To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant. (Amos Bronson Alcott)
At present, we are looking at a confused reflection in a mirror…now, I have only glimpses of knowledge… (1 Corinthians 13:12)
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. (George Santayana)
Thank you for sticking around during my lengthy sabbatical. I could say my excuses for not writing are poor and my reasons personal, but I would already being say more about it than I really would like, so we best ought to leave it alone.
I plan to write regularly again. Exactly what will be written, and about which topics, I really can’t say. But my hope is to continue what was good and discontinue what was poor about the previous iterations, and thusly reward you for your good faith in Lord of Indiscipline.
Time is a great teacher, not least because it humbles.
Looking back at what I last wrote here, roughly one year ago, on such heady themes and topics as responsibility, freedom, destiny, fatherhood, and even normalcy, I find far less in the way of answers than I do in the way of further questions.
One reason for this is that I am another year older in life, and have four kids, instead of three, and that does make a fair bit of difference. Sometime shortly before number four arrived last fall, it was reported to me that, per The Psychologists, the majority of parents are maximally stressed with three children; the arrival of the fourth child advents diminishing returns on stress and increasing returns on the tranquility of order.
The jury, in my domain, is still out on that. But what the jury has found so far, in its deliberations, is that the fourth child will emphatically deliver a lesson which you, the parent, should have known all along: namely, you don’t know squat.
Which is not to say I don’t know anything. It’s just that I don’t know anywhere nearly as much as I thought I did, and what I do know has been subject to significant change and confusion as well as impoverishment, revision, and some improvement, and the result is that I don’t know what I thought I knew and what I do know now is hardly what I thought I would (or should) know after knowing all the other things I knew (or thought I knew).
In short, I don’t know squat.
Socrates said that wisdom is knowing that you know nothing. I am certainly older now than I was, and at least in this way, also wiser—for I sense more sharply and see more clearly that while I may not know the answers, I do believe that the answers are out there.
Out of curiosity, I went in search of the findings about three children being the most stressful number, and four being the “critical mass” where that stress begins to diminish. Back in 2018, the Today Show ran what I assume one is supposed to call a “story,” covering a 2013 survey of seven thousand-plus mothers. Per the survey, mothers of three children reported more stress than their counterparts with one or two children, and mothers of four or more reported the least amount of stress. The story proceeds to a general discussion of stress, what causes it and how to cope with it, what aggravates it and what ameliorates it, and so on and so forth.
Notably absent in this discussion are the fathers. The generally inclusive admission that “every parent has stress in their lives” is the closest we get to paternal participation in a leading role; the words “father” and “dad” are not mentioned at all. As husbands, men are mentioned four times in total. The two main references are to their less-than-flattering positions of stress-makers, not stress-relievers: (1) “What’s stressing moms out? Plenty, from money worries to balancing the demands of work and home to feeling like husbands are sometimes just another big kid demanding attention.” (2) One of the “stress nuggets” from the survey: forty-six percent of moms say their husbands/partners cause them more stress than their kids do. (my emphasis)
I understand, of course, that this was a survey of mothers, so the omission is not necessarily malicious. Besides, even if the surveyors had wanted to include the fathers, the odds are quite good that those fathers would have been, at the time of asking, at work, or without cell-phone reception, or unable to access email, or filing the taxes, or watching the game, or mowing the lawn, or just out in the yard, or taking a shower, or any of the other myriad, suddenly time-sensitive masculine activities which preclude any delay and prohibit any interruption and which are also not taking a survey.
Speaking just for myself, the only time I would be ready (not willing) to speak to a stress-surveyor would be a time of actual maximal stress—such as when brushing the teeth of three toddlers while holding an infant—but my reportings would likely be disqualified as having an outsized impact on the survey as a whole. When I am not actually being stressed, like right now, I can’t quantify or exemplify the stress. Is it a guy thing? Just an Irish thing? Don’t tell me. I don’t actually want to know.
But what I do want to know—and not to put too fine a point on it—is this: What do the fathers think of all of this? If Today.com and Insight Express ran that same 2013 survey again, this time with seven thousand-plus dads, what would be the result?
Would the fathers of three children report more stress than their counterparts with one or two children, and fathers of four or more, like the mothers of the same, report the least amount of stress? Or would it be a sociological nonstarter, if for the one, simple reason that the apparently consistent basis of maternal stress—expectations—is not in place, in the same way, for the average father in the twenty-first-century West?
My own sense is that set expectations for what I am supposed to be and do as a dad are nil. Well, maybe not nil. I am expected, as a matter of course, not to be a schmuck and to like (or at least tolerate) my own children.
Unset / unstated expectations also exist, but they are difficult to abide by, and practically impossible to entertain in such a way that produces anything remotely approximating unity among fathers, a unity we could otherwise achieve by virtue of commonly enacted, commonly appreciated ways of living out our paternal identity.
All other things being equal, it seems that I am left to my own devices and inclinations.
If I want to be an emotionally available dad, a vulnerable dad, that’s great. If I want to be more proactive and engaged on the home front, the primary for such domestic tasks as bathing and feeding the kids, that’s great, too. I, too, can be a gentle, nurturing force in my child’s life.
