To Be a Man Is to Be Called to Fatherhood

A late-night, caffeine-fueled, bleary-eyed burst about the commonplace miracle that saves us from ourselves.

This fatherhood bit takes up the middle part of your life, and since there is no wiggling out of it, either you will learn to love the struggle, or you will only struggle, since the battle is inevitable, but the love is your choice. You might hate it because it denies you certain freedoms, but most of those freedoms are petty, and you know it. (You say this with clenched teeth.) Even as you begrudge your children for how they have slipped in and taken the center of your life, you know you are in the presence of something like a burning bush, an item calling you to step aside and take off your shoes.

For a while now, you’ve been discovering that loving your children is binding you to them and loosening the bands of your vices. You are free to love them, but this love constrains you. Once you were little like that, and someone loved you, and now you would withhold this from your child? Do the math. Any society that hates its elderly and children hates itself. You feel this deep in your bowels. To not love them is also to hate them, and to hate them is to hate a part of yourself. There is no way out of learning to love except the descent to brutishness. It is a freedom forced upon you.

To be a man is to be called to fatherhood, a spiritual calling to be a person who can be imitated. Almost any man can be a father, and most of us will. Maybe not biologically responsible for creating life, but a father nevertheless. There are dads who have never become fathers, and fathers who have never become dads, if you know what I mean.  

For years now, you prayed for more virtue but realized virtue is hard to get. And then one day, you had plans, like a good night’s sleep or a little alone time late at night or early morning, and then the children woke up and destroyed those plans. Maybe you had a trip planned, and they fell ill. You realized later that you had accepted the disappointment with a kind of philosophical detachment: it was a disappointment, but you weren’t grumpy about it like you might have been a year or two ago. Where did this virtue come from? How did you learn to give up for someone else and be happy about it? How did you learn to smile into your daughter’s wide-open eyes at 3 a.m.? There was a time when you couldn’t have done that.

And then you realized you are not the center of the universe, which you suspect is the point of all this. And if you are a wise parent, you realize your children are not either, because that will break both them and you. They cannot bear the weight of your sense of success or failure, and neither can you. Folks told you this long ago, but just now it makes sense. You have to get this focus off yourself and off your children. Now what? 

You know less now than you ever did, and while ignorance balloons, your need for wisdom multiplies. You feel more deeply the wounds of the world, and you think more about bombs in Gaza and war in Palestine. You think about poetry more and science less. Decisions are freighted with the weight of legacy. You know you’re doing something wrong, probably something so wrong some future therapist will call it “trauma.” You wish you knew what it was. Your prayers have more to do with what you don’t know than with what you do.

You discovered, as a philosopher once said, there is no increase in pleasure without increasing sensitivity to pain. This is the inexorable law of consciousness. Drunkenness, laziness, and sleep feel good but decrease consciousness. A complete unconsciousness is death, and so it follows that a decrease in consciousness is a partial death. The desire to be drunk and lazy and to sleep is a kind of death, a shutting oneself off what could have been. You will know nothing, feel nothing, and disappear into nothingness.  

But if you wake up, you will feel the pain and suffering and meaning and work and sacrifice that comes from being awake. The more awake you are, the more painful it will be, but it will also be more joyful. The suffering and rewards of being fully human are symmetrical: they extend to heaven as high as they descend to hell. You will need to embrace the entire human project with its frustrations and pains if you want to know the joy of it. The alternative is a dull life of neither pleasure nor pain, an almost death.

You suffer more, sleep less, work harder, sacrifice daily, and are more alive than ever before. What’s going on? Welcome to your consciousness and your humanity. Your child brought you here.

You might have stayed the man you were before you had children, just by not really caring. Apparently virtuous, taking your children to the park and buying them toys and all, but not really caring about it, just trying to shoehorn your ambitions into your life and fulfill your fantasies. The wife does a pretty good job of civilizing the children, and your business has a nice storefront and five stars on Yelp. 

But then you look back at the person you were before you had children and say, “It’s a lot harder this way, but I was meant for it. And I am called to it.” Like a teacher is called to teach or a composer is called to make music, you are called to this fatherhood stuff. It has saved you from the destruction of your own whims, and those empty pursuits that you thought were your dreams, from the idols of your own success and comfort. There is no starker reminder that you are not insignificant—not significant, either, but knowing that what you do matters. And what else is there? If what you do matters, isn’t that enough?