The Unmade Bed

by Stephen Marche

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  What I saw in my own boy was that his boyishness had to have an outlet and that I would have to find him one. Parenting advice today has become like dieting advice in the 1980s: many schemes are promoted; many schemes are debunked. But to be a parent is necessarily to be a bumbler; nobody really knows what they’re talking about. That’s why having kids is humbling and maturing; you realize that, about the important things in life, we’re all stumbling around in the dark, taking hope where we can find it.

  The main experience of parenthood is exhaustion and filth and being responsible for vastly complex and vulnerable organisms. There is little room for originality or innovation. When you are holding a shitty diaper, you throw it in the closest receptacle. When your daughter can’t fall asleep, you sing the old songs, the tunes that you know have worked to put other babies to sleep over the centuries.

  After much bumbling I found various ways for my son to express his inner boyishness: martial arts, team sports, rock climbing, summer camp. Embarrassing clichés, but they worked. My son had no problem standing still in a gym when ordered to by a coach. He had no difficulty with concentration when he was dangling from a rope fifteen feet up a climbing wall. He was not disruptive singing songs around a campfire. Watching him flourish in these activities was like releasing a bird into the air and watching it fly. Oh, so this is where you were supposed to be all the time. It was also oddly disappointing. These are the best solutions I could find? The old solutions?

  Here was the position I found myself in: I had to reckon with my son’s masculine nature within an egalitarian system. I wanted to preserve both. Or rather I sensed that my son needed both: belonging to groups that encouraged his nature while having the freedom to become whatever he chose. What I wanted was an approach that retained the best features of the traditional ways of teaching boys while not indulging the old restricted visions or fantasizing some hollow vision of deliberately stupid masculinity. A related problem, equally difficult to solve, is how to be a proud man without being an asshole about it.

  These are questions every man and every parent of a son face. Unfortunately they demand intelligence, which is not a requirement for becoming either a man or a parent. They involve thoughtfully and consciously selecting the values we want from the past without buying into the supposed male supremacy those values emerged from. They involve the search for equality while accepting the realities of difference. Call it neotraditionalism, or even neopatriarchy. Or call it modern fatherhood: the struggle to retain respect for the nature of boys, and of men, without patriarchy’s treatment of women as subhuman and the narrow confines of antique identities.

  One thing is becoming certain: to forget gender difference, either by accident or intentionally, is disastrous for boys. It is no coincidence that the boys’ crisis arose at the same moment as the crisis of fatherlessness, with the disappearance of the male example. Exposure to exemplars of masculinity are so necessary for boys because, in their absence, the most simplistic ideas of manhood triumph. The iconoclasm of male heroes has stranded men in their attempts at self-articulation. One by one the patriarchs have been deposed or have deposed themselves. The priests turned out to be diddlers, the coaches savage bullies. The past fifty years have been consumed with the destruction of various patriarchies, and they deserved to be destroyed. But the coaches and priests are not the enemies of civil society; they are its creators. Without them, things fall apart. The crisis has been caused by men removing themselves, absenting themselves, checking out, not giving a shit about anyone but themselves.

  To know a real-life man is to know that the ideals of traditional masculinity are, at most, conditional fantasies. Sports remains the great teaching ground for boys because, even though the focus is on winning, the lessons are mostly about losing. You try to win, but you live with loss—the fundamental lesson of all competitive children’s activities. When my father died, two lines kept running through my head, one from Hamlet and the other from the baseball movie Bull Durham. When told that his father was a good king, Hamlet replies only, “He was a man, take him for all in all.” In Bull Durham, when the hot pitcher Nuke LaLoosh is pitching poorly because his father is videotaping him, his catcher Crash Davis tells him, “He’s just your old man. He’s as full of shit as anybody.” The insight is the same in both: actual patriarchs have the vulnerabilities inherent in masculinity. The ghettos and the prisons are full of tough guys who think that being a man is never showing any weakness. They are the brittle men, whose shattering is so dangerous.

  Sommers and Kimmel are both right: the men lost without a patriarchy and the men lost in guyland are the same men. What has been taken away from boys are the visions of manhood as much as the entitlements of patriarchy, and without those visions, the boys lack the frames within which to develop the emotional complexity required to be fully fledged men. The bridge over the chasm between boyhood and manhood has two parallel spans: give boys and men a way to be proud to be men in order that they can then understand that being a man is an ongoing, difficult, complicated undertaking that involves failing a great deal. It’s not that the boys’ crisis requires a complex response. Complexity is the response. Nuance is the path to salvation.

  There is a war today between two types of men: those who are so threatened that their masculinity emerges only in vacuous macho and those who are confident enough to recognize that emotional complexity is part of every man’s life. We have a choice of confusions. We must make sure we choose the right one.

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  The problem is that complexity and nuance are anathema to massive institutions like, say, the Department of Education. The first nuance to be negotiated, and the most fraught, is how we distinguish girls and boys.

