Fatherhood Can be a Job- Paul Nathanson

Last Fathers' Day, U.S. President Barack Obama, so eloquent on most occasions, chose not to celebrate good fathers but to rant about "deadbeat dads." David Warren hasn't repeated that mistake. His Saturday column, "In praise of patriarchs" is excellent (and not only because of his reference to the books that I have written with Katherine Young). In the hope his article will jump-start a public discussion of fatherhood, I offer the following comments.

My father, who died two years ago, had a difficult but close and even intense relationship with me. From my perspective as a boy and young man, he seemed overly judgmental. I grew up thinking that I could never make the grade, never be good enough to satisfy his lofty expectations. And his standard for honourable manhood, which he applied to himself no less than to me, did seem unattainable. Worse, it seemed to me, his notion of manhood focused heavily on duty and sacrifice -- not things that most people, certainly not children, are eager to embrace. Worse still, perhaps, he expected me to learn skills that didn't interest me.

Dad played with me and took me to museums, sure, but he also tried to help me with my arithmetic homework -- and was visibly exasperated, night after night, by my inability to understand what he considered common sense.

To be blunt, I usually preferred my mother, who gave me uncomplicated and unconditional love. Dad confessed, many years later, that I had disappointed him at first. And I can see why.

I was an outsider for several reasons in childhood. Apart from anything else, I was both unwilling and unable to absorb prevalent but superficial (and ultimately both destructive and self-destructive) notions of masculinity. I had to invent myself, therefore, and I'm proud of my ability to do so. But it was Dad who first taught me to be independent -- that is, as I eventually understood, to think for myself but within a larger moral context. He taught me to become more fully human, in other words, not to embrace either conformity or "autonomy" (an overused and misused word these days).

Dad lived long enough to see me take my place in the world. I knew that he respected me as a scholar. One day, in the middle of some argument, he suddenly turned to me and said, "Paul, you're a learned man." Okay, I was much too old by then for those words to give me a sense of self-confidence. But we both realized immediately that this was a moment of profound fulfillment; a father had symbolically conferred manhood on his son. I never did learn arithmetic, but I had made him proud of me in other ways. This was my secular bar mitzvah.

Dad still blamed himself, however, for not pushing me hard enough to become more financially secure. Fortunately, we had time to talk about that. Having spent many years doing research in the humanities on manhood (including fatherhood), I told him that he had done exactly what every father needs to do. I didn't have to add that he had done so not by consciously adopting the approach of this or that expert but by subconsciously absorbing the legacy of human experience after countless generations.