There are so many monuments and statues in honour of generals, warlords, politicians and presidents. Wouldn’t it be nice if we started making monuments to men who are growing children rather than men who are killing them? Mick O’Regan, journalist.
Each issue of byronchild is like a birth. What comes through has its very own personality and soul. As the magazine unfolds, it is always a surprise and always a teaching for me personally. As editor I am not the ultimate authority around what goes into the magazine, but rather a midwife who ushers through what wants to be communicated. Overwhelmingly, what this issue wanted to communicate was the need to end violence.
My direct experience is that peace in the world starts with our ability to end violence in our homes. That means redefining what constitutes violence and bringing the definition closer to the bone so to speak. Sarcasm, cynicism, teasing, ignoring and threatening all fall into the category of disempowerment and therefore violence. Disrespect, comparing, putting down, judging and of course smacking are violent actions and attitudes. Hitting children is still legal in Australia, though thankfully it is an illegal practice in schools. Still, smacking remains largely unquestioned. Personally after reading the articles in this issue of byronchild, I knew I had to redefine violence for myself in order to stop more subtle ways of perpetuating it.
The play between men and women is a breeding ground for violence, not only the obvious kind but also the subtle undercurrents. It can be the place where children become the casualties of domestic battles. Refusing a child the right to see a parent, putting down the other parent in front of the child and (if that parent lives someplace else) promising to see the child and then not turning up – this is violence. Becoming increasingly intolerant to violence of any sort by both sexes means finding new ways to listen and communicate. Men and women need to be allies if we are to defend our children against the trends assaulting their lives. Fathers and mothers must stand side by side, equally.
While the maternal feminist movement reclaims and glorifies motherhood, fatherhood too, must be sung up from the graves of the industrial age. Thankfully, a fatherhood movement is afoot and with it a chance for us to all move beyond cultural persuasion and into a new, more honest and loving paradigm.
Often it is music that heralds and communicates a revolution, and the music on a new CD called Fatherhood is one of those compilations. I recently attended the launch of Fatherhood where singers like John Butler claimed their place as father. There was not a dry eye in the room that night as fathers were sung home – finally, after decades of absence. What happened within me there was unexpected: I had an epiphany about dads.
As I sat watching these musicians singing, authentically exposing the most vulnerable parts of their hearts I felt both deeply touched and sad. I discovered a whole lifetime of pain around fathers. I felt the pain and consequence of their absence. It was staggering.
Fathers, with the rare exception have been far away, busy and unavailable. Many children have come to feel that the mother is their primary caretaker and indeed even the preferred one. The nuclear family has given way to single mother homes as fathers have become increasingly replaceable. The average Australian child spends more time with the television than with his father. Are fathers indeed less skilled, intuitive and nurturing and therefore their absence an accurate reflection of their unimportance in children’s lives?
According the Adrienne Burgess, author of Fatherhood Reclaimed (Vermilion 1997), who also spoke at the Fatherhood launch, men have exactly the same capacity physically, psychologically, biologically and emotionally to take care of babies and children, with the only exception being the act of birth and breastfeeding. Research was done where men and women were hooked up to various monitoring devices that measured skin moisture, heart rate, blood pressure etc. while listening to disturbing tapes of a child crying. While the facial expressions of women were more expressive, both men’s and women’s measured responses were exactly the same, in timing and in type of response. Both showed distress, empathy and an urge to help. The facial expressions and perceived outward appearance of response had nothing to do with the actual sensitivity and responsiveness to the baby’s cries.
So why is it that men are given so little credit for being able to be as intuitively capable to respond to children as women? Why is it that our culture has accepted the idea that mothers are essential and fathers are optional? Burgess continues to cite that women have an average of 60 hours a week alone with their newborn babies. Men have none. So what women do have is lots of time to learn all about their new baby, to learn what they need and when they need it. The new fathers do not get the benefit of this time. This is the only difference – time to learn. Their lack of knowledge feeds the idea that only mothers really intuitively know the best and that children are better off with them. People make it about an innate ability, but this isn’t true. The old adage, ‘men weren’t cut out for this job’ or ‘it’s easier for women’ is a myth. In summary, men are as capable and more, they are essential.
When first hearing this research, I was curious at my conflicted response. On one hand I rejoiced at the beauty of a man in love with his child, and that the age of the absent father might be coming to an end. On the other, I felt usurped and threatened. After all, hadn’t I earned my place as primary caregiver of my children? And hadn’t I earned it because the father didn’t show up? Hadn’t everything already been taken over by men already? Can’t women have domain in one place without men moving in? Do fathers deserve to be seen as capable, after all, don’t they constantly try to get out of it? Don’t men prefer to be at work? Aren’t they the ones responsible for all the war? This, of course, was my pain speaking. It was also decades of conditioning around stereotypes of mothers and fathers.