  Unfortunately a cultural shift toward recognition of boys’ needs seems a long way off. The boy is now an alien among us, brittle but also violent, to be feared or pitied or both. But you don’t have to look far back to find other responses. Not so long ago boys and boyishness were ideals. On the walls of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan are written the hopes Teddy Roosevelt had for the boys of his era: “I want to see you game, boys, I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender.” Boys used to be strong but also sentimental; the camaraderie of young men was the basis of larger social belonging, the source of the desire to contribute to a power greater than oneself, the model of community itself. For most of the twentieth century boys represented the best of humanity. Our expectation of boys has shifted from “Go out and do great things” to “Sit still and be quiet.” The biology of boys is not destroying them; the culture is, and culture can be changed. Boyhood and manhood will have to be revised together.

  Love of children and fear of the world arrive in stutter-step tandem. Cortisol dances with oxytocin from the beginning. Right after the rush of birth, the very next act is to fit the baby into a car safety seat. Here is new life: don’t wreck it. The anxieties are interwoven with our hopes. Not the least of the pleasurable horrors and abject joys of parenting is the forced reckoning with the unpredictability of the future, the wildness of life. What will become of them, my big-hearted boy, curious and tender; my daughter, who is so trusting she will take the hands of strangers in crowds to be led into dimly sensed, half-promised adventures. Your heart is out walking around in the world. How much do you trust the world? How much do you trust your own heart?

  A world filled with lost boys, with boys torn apart by phony masculinity, tossed by shallow dreams of what their desires should be and what the world expects of them, is a world filled with girls who will eventually have to live with these boys. For both girls and boys we want the same thing. We want them to escape the snares of being told what they are, and we also want them to flourish in their nature. We want for our children the chance to be fully human in all the impossibility that entails.

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  I remain worried about my son. He runs when he should not run. He shouts when he shou
ld not shout. When he walks in the street, his conception of the personal space of others is vague at best. Parenthood is a low thrum of anxiety, relieved by staccato bursts of joy and panic. To be a parent is to be worried. It’s not supposed to be any other way.

  The year after our first conversation with his teacher, my wife and I found ourselves sitting on another pair of uncomfortable chairs in another bland room smelling of markers and anxiety. This time we brought up the boy’s messiness first, knowing it was coming. His new teacher shrugged. “He’s a boy,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Her shrug of acknowledgment was worth more than any advice she could offer. It showed that boys are not given to the world as problems to be solved, by the use of algorithm or sociological experiment. Boys and girls are here to be loved.

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  I. As a Jewish mother, my catalogue of worries about my kids is comically long. I worry about water seeping into winter boots, about snacks being crushed in backpacks, about the mild eczema that both my kids have. I worry a lot about them being hit by cars. I also share Steve’s worries about boys in the modern classroom, but less so. A few weeks ago I attended the parent visit day at my son’s fourth grade Jewish Sunday school. The classroom configuration: About seven tidy girls sat in the front row, books neatly organized on their desks, eyes facing the blackboard, each girl eagerly awaiting an opportunity to please the teacher. There were only four boys in the class because each year since preschool one or two boys had dropped out of the program. The boys were in the second row, giggling over a silly cartoon one of them had drawn, utterly uninterested in the lesson. I worry that the boys are being left behind. On the other hand, that rebellious, freethinking kid who drew the cartoon will probably go on to have an interesting, innovative career that will reward him financially for thinking creatively.

  II. Like many women my age who attended college in the 1990s, when academic feminism was in vogue, I emerged into adulthood convinced that gender was overwhelmingly a cultural construct. Then I had kids. What a humbling business it is to watch all your beliefs crumble in the hands of a pair of toddlers. My daughter likes to organize the shoes in the front hall. My son takes his off while bounding into the house, scattering sand from the playground, obliviously. I’m trying to teach my son to pick his socks up from the floor so that his future partner doesn’t have to date a guy who leaves his laundry lying around.

  III. I visited five or six day cares in Brooklyn. They were almost all in fluorescent-lit repurposed storefronts, with cheap carpets and a pervasive smell of bleach. They were all unregulated. The owners were entrepreneurial women who I suspected were just as concerned with cost management as they were with baby care. Canada requires day care staff to hold early childhood education degrees. The one our son went to when we first moved back had unionized staff. The government inspects them regularly. They are often the first choice of upper-middle-class educated parents. None of my American friends can fathom any of this.

  SEVEN

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  The Case for Living in Filth

  MEANWHILE there’s housework. Sex is beautiful and dangerous, babies are born, fathers die, children are worries, but the housework is waiting always. A house is work. One goes with the other.

  It’s strictly a question of perspective: Do my wife and I own a house, or are we swallowed every night into the hungry belly of a stationary, numbered beast? Our house-beast is cozy and squat, more than a century old. It has “good bones,” so I have been told, as if the roof beams over the dining room were thick ribs, and when I held the thrill-seeking babies up to grab them, the house was being tickled from the inside.

