . . . Family structure correlates with upward mobility not just at the individual level, but also at the community level, perhaps because the stability of the social environment affects children’s outcomes more broadly.” Though no studies with such breadth and vigor have been undertaken for the EU, the connection between fatherlessness and poverty has been well-established by researchers in all of those countries as well.

  Again we see the limits of feminism as a political agenda in the face of the new realities of family life. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” may be true. But a kid needs a father like a fish needs other fish. (Exceptions are lesbian families, which show no trace of the crisis of fatherlessness. Why is unclear.) The figure of the father is more prominent because of rather than despite his widespread absence. Again the hollow patriarchy haunts us. The symbolic significance of fatherhood is at an all-time high, while real fathers, in the flesh, have gone missing. The rise of fatherlessness has revealed how intensely fatherhood matters. Fathers spending time with their children results in a better, healthier, more educated, more stable, less criminal world. Exposure to fathers is a public good. If the Harvard study is to be believed, and they looked at forty million children, having a dad is a surer sign of your ability to move up in the world than where you went to school or what neighborhood you’re from. No wonder men want to show off their kids. Fatherhood is a clearer status symbol than a car.

  The prevalence of the absent father distorts, in its turn, the perception of mothers. As fathers become symbolically vital but physically absent, mothers are exalted beyond all reason and degraded beyond all sense. The exaltation begins early, raising mothers to vertiginous, nauseating heights—they are the only ones who matter in childrearing and therefore are responsible for its results. I remember, while preparing for the birth of our son, readingI the various baby books whose sole purpose seemed to be to provoke, collectively, as much anxiety as possible. Do you sleep with your child in the same bed? She’s going to grow up to be incapable of independence. Do you leave her to cry in her crib? She’s probably going to be incapable of forming meaningful bonds. You don’t breast-feed? You want your kid to have two dozen allergies? You do breast-feed? Don’t you care about the future of women in society? Let your children go to the park by themselves, and the State of New York will prosecute you. Don’t let them go to the park by themselves, and you’re ruining their capacity for independence. Are you allowing them to be dirty? Are you not allowing them to get dirty enough?

  It is impossible to overestimate the desire of the world to make mothers feel like failures. Perfection is not good enough. The guilt of the contemporary mother is like the guilt God should feel. And of course it’s all so much pseudo-science. I remember dropping my son off at his first day of school and looking around the playground; I couldn’t tell who was breast-fed and who wasn’t, who was raised by attachment parenting and who wasn’t, who drank organic milk and who didn’t. Only one distinction flared up: kids who were loved enough and kids who were not loved enough. The kids who were loved enough had love to give. The kids who weren’t could never spare any.

  The exaltation of the mother as the icon of all parental responsibility is a natural response to the crisis of fatherlessness. Increasingly, without the presence of a mother there is no family at all. Without single mothers the streets would run with feral children. And yet the single mother is the preferred scapegoat for the world’s remaining scolds. Political parties have built major affiliations on the simple premise that the state should give less to single mothers. Impossible sacrifice is expected of them, and many want to make it more impossible. Attacking single mothers is the moralists’ alternative to blaming poor people for their poverty.

  On the other edge of the social spectrum, to be a professional mother is to have to dig a huge hole, then throw yourself in. Working mothers, required for a modern economy, have to endure the assumption that they are failing in both roles: a woman who works cannot possibly be taking care of her kids properly, and a woman with kids cannot possibly be dedicated to her job. Successful women have made a minor industry out of extolling and celebrating their exhaustion. There is a strange idea stalking us, that motherhood is a space for expected achievement rather than a biological state of being.

  And, almost needless to say, in all the pregnancy books and child-rearing books, men are there to make money and hold the purse. We don’t expect much of a dad—an insulting but luxurious position in its lazy way. One of my editors at Esquire remembers returning home from shopping in the East Village, toting a bag of groceries and fronted by his newborn son in a pouch carrier. “You’re a good father,” two ladies passing by muttered to him. “I was buying fucking milk” is how he put it to me.

  At the heart of the new fatherhood is a somewhat surprising insight: men, as men, are worth something. The epidemic of fatherlessness and the new significance men place on fatherhood point to the same clandestine truth. The most startling conclusion of the research into fatherhood may be simply the power of their brute presence. The Harvard study of upward mobility does not say that good fathers are the strongest correlate. It says that family structure is. Being there—mere, dumb being—is the difference. Presence is what matters.

