Tag Archives: Father

My favorite carol

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My favorite Christmas carol is the one that puts the lump in my throat every year at this time: “O du Fröhliche.” (Here’s an old Youtube clip of the Vienna Boys Choir singing a rather stately version.) Along with “The Holly and the Ivy”, “O du Fröhliche” would certainly make the upper end of any top ten list I compiled.

But I write this morning thinking of my father, for this was indisputably his favorite carol, and his memory of hearing it sung as a small boy is especially poignant. My father was born in Austria in 1935 to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who had converted to Rome. After Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938, my grandparents took their children and fled successfully to England, living a refugee life in London, then Ellesmere Port, and finally rural Berkshire. (Most of the rest of my grandfather’s family perished.) When World War Two broke out, however, the British government interned my grandfather. A citizen of an enemy nation, it didn’t seem to matter — at least at first — that he was an ethnically Jewish refugee from Hitler. He was released after about a year, but spent the first Christmas of the war — 1939 — in what my father says was a reasonably comfortable camp in Scotland. (He was not interned with actual prisoners of war.) Women and children were not interned; England’s policy was apparently more lenient than that shown by the Americans to the Japanese.

That Christmas, when my father was four and a half or so, my grandmother took him and his older sister on a long train trip up to the north to visit my grandfather in his camp. My father remembers very little of the visit, but he does remember that the assembled internees (all of whom were either German or Austrian men) sang some Christmas songs. The last one they sang was “O du Fröhliche”, and my father remembers that his mother and many other grownups wept. For the rest of his life, he was very fond of the carol.

I’ve sung “O du Fröhliche” all my life. And I’ve heard many recordings. But the version I love best is one I’ve never heard. I often like to imagine the one which was sung in December, 1939 by dozens of German-speaking men, ranging from adolescence to late middle age, internees in spartan barracks in Scotland. I imagine their mostly unprofessional voices, and their faces as they gazed at their families who had come to spend a few Christmas moments with them. I think of my grandfather, a then 37 year-old physician, himself descended from a line of Moravian rabbis, but now a loyal son of Holy Mother Church; I imagine his mixed feelings at being safe from Hitler only to be shut away from his family in this strange northern country. And I imagine my father, not quite five, missing his daddy as I, a man of 44, miss mine this Christmas.

It’s a fine carol.

Merry Christmas.

Father’s Day Poem: Justice’s “Men at Forty”

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I recite this very famous Donald Justice poem to practically anyone who will listen, and have posted it many times before. I’m in my mid-forties now, and really, I love this poem because what Justice describe is my life — I have closed softly the doors to so many rooms to which I will not return (would that more men would do so!) I see my father’s face when I look in the mirror, just as I still see the little boy whom I once was…. and there is a special call that seems to me to come with growing older, as if only now can I have the courage and the clarity to do things I simply couldn’t do before.

I’m thinking this father’s day of my Daddy and my daughter, and of all of my forefathers. I got up at 4:30 this morning, and before my run, went through the house and looked at the pictures of my two grandfathers (both dead for decades), and at the old photos of earlier generations of bewhiskered men. I carry their DNA in me, and I carry their hopes. That burden rests lightly, like a soft warm jacket rather than a crushing weight. It is good to be a Dad, good to be growing older, good to feel my fathers in my fathering.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Father’s Day note

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This Sunday will mark my third Father’s Day since Heloise was born, and my fifth without my own Dad.

There is so much I appreciate about having become a father in my forties. I admit I get sore more easily than a younger man, and I certainly wince sometimes when I climb up off the floor after a roll with my toddler. But the extraordinary reservoirs of patience I have simply didn’t exist when I was in my twenties. I’m able to be present for Heloise in a way that I could not have been ten or twenty years ago. Muscle tone fades and wrinkles come — but self-absorption also fades, and gentleness also comes.

(Parenthetically, I note that Eira and I are young parents compared to many of our friends. This is West Los Angeles; in Heloise’s pre-school class of eight kids, six have at least one parent older than I am — including a handful of biological moms. One of our good friends just had her first kid at 47, conceived and brought into this world the old-fashioned way.)

But I grieve that because I waited to become a papa, my daughter will never know her grandfathers, just as my wife and I never knew ours. And heading into this Father’s Day, I am reminded that I have so few regrets — and that one of the greatest is that my father is not here to see me be Heloise’s Daddy. I am comforted by the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, it is I who cannot see him watching over us.