If I want to be a technically competent dad, even an adventurous dad, that’s great. If I want to train my children how to both live and survive, to channel the educating power of experience into their minds and hearts, even if it hurts a little, or a lot, then that’s great, too. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
All these modes have their merits. That should be obvious. Many other modes also exist, perhaps as many as there are individuals who live by and in them. No matter what mode you choose, odds are good that society in general or some people in particular might think more or less of you. That should be obvious, too.
But what is not obvious, at least to me, is the principle from which any mode derives its merits or the principle by which society and people judge that mode as either meritorious or deficient. What makes a domestically competent, emotionally available dad and a bread-winning but chore-eschewing, island-unto-himself dad each respectable and admirable and emblematic, despite their differences, of what it means to be a dad?
Is it the competency with which I am that kind of dad? Is it the agreeableness of my personality as I go about doing the kinds of things which make me that kind of dad? Is it that I have set expectations for myself, instead of just wallowing happily in the absence of external expectations, and am striving towards meeting—maybe even exceeding—those expectations?
Is it a combination of these, a combination which also perhaps includes other factors, other motivations, other traits? And then is it this mysterious combination, all these materials taken together, which make a man a good dad, a dad able to live gracefully, manfully, with the stress and struggle which his own survival instinct has brought down upon his head?
“The danger is of becoming no one nowhere”—from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. This danger is very real, I believe, for fathers in the twenty-first century. The absence of explicit, socially-imposed expectations—expectations which are at the same definitely, objectively helpful for fathers—creates the need to self-identify and self-determine expectations for yourself as a dad. But only you really know and understand these expectations; this isolates your own sense of self as A Father, an abstract paragon of power and influence and authority, into a corner, and leaves you standing as dada, daddy, dad. And try being someone, somewhere (anywhere), when your note of introduction is: I’m daddy. It’s true, but it sounds weird.
The questions of what kind of someone you are, of what kind of father I am, or am failing to be, or am expected to be—these still remain.
And all I know is that I don’t know the answers. Moreover, since the survey hasn’t been done, it seems safe to assume that not many other people know the answers, at least not officially.
So the way is clear to state some theories. And that’s all I have to say now: my working theories. I want to articulate these because it helps me, as Santayana said, to “bear my ignorance of fact.”
Fact is the answer to a question, any question, in all its incontrovertible fullness; the kind of answer you can make and just know that nothing else need to be said, not to someone else out there, not to your own self; the kind of answer that envelopes the question and all its attending circumstances, factors, details, defects, you name it, and holding all that complexity at once, still issues a statement that satisfies, truly satisfies.
Obviously, nothing I can write here, not now and maybe not ever, would meet that standard. But that’s why I have my theory, even as I accept absolutely that theory will take us only so far. To that point, at least, we should go; if we don’t, or won’t, make it that far, then the answer really will be unattainable.
So I will say simply to continue what I said at the beginning: I’m not saying I don’t know anything.
Here is something I do know, something that I think bears saying aloud, if only for my own sanity.
I have experienced no more powerful antidote to that danger of becoming no one nowhere than fatherhood.
Fatherhood offers you a sense of self as someone needed, important, absolutely essential for existence. And that’s a good feeling to know—even when, thanks to the stressors, it really isn’t such a good feeling.
Fatherhood anchors you, the real you, the you that only you know and that you wish your children could know, because they just so clearly love you and have neither concept of nor capacity for your faults and failings. Like God himself, who will remember our sins no more, children are quick to forget our wrongs. And forgetting is a step above forgiving, because it leaves us who and where we were before the fault—someone, not one; somewhere, not nowhere.
So what’s holding us back? What power prevents us laying claim to this antidote, what force restrains our nature from gathering to itself the fruit of its own desires, the fruit by which we will be known as truly as we know ourselves?
Our norms. I believe we have to dispense with those conceptions of “normal” being dealt out so confidently to us. Normal is the fruit of our norms, which encompass the “code of good conduct” for our society as a whole.
Look around. Look about. Look down at your phone. Look up at the heavens. And tell me if you can disagree with the (paraphrased) words of Violet Parr: Normal? What do we know about normal? What does anyone in this world know about normal?
Accepting responsibility: not normal.
Rejecting banality: not normal.
Loving what you do: not normal.
Serving, not being served: not normal.
Honoring your country: not normal.
Knowing your neighbors: not normal.
Growing your own food: not normal.
Worshiping God, in spirit and in truth: not normal.
Raising your own children: not normal.
Our overall norm consists of the opposites of these tasks, along with a whole host of other pursuits, preferences, predilections.
Changing that norm is a mission of historical magnitude. But the seeds of a code of good conduct for ourselves, and for our immediate (and maybe also next-to-immediate) circles? We can sow these seeds now and reap them in our own lifetime. The seeds are small and the process of planting them slow, somewhat painstaking, and certainly unexciting. Yet if we are to escape these maladroit modes of existence that we have either received from others or wrought for ourselves, we will need these small ways.
Tolkien said that “only a small part is played in great deeds by any hero.” And I have four good reasons to believe he spoke truly.
Credit: August Macke, Four Girls (1912–1913), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.