  On the walk to my son’s school a few hours after my father died, the numbness started to wear off and the newness to seep in. I had been drifting. The hospital hallways, the car trips between our house and my parents’ apartment, the phone calls to relatives—they had all possessed the stasis of the unreal. But now the surface of the street suddenly burned with change; the leaves flickering in the bright sunshine shook with the fact that they would soon tumble; the cars trembled with approaching obsolescence. “Change is the only constant” is a wonderful premise for a bumper sticker. People are entering a
nd leaving the world every moment. But the consciousness of this obscene fact is unbearable.

  I needed my father to advise me how to deal with his death. I needed my father to tell me how to tell my son that he wasn’t there anymore. I needed to hear, as I had heard so many times before, his slow intake of breath, a half-sigh, as he considered whatever question I had brought him. I needed to see his eyes closed in thought, his thick hands folded together in momentary meditation. I needed to see him thinking up solutions to the problems at hand, maybe more than I needed to hear the solutions themselves. He had experience and he had remained cheerful about it—a powerful combination, and no mean attainment.

  His importance in my life had never been more vivid. We rarely agreed about politics or anything like that, but we were both smart enough to recognize that we weren’t supposed to. He grew up in poverty, managed to educate himself through the military, became very interested in poetry, was a venture capitalist and then a professor, walked to the eighty-eight Buddhist shrines on the island of Shikoku in Japan. His own father died when he was eight, and yet he managed to turn himself into a man of the world.

  How would I do?

  * * *

  “The memory of the dead” is such an imprecise phrase. It offers an illusory impression of solidity, of fixity in space and time. It’s also strangely singular. Memories of the dead are polymorphous: a photograph of sharing a bath with Dad and my brother when we were kids, the orange at the bottom of the Christmas stocking, a bruised thumb from splitting wood, a long story he used to tell about the front gate at Royal Military College that ended with the punch line “Bird poop, sir,” the explanation of how rooks and bishops move on a chessboard. The memory of the dead is a residue of intimacy, a swirling dust that kicks up in your chest and scours it until the dust rushes out into the world like a whirlwind and belongs to nobody. Death is not the end of intimacy, that is for sure. In a way, memory is the most intimate of interactions. A working definition of intimacy is a memory forming in the present.

  The switch that had flipped as I walked to my son’s school was binary. My father had always been there when I needed him, right up until that moment. The street that I was walking down was a street I could not walk down with him anymore. Just before I arrived at my son’s school, I ran into my wife’s cousin, a good guy of the sun-bleached, laid-back variety whose own father had recently died. He had the misfortune to ask “How you doing?” to a guy whose father had just died unexpectedly. I told him. Instantly he stuck out his hand and shook mine. It was weird. We laughed at its weirdness at the time. He later told me he was embarrassed by the gesture, but I came to realize it made perfect sense. He was congratulating me. That day, on that walk, I had become a man.II

  * * *

  The discrepancy struck me even as a child: that my dad was not like the dads on television. He represented to me—he still does—an open masculinity, a way of being a man without being boring or intentionally stupid. And he had found that path largely by himself. I suppose he was eccentric, although really he was interested in things and unafraid to be interested in them. If he suddenly cared about origami, he would study origami. If he suddenly grew passionate about D. H. Lawrence, he would go and read all of D. H. Lawrence’s novels. This was not what dads were supposed to do. They were supposed to want their usual chairs and not to be bothered.

  The standard family on television today—and it’s hard to think of any exceptions—consists of a hypercompetent woman and the dumb slob she married. The fathers come in two principal varieties: Mr. Mom and Fat Pig. The ur–Fat Pig is Homer Simpson, a man who worships a waffle stuck to the ceiling, but the purer expression is probably Peter Griffin from Family Guy, the farting, mentally handicapped narcissist whose subsidiaries amount to a billion dollars of television production. The Mr. Mom type is defined by the defeated, awkward, confounded Raymond on the ironically titled Everybody Loves Raymond. The most popular shows of the past thirty years have all been about family, and all have an idiot dad at the center. Every season produces its crop of imitators.