I love being a papa, an abba, a daddy. I am so grateful for my daughter, for my wife, and for the many men and women who taught me how to be a loving parent — my own mom and dad chief among them. I am grateful for the young people whom I’ve mentored who’ve honored me by letting me serve as a father figure, and who’ve taught me that I can be loving, safe, and fully adult.

Happy Father’s Day.

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Now I know a little of what he knew: on fatherhood and leaving a crying child

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On Wednesday, our daughter Heloise started pre-school. She’ll be two on January 26, but the place we’ve wanted to send her enrolls little ones at 23 months. (And please, let’s not have this be a thread about the ideal age to start school. Like vaccinations or breast-feeding, it’s one of those issues likely to send privileged and anxious parents — I’m in that category myself, no doubt — into paroxysms. Plenty of other fora for that discussion.)

Her little school is five blocks from our home, and for the 2 year-olds, runs 8AM-12PM. I’ve been worried and excited for weeks, remembering my own mixed experiences of very early childhood education (I attended Humpty-Dumpty Nursery School in Santa Barbara from 1969-1972). And on Wednesday morning, I was the stereotypical wreck of a father as we took Heloise to school. I sniffled as we packed her little Dora the Explorer backpack and filled her little Minnie Mouse water bottle. I had a lump in my throat as we walked into the classroom to chat with the teachers. And though my gregarious little one immediately ran off to play and barely noticed our departure, I was in full-fledged tears by the time we made it back to the car without her. My dry-eyed wife patted my arm. “They told me all the Dads cry on the first day, honey. It’s okay.” Great. This is how the gender studies professor finds one way in which he’s an utterly stereotypical male.

This morning is Heloise’s third day at the school, and somewhat predictably, she burst into tears (something she hadn’t done the first two days) when we left. We’d been told that was normal too — the first day or two are wondrous and new, and it’s only when it starts to seem routine that the upsets come. I walked out of the classroom while my daughter collapsed into the endlessly comforting arms of Mrs. Shanaz. My own tears were welling up well before I made it to the front gate. One of my friends, a father with two boys slightly older than Heloise, was leaving at the same time. He read me in an instant, and said gently, “Man, I know that face. That’s the ‘I just dropped off my crying kid and I feel like the biggest jerk in the world for abandoning her’ face.” It made me laugh.

Why do men cry more than women at moments like this (if they do — the evidence is indeed anecdotal)? Perhaps it’s because of our fears of being the sort of father who abandons his children. Even if we ourselves were raised by loving and present dads, most of us are keenly aware of the reality that men famously leave their children. Most of us know what it’s like to have had a man we loved not be there when we needed him. And we very badly don’t want to be that sort of father to our own kids. So it’s devastating the first time we walk away from our weeping child, forcing ourselves not to respond to the cry of “Papa, Papa!” I wanted to scoop Heloise up, rush her home, promise her that she and her Daddy would never be separated. I know of course the damage that fathers can do to daughters by putting them on pedestals, or by being over-protective. But all of that knowledge has to confront the reality of my indescribably intense love for my child. Continue reading →

Parents, children, candor, and embarrassment: a note from a blogging father

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Several times in the past year, friends both in cyberspace and in “real” life have asked me the same question: Do I ever pause to consider the impact that this blog will have on Heloise, and any other children with whom we may be blessed, when they are older? Though it’s been a quarter century and more since I was a teen, I’ve been working around them continually almost since I stopped being one. And though there are some surprising exceptions, the general rule continues to be true: most teens, particularly at the onset of puberty, go through a stage where they are acutely embarrassed by their parents. Call it the “please drop me off a block from school” phenomenon — it’s a rare fourteen year-old who wants his or her friends to know much detail about his or her parents’ lives.

I write and speak openly about my past and my present. Compared to the degree of disclosure now common among teens on social networking sites (both in terms of words and images), what I’ve shared here is pretty tame. Of course, I write as an adult — and though I have plenty of youthful indiscretions in my past, I cannot claim the excuse of youth when it comes to explaining my reasons for choosing to be so candid about certain aspects of my life on this blog.

I cannot protect my daughter entirely from future embarrassment. No doubt there will come a time when how I dress, or walk, or even breathe will be a source of intense annoyance to her; I know adolescents well enough to know that that those moments of deep disgust with her parents (perhaps particularly her father) will be brief albeit (probably) intense. And no doubt she’ll wince when and if (realistically, just when) she reads what I’ve written and continue to write about my life and my past.

