A brief history of the (over)involved father

Do you have to go to every Little League game to be a good dad? An excerpt from "The Bastard on the Couch."

By Anthony Giardina

Apr 29, 2004 | Sometimes it's possible to locate the exact moment when your life changed. In my case, though, it's not so much the moment of change that remains vivid for me; it is the moment of coalescence, the moment when changes that had already taken place began, finally, to make sense. Given how important the movies have always been to me, it seems appropriate that this epiphany hit me while I was watching a movie.

The movie in question was "Kramer vs. Kramer." It had opened in December 1979, roughly coincidental with the birth of my first daughter. But I didn't see it at that time; I was too busy. I was living then the life I had always wanted to live: in a too-small apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, writing plays that were getting produced off-off-Broadway, halfway through a first novel. Oh, did I mention that I had a wife? Mentioning her this late in the game is indicative, I suppose, of how I thought of my life then: achievement was important, with everything else taking a distant second place. Relationships, the birth of children, these were items in the Bildungsroman, but in no way central. If I could be said to contour my life in those days around any image, I think it would be one I grew up with, in the '50s and '60s. It was the image affixed to all those paperback covers I studied in drugstores and supermarket racks, the one featuring a guy with a raincoat slung over his shoulder, a guy on the verge of needing a haircut, with a quizzical, slightly weary, but (don't be fooled) absolutely thrilled look about him. Surrounding this central image were the disembodied heads of women: they were all to somehow feed into this man's story, but the message of the image, and the arrangement of the image, was that he was not to lose any vital part of himself to them. At the end, he was to walk off alone.

In the first two or three years after my daughter was born, I went on trying to live that life, with the raincoat thrown over my shoulder and the weary, sexy, thrilled expression. I went on writing plays and seeing them produced and writing that first novel and seeing it published, and on weekends joining the other parents in Riverside Park, pushing my daughter on the swings and enduring the jostling, competitive chatter of the other Upper West Side parents, until one day I realized I had come to the end of things, or at least to the end of a chapter. It announced itself in nothing very dramatic. One afternoon, after hoisting our daughter's stroller up the stairs of our walkup and entering the dim light of our cramped quarters, I just turned to my wife and said, without knowing I was going to say it, "Let's move."

I didn't mean "to another apartment" or to a suburb. I meant, let's move. To western Massachusetts, in our case, and, given the nature of our marriage then, my wife didn't resist. She was looking to break out of her job as the dessert chef at an insane SoHo restaurant, and the notion of searching for a new career in a more relaxed atmosphere appealed to her. The truth is that I had always been the one to call the shots, the one who cared more about his career, and she was willing to go where I wanted to go. But almost immediately, it seemed, life began to change in ways I'd been unprepared for. My wife took on an interim baking job that required her to work more, not less, than she had in New York, and me, well, all those big thoughts about "career" seemed to get subsumed into a different life, one I hadn't been fully conscious that I was choosing. All I knew was that in place of meetings in theaters and editors' offices, I found myself spending a lot of time in the park, reading to my daughter about a man named Mr. Pumblechoke, and from a book about a mysterious cranberry recipe, a salty sea captain, and a foiled robbery. Our daughter was in day care then, but hell, I was a writer, I could take afternoons off (and it would save us money as well), so I picked her up midway through the day. I gained a new conception of time in that first year: how long afternoons with a child can be. Life seemed to have gone from a tightly shaped thing to something amorphous: sleep, day care, children's books, doctors' visits, puppet shows, library hours. And, oh yes, writing. But writing -- the whole way I thought about it, at least -- began to take on a different weight than it had in the city. In Manhattan, I had thought of children as delightful appendages to the serious business of life: strap them on your back and take them where you need to go. That was where my daughter was -- on my back -- the day I delivered the revised manuscript of my novel to my editor, and one of my all-time favorite moments was standing outside the old Manhattan Theater Club on East 73rd Street while a play of mine was going on inside. It was May, but one of the play's effects had the actors entering the theater from out of a snowstorm. We stood on the street and watched the techie working the snow machine, to my little girl's 2-year-old delight. But now such moments were gone. When a play of mine was done (increasingly rarely) it was done long-distance. Mostly, I was in the park, strapped on the back of my daughter's life: she was taking me where she wanted to go.

It's tempting to say that childhood itself changed when we moved out of the city. But it wouldn't be true. It was me who had changed. I was undergoing what I imagine a lot of men undergo in their mid-30s, particularly those with young kids: that slight dampening of energy, that awareness that the testosterone-fueled will to dominance has given way to a new set of questions: does my life really have to go the way I believed it must in my 20s? The vexing part was, though I can phrase these questions now, I couldn't then. Or maybe I just didn't want to admit to what was happening to me. When my daughter turned 5 and started kindergarten, there was a particular lunchbox she insisted she had to have, and I remember now the intensity of the search for that lunchbox, which was, of course, out of stock everywhere. We drove far afield, in the beautiful late-summer dusk, to Ames and Caldor and Kmart, each of them a tall, beckoning, neon-lit tree on the branches of which the Holy Grail of that phantom lunchbox might be found hanging. Though I felt it intensely, it was still not possible for me to admit consciously that this quest had become more important to me than the quest to complete my troublesome second novel.

Next Page: Everywhere I turned it seemed someone was telling me that my lunchbox-conscious life was the new male life

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