My resistance revealed what most fathers have to walk through in order to claim their position as equal parent – women’s claimed dominion, hundreds of years of patriarchal imagery, traditional archetypes and in more recent times, feminist aggression. Just as there was propaganda keeping women away from work, men have been manipulated away from home. And both feed upon each other, keeping the one down, in order to maintain the position of the other.
When looking at the history of men and men’s issues through Fatherhood Reclaimed, one gains a clearer understanding of why men these days often don’t show up as fathers (in whatever way they don’t show up, be it covert or overt). Over the decades, men have been victim to incredible propaganda keeping them away from families. After all, if men became attached to their families, they wouldn’t so readily go out and fight wars or spend all day in the factories. In fact research shows that cultures where men do share in the care of children are less aggressive. So politically and economically speaking, there was much to gain by undervaluing and emasculating involved fatherhood.
The emasculation of fatherhood remains today. Just look at the names ‘Mr. Mum’ or ‘house-husband’ and their insinuations. A dishevelled man clad in a frilly pink apron, holding a spatula in one hand and a screaming baby in the other are part of advertising campaigns that communicate both that he must be feminine to do the job and that he doesn’t do it very well. Recently a dad was telling me the story of shopping with his baby alone in a grocery store. ‘Oh, how lovely, you are playing Mr. Mum today!’ exclaimed a woman in a line. ‘No, I am her father!’ he retorted. He said he felt so insulted. We have been indoctrinated with the stereotypes of man as breadwinner and woman as caretaker so to cross the lines often means castration.
Centuries of artwork, poetry, media and campaigns have fed us with patriarchal images and stereotypes that have shaped how families look today. The interesting thing to note is that due to certain vested interests, art in this case did not follow life, but life began to follow art. This leads us to believe that such stereotypes are true.
To make matters worse, when fathers do get home, they are blamed for not doing it right, or confronted with feeling completely alienated from a life that has moved on in his absence. Given all this, ‘it is a marvel that he is daring to show his face at all,’ states Burgess.
We need fathers to show their face. It is an issue for all of us. The absence of fathers has been linked to increased rates of juvenile crime, teen pregnancy, drug use, low self-esteem, early school dropouts, depression and teen suicide. Given this, we must make it not a men’s rights issue, but a human rights issue. Fathers too must take some risks and move outside of their comfort zone. They must actually be assertive to claim that alone time with babies and children so as to reclaim that position of equally valuable parent. They must push themselves through their own beliefs, the beliefs of the mother and beliefs of society. They must confront their own resistance to father.
For fatherhood to be reclaimed, it must have its dignity restored. For father is the quintessential hero, the super man just as mother is the goddess. Restoring fatherly dignity is one of the reasons why I have a men’s section in byronchild and why I don’t also have a special section for women’s issues. Personally I feel women have had a monopoly on the parenting and ‘issues’ circuit and it is time for the men to have a place to speak up within the context of family and conscious living. As a woman, learning more about men and their perspectives and issues has been beneficial, allowing space inside me to let them into my heart in new ways and thus allowing me to be an ally for their causes. Informed men can help us too. They can help make great strides forward in terms of birth reform and aware parenting. After all, home birth, attachment parenting, long breastfeeding is not about women’s rights – it is about children’s rights. I would even venture to say that the startlingly increased rate of medical intervention in birth is in part a result of men’s alienation from fatherhood.
Active fathers are informed fathers. One of the greatest gifts I received from the father of my children (besides the children!) was the courage to have a home birth. It was he who was informed about birth choices, myself coming from a much more conservative (choiceless) background. But putting fatherhood on the feminist agenda may not be easy. Once, while I was still married to the father of my kids, I commented to a friend who was also married with children that I felt like a single mother. ‘Honey,’ she said cynically, ‘We are all single mothers.’ Somewhere perhaps, between our own fathers not being there and the fathers of our children being unavailable, some of us have become tough skinned. But hearing those songs that night pierced something open in me. I see that there is much more to the story than just my idea of a man’s unwillingness to love or be loved. No, indeed something unfair happened to men somewhere along the line, their integrity betrayed by a culture that was economically served by keeping them far away and busy.
For women we must realise that the healing of fatherhood is also the healing of motherhood. Rather than exclude or usurp motherhood (as the feminist movement often did to fatherhood), healed fatherhood is part of the making of motherhood. Healed fatherhood honours motherhood, respects it, nourishes it and walks alongside it equally. The metaphorical and literal return of the father is essential, not just for fathers, but also for mothers and children.
As mothers and feminists, we have come as far as we can alone. Can mothers, within their children’s hearts, move over and make room for fathers? Can fathers put their fears aside, and sit next to her there? This is the next evolutionary leap for humanity, for men and women to sit side by side in the heart of a child. It is the beginning of the end of violence. The beauty of this particular leap is that we have to do it together.