I remember vividly a conversation I had with my father not long after I had lost my virginity. I was seventeen, and he was fifty. He was in Carmel visiting us for the weekend (when my parents divorced, my mother took my brother and me to the Monterey Peninsula while Dad stayed in Santa Barbara, where he remained until his death.) Papa and I took one of our long walks and talked about many things, mostly about my new girlfriend. Dad remarked, as we strolled on San Carlos Avenue, that I was younger than he had been when he lost his virginity; “I was nineteen and in the RAF”, he said. It was the first time he had ever mentioned his own sexual life to me, and I felt that familiar mix of revulsion and curiosity so common to adolescents when a parent begins to offer what my cousin Dinah calls an “over-share”. He told me a little about the “girl from the village”, how they had met and so forth, and I listened with eagerness and trepidation, not knowing how much I wanted to know, afraid of hearing more than I wanted but fascinated by my father’s sudden burst of almost uncharacteristic candor.

We walked on for a few more moments in silence, and then Dad asked “Were the lights on or off?” I said something like “Jesus, Dad, what a question!” I told him that the lights had been off but the television had been on (videos on MTV). My father seemed puzzled and asserted that he preferred the lights on. And that was the last we said of the subject; indeed, in the remaining 21 years of his life, we never had a similar conversation again. But what I’ve noticed, as I play through my memories of my father in my head, is that the embarrassment I felt discussing sex with my father has faded completely. What remains is the recollection of a precious glimpse into his youth, of what life in England in the early 1950s might have been like for this bookish, gentle, funny young man doing his national service before heading off to university. What remains after the awkwardness is the memory of intergenerational intimacy, tinged as it was with the mutual incomprehension that comes with an age gap and a different cultural vocabulary.

To put it simply, what made me cringe when I was seventeen is now a fond and precious recollection. And it is in that light that I think about my daughter’s future reaction to my own writing, so full as it is of stories about my past. There will be a time, I am sure of it, when Heloise will wish very much that her father had not been quite so forthright, so inclined to what my generation often calls “TMI” (too much information). But I also suspect, based upon my memories of my father, that when she is older still, what once seemed so embarrassing will become considerably less so. Though our culture does do its damndest to turn adolescence into a quarter-century process (at least for men, and not an insignificant number of women), psychic puberty does end. And as far as I’m concerned, psychic puberty ends when we cease to blame our parents for our own adult mistakes, when we absolve them of responsibility for the outcome of our lives, and when we no longer cringe when we contemplate them in all their lovely, flawed, perfect humanness.

What humiliates and infuriates at fifteen becomes the happy recollection at forty; the story I shared above is hardly the only such instance. And it is a good reminder to parents and children alike about the need to balance both candor and respect for boundaries, and to forgive generously when that balance becomes skewed, as it inevitably will.

“She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness

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Little Heloise Cerys Raquel is indeed an enchanting baby, at least in the eyes of her doting parents. Now seven months old, her delightful personality emerges more and more each day — or so it seems. One of my favorite things about being on vacation this summer was the chance to be with her virtually every second; as I type this in my office, I note the hours (about five) until I will be home to her.

When we’re in public and Heloise is in my arms, we invariably get the same remarks: “She’s got you wrapped around her finger already, doesn’t she?” Or, “Watch out, when she gets older, you’ll have to watch the boys like a hawk!” My wife frequently gets told how much our daughter takes after her, but never receives anything like these comments. (When we were in Britain over the past few weeks, we got almost the same comments as we do here in the States.) And as a male feminist and father to a daughter, I find the subtext of remarks like these troubling, even as I honor the innocuousness of the intent behind them.

The bit about a daughter having her daddy “wrapped around her finger” repeats the old myth of male weakness. The myth of male weakness suggests that men are inherently vulnerable to temptation and manipulation. Men, the myth insists, have a much harder time practicing fidelity than do women, as men are biologically less capable of resisting sexual temptation. Heterosexual men are easily seduced by women, or so the trope goes, and thus women can use this weakness to flirt their way out of, say, traffic tickets or into jobs and marriages. The parental corollary, I’ve been realizing, is that daddies are far easier for daughters to manipulate than mommies. Fathers, the myth suggests, are powerless to say no to the pleas of their infant (or adolescent, or grown) female children.