  The house has its own orders, its own exchange of airs and energies, just like a body. I am writing this in the attic, where I am kept behind a door that locks both ways with the books and records and other curios. Below me are the bedrooms on the second floor, where the pools of the family’s identities lap against each other—my son’s walls postered with One Direction and Harry Potter and SpongeBob SquarePants; my daughter’s room, shared with her communion of dolls, who stare at each other with their half-lidded eyes; our bedroom, a bare room with no art but a cello sitting like a plump aunt in the corner. I think we haven’t decorated the bedroom because we are both so tired of making decisions. On the ground floor the gumwood-paneled living and dining rooms, classically Edwardian in their cozy melancholy, serve mainly as an extended indoor climbing gym, strewn with toys that have been picked up and put down, books that have been picked up and put down. The blinds on the front window had to be removed; my son broke too many slats leaping over the sofa, fleeing from bad guys of his imagination. The kitchen is the heart, like the stitched platitude says, humming with refrigerated food and leaking taps.

  As in many bodies, the dark corners of the house are the most tender. In the kitchen a cup of red wine vinegar covered with Saran wrap pocked with holes traps fruit flies. The basement holds the detritus of previous lives: letters from ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends, a garden hose coiled in futility, the summer tires of a car I crashed, boxes of Christmas decorations, a wall of CDs long since transferred to digital, the toys no longer desired, the empty bottles waiting to be taken back for deposit, a claw-foot bathtub kept in a small chamber once used to store coal. A previous owner must have found a way to bring down that bathtub; it will stay there until a future owner figures out a way to bring it up.

  Sarah and I are only temporary acolytes of this redbrick idol. Others came before us. Others will come after us. The house-beast needs to have its various vanities assuaged with regular sacrifices, nightly sweeping and washing of its surfaces, and the shaving of its front lawn so that it won’t be embarrassed in front of the neighbors. It requires the biweekly sacrifice of huge piles of money to an Australian mortgage company, along with other irregular whimsical expenses, roofs and boilers and many, many surprises. Every now and then it needs to be told it’s loved, so we paint the walls or clean the windows. As in any symbiosis, general affection is offset by intermittent resentment. All this trouble for shelter. But how could it be any other way? The trouble is the price of intimacy. Housework is intimate trouble.

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  At the end of all comedy, housework is waiting, right after sex. “Reader, I married him” is how Jane Eyre ends. No epilogue explains the specific breakdown of duties and responsibilities established in the subsequent domestic arrangement. Eat, Pray, Love stopped at “Love.” There was no fourth part titled “Chores,” because it would have taken too long and nobody would have read it.

  Sex inevitably progresses indoors. Sex begins in stolen spaces: the backs of cars, parks, basement couches. Sex continues through a phase of “your place or mine”—the tragicomic negotiations of apartments and hotels, which is why sex farces on stage inevitably involve the closing and opening of many doors. Moving in together is the real decision between lovers. Moving in together means you have to consider the reality of another person, not now and then but all the time, over the course of the entire day, every day. In contemporary romantic life housework and children are the true gauges of intimacy; sex is a lark, and marriage is paperwork. When a man and a woman fall into bed together, they might have each other; when one of them makes the bed, they have a relationship.

  At the moment I could leave my computer and tidy the stairs to my office, replace the back gate’s slat that was lost during a recent storm, clean the lunch dishes. I could paint the ceiling in the bedroom, which grew slightly dampstained after a snow-packed winter. I could go into the garden, where I really should trim the hedges and hack back the grapevines on the trellis. I’m not even thinking about treating the deck, which will take half a week at least. But I won’t do any of them, at least not now. Even the fact that I will have to do them at some point is oppressive. Housework is a fundamental dreariness between human beings,I a dreariness that necessarily consumes far more time and effort and emotion than joy. A house, no matter how much love it contains, is a
collection of unpleasant tasks and tender gestures, duties and expectations, disgusting tasks and half-noticed considerations.

  It’s also the sphere of life where the question of gender equality is not statistics but everyday action, not theoretical abstraction but nitty-gritty. There are worse definitions of power than the difference between those who clean up and those who don’t.

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  Housework equality is in a state of stasis. In 1989 Arlie Hochschild published her highly influential study of working parents, The Second Shift. After studying the wild discrepancies between what household responsibilities couples thought they shared and what they actually shared, she concluded that women who worked out of the house were no less exempt from the traditional role of homemaker than women who didn’t. In the 1980s America became a nation of supermoms—doctors going home to vacuum before the dinner party, partner-track lawyers cooking all weekend to fill the basement freezer, and so on—doing a range and quantity of tasks that seemed not just unfair but preposterous and unsustainable. For Hochschild the discrepancy in expectations between men and women at home meant that feminism itself amounted to a “stalled revolution.”