  These cultural stereotypes are now starting to crumble; fatherhood is changing so thoroughly that they have to. The clearest evidence that the bumbling father is doomed comes from advertising. In 2011 a Huggies spot claiming that their diapers “could even survive dads” was pulled when it provoked outrage. Dads attacked on Facebook first, then a small group of activist dads—let us pause to consider the mere existence of the phrase activist dads—petitioned the company directly. Huggies pulled the ads immediately and went to the Dad 2.0 conference to make the most of their apology. Now advertising is swinging the other way. Volkswagen ads show concerned fathers asking, “Is it safe?” Drew Breese, star quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, is shown rubbing Vicks VapoRub on his real-life son’s back. The 2015 Super Bowl was dubbed “the Daddy Bowl” because so much advertising shoehorned so many companies into the aesthetic of modern fatherhood. Nissan played “Cat’s in the Cradle” over racing footage.

  Advertisers have realized that men who consciously think of themselves as fathers and are passionate about that role represent a sizable market. Still, the engaged father remains an alternative form, a peculiarity worthy of op-eds. The cool dad retains all the cultural apparatus that status implies, with self-consuming, inherently narcissistic, demanding poses that co-opt and then mock. That double process certainly greeted Neal Pollack’s Alternadad when it was published in 2008. When Kindling Quarterly, a journal for design-conscious fathers, launched in 2013, I knew I was supposed to make fun. I mean, the first issue had a recipe for pumpkin gnocchi. But I didn’t. Fatherhood is one of the truly binding connections between men, no matter what aesthetic cloaks it. If you’ve ever wondered why new parents are so unbearable to be around, especially for people who don’t have kids, it’s because they are overwhelmed by the strength of their personal transformation. Like teenagers who’ve lost their virginity, new parents have been inducted into a secret, and, at least for a while, that secret seems to be the whole of the world. Men who are fathers share in that secret, no matter their other distinctions.

  * * *

  One of the most surprising, intriguing possibilities of our moment is that the family, despite its complete revaluation and the collapse of its traditional structure, has lost none of its power as a social institution. The old vision of the family—Dad works, Mom stays home with 2.3 children—has vanished into history, or rather its dominance has. The nuclear family is now one aesthetic choice among others. A huge array of options and modes of family life have emerged. Those who prophesy the demise and decay of the family as a social institution have not been paying attention. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the U.S. divorce rate doubled between 1940 and 1981, but then fell by a third from 1981 to 2009. A new set of family values is emerging that is fiercer, in its way, than the dull societal expectations that came before.

  The most obvious shift is the expanding acceptance of gay marriage. In terms of sheer velocity, the rise of gay marriage is a nearly unprecedented political victory, one that has created some oddly jarring juxtapositions. President Barack Obama himself, that icon of hope and change, was “evolving” as late as May 2012, and he finally came around only because Vice President Joe Biden forced his hand. A few months later Obama and the Democratic Party phrased the question of same-sex marriage as a civil rights struggle. Less than two years after that the CEO of Mozilla was pushed out of his company for having financially supported California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 ban on gay marriage. Meanwhile, in Russia and Uganda explicit homophobia has become a means of resistance to the decadence of Western democracy. The haters have seen the same truth everybody else has: acceptance of homosexuality, like the promotion of women, is a sign of modernity, plain and simple.

  No one has really figured out why the support for gay marriage has risen so swiftly in the United States, from 27 percent in 1996 to 55 percent in 2014, finally resulting in the decisive 2015 Supreme Court vi
ctory in Obergefell v. Hodges. One theory for the suddenness of the rise, and not a poor one, is simple exposure; when you have a lesbian couple living down the block, their kids playing with your kids, and you see them grocery shopping, being as boring as hell, it is hard to want to destroy that evident and substantial love because of some ethereal morality. A Pew Research survey in 2013 on the growing support for gay marriage found that 32 percent of those who changed their minds did so because they knew someone who was gay, the most common reason by far. One hopes that declining ignorance and common sense also played a role. Thirty years of research by the American Academy of Pediatrics has shown that children’s well-being is barely affected by the sexual orientation of their parents. Only the willfully ignorant can accept the argument that homosexuals are incapable of forming healthy families.

  But the power of argument is limited. New family values do not emerge because people begin thinking differently. Compassion and reason are unfortunately nowhere near powerful forces in this world. Instead the new tolerance toward gay marriage comes from a new consciousness about the family, an aesthetic turn that is intimate as well as political. No longer is family something you do because you’re a woman and he’s a man and, hey, you have to start fucking sometime and the paperwork is easier. The new family is a mode of lifestyle construction.