Fathers, like other men, are supposed to be at least somewhat aware that they are being manipulated. I’ve gathered already that if I say “Yes, she’s already got me right where she wants me”, I’ll get indulgent smiles and teasing warnings about what she’s going to be like as a teen. And if I say — as I have said in one way or another several times — “I adore my girl, but she’s not going to get away with murder on my watch”, folks tend to shake their heads in real or mock pity at my stubborn refusal to acknowledge my own obvious frailty in the face of my daughter’s feminine wiles. A great deal of homosocial cameraderie is built and sustained on the theme of genuine or feigned exasperation at the supposed male inability to resist the charms of “hot chicks and pleading little girls.” Continue reading →

Home again, and giving thanks for Britain

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We’re home from a fortnight in the UK. My wife and I took Heloise and my wife’s mother with us on the trip; for the latter two, it was their first visit to Britain. (Our daughter was in my wife’s tummy when we were in Europe last summer, but no passport was required at that point.) The ratio of three adults to one infant is a good one for travel, and we’re blessed with a daughter who is an easy flyer. (I’m proud to say that the Cabin Service Director on our BA flight to Heathrow called her “the little angel” as we got ready to deplane.)

I took everyone to visit Kingston Lisle, the tiny Oxfordshire village in the Vail of the White Horse where my father grew up. We knelt at the graves of my paternal grandparents (noting that we need to hire someone to redo the headstones), stayed at a glorious hotel in nearby Great Milton, and enjoyed the Cotswolds before heading on to Carmarthenshire, Devon, and Cumbria. We took my English nephew to see his hometown side, Exeter City, play their first home match of the season. And we finished the trip in the glorious Lake District, which was the only place where we dealt with rain.

My father, born in Vienna and, from the age of three, raised as a war refugee in England, had four children. My younger brother decided years ago that he felt more at home in Britain than in America; he and his family make their home in Exeter, where my brother is now associate professor of English. My two nephews and my niece are growing up with Devonian accents; they are culturally English. My sister Elizabeth lived and worked in Britain for nearly a decade before returning home two years ago; my youngest sister and I have never lived for any great length of time in the UK, but visit regularly. All four of us have two passports; each of us feels a different degree of connection to that “green and pleasant land.”

My love for Britain isn’t rooted in ethnic heritage; on my mother’s side, I’ve got some ancestors from that sceptered isle, but far more from the continent. The love I have is rooted in many things, but perhaps most plainly in my family’s history. My paternal grandmother, Elisabeth von Schuh, was born in Vienna to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father; her husband, Georg Schwitzer (the spelling would later be changed) was born Jewish but converted to Catholicism when he married. My father was uncircumcised and baptized, but was ethnically 3/4ths Jewish; that latter fact would have meant a death sentence for him and the rest of the family following Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938. My grandfather, a gentle physician, wasn’t eager to leave; like many, he thought things wouldn’t “get that bad” for Viennese Jews (who were used to anti-Semitism as a political prop.) My late grandmother knew better, and she explored every avenue she could to get the family out.

It was Great Britain that welcomed in my father’s family. Not the USA (my grandmother tried that option). Not France (lucky, too, given what would happen to French Jews during the war.) The only door that opened was for Britain, which was willing to take certain Jewish professionals, especially doctors. The family escaped just before the outbreak of World War Two, and after a brief period in London, settled in what was then Berkshire and is now Oxfordshire, in a place called Fawler Manor just outside of Kingston Lisle. Though my grandfather was briefly interned as an enemy alien, he was eventually released and allowed to practice medicine. While my grandmother and her children stayed in the south, he went to work as the staff doctor at the refinery in Ellesmere Port, Lancashire — where he would die in a car accident in 1947.

It was the English who cared for my family before, during, and after the Second World War. My father left England at 24 to go to graduate school at Berkeley, but England never left him. The fundamental decency of that culture stayed with him all his life. He lived 47 years in the USA, but never got an American passport — he only wanted one citizenship, that of the one country that had opened its door and saved his family from the worst mass murder in human history. His California-born children all got their UK passports as soon as they could, and we all use them with varying frequency; we honor our father and we honor the land that became his home.

It was the British (the Scots are as British as any) who gave the Lockerbie bomber his compassionate release this week. Whether it was deserved in this case is debatable, but it is worth noting that compassionate release for the terminally ill is far more common in the United Kingdom than in the States (or anywhere else I know of). While the American attitude tends to be “let the man rot”, or more commonly, “fry his ass”, the attitude of at least a plurality of Britons is far more humane. And I see a direct link between the compassionate release of Abdelbaset al Mograhi this week and the compassionate welcome my father’s family received nearly seven decades ago. My family were escapees from mass murder rather than agents thereof, but the decency that undergirds the very existence of the concept of compassionate release was the same impulse that saved my father’s life.

Could I live in Britain? Perhaps. Not in London, which I find delightful but exhausting. To quote Cerys Matthews, the sublime and lovely Welsh pop star for whom my daughter is only partly named, “I come alive/outside the M25″ (the ring road around the capital.) I love the northeast, particularly Durham and Northumbria, but my brother’s location in the southwest makes a good case for a second home there. But perhaps, like my Dad, I am destined to spend the majority of my life in the once Golden State, making regular visits to somewhere greener, somewhere wetter, somewhere somehow just a bit kinder.

In any case, it’s good to be back. More blogging to come soon.

Feminism, fatherhood, and enduring male privilege

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This post by Jessica at Feministing, responding to this risible Neil Lyndon piece in the Daily Mail has revived many of the familiar arguments about feminism, the men’s rights movement, and gender essentialism. It’s all part of a response to the latest flurry of op-ed pieces (far too numerous to which to link) suggesting that feminism has proved a failure, largely because so many women today (especially middle-class American and European women, presumably those most likely to have benefitted from the movement) report being exhausted, overworked, anxious and, well, unhappy.

If you follow the feminist blogosphere, this topic has been debated over and over again in one form or another since the earliest BBS discussions of the mid-1990s. I’m not interested in rehashing the arguments, though the latest round of anti-feminist bromides seem unusually poorly constructed. Most are guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: if women are anxious or frustrated or unhappy after the coming of the first three waves of feminism, then they are anxious and unhappy because of the first three waves of feminism. One might as well make the same argument about the arrival of the cell phone, electrolysis, or the designated hitter rule. Repeat after me, class: correlation is not causation.

What made me want to write today was the comment thread below the Feministing piece, a thread in which a number of classic MRA (men’s rights activist) arguments were raised. The basic thesis: feminism has created a world hostile to men (at least in the industrialized West). Feminists have co-opted judicial, political, and educational institutions in order to advance what the MRAs call a “victim ideology”. Men and boys are alternately harangued and ignored, viewed by the feminist elite as either dim-witted oafs or dangerously calculating and predatory. Men are dying earlier and committing suicide more frequently because of their alienation from these woman-centered institutions, say the MRAs; the legions of young men hooked on pot or porn or Playstation (or all three) are the inevitable result of their cultural and social emasculation at the hands of a shrill and craven matriarchy. Or so say the MRAs.

So let me say this in defense of feminism, not only from the perspective of someone who makes his living in no small part by teaching it, but from the perspective of a new father: my relationship with my infant daughter is, in a very real way, made possible by the critical work feminists did to reframe traditional gender roles. It is thanks to the gains of the feminist movement that I was encouraged and expected to go through every aspect of the pregnancy and birthing process with my wife. It is thanks to the cultural shift initiatied by feminists and male allies that I was able to take the time away from work to be there for my wife (a right alas not yet universal). It is thanks to the feminist movement that a generation of committed and dedicated fathers has emerged, fathers who actively practice co-parenting with the mothers of their children. Though men neither get pregnant nor breastfeed, these biological inadequacies are no impediment to developing the capacity to nurture, something I am living out as best I can every day. Continue reading →

Assorted daddy thoughts

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My wife, daughter, mother-in-law and I spent a very happy weekend in New York. We saw family and friends and kept ourselves very busy. I didn’t start visiting Manhattan regularly until a decade or so ago — and now, increasingly, I see it as somewhere I could live. (My dear wife would embrace that idea very eagerly.) The pace at which things happen is indeed satisfactory, and the fear of boredom is allayed in so many countless ways by that marvelous city.

It was the baby’s first long plane ride, and if I do say so myself she and her carers acquitted themselves splendidly. I now consider myself an old hand at wrangling strollers down jet ways and changing diapers in the lavatory in the midst of not-inconsiderable turbulence. My wife and I arranged our meals to be served separately, so that one could hold Heloise while the other ate. And oh, the blessing of a happy baby whose delicate ears are untroubled by landings and takeoffs. Heloise barely cried at all, and spent most of her waking time charming the FAs and her fellow passengers. (We are lucky parents, we know.)

I’ve got a post or two about feminist co-parenting (from the limited perspective, of course, of a first-time papa to a not-quite five-month old) in the hopper. For now, let me say simply how much I love being a father. There is nothing singular about this experience I’m having; many of my readers have had it or are having it, some many times over. But my goodness, what an extraordinary delight this girl is! And how extraordinary too to discover in myself reservoirs of patience and energy that I had no idea existed, reservoirs that might have gone untapped had my wife and I not had this little girl. Continue reading →