A brief history of the (over)involved father

There was, at the time, the mid-'80s, a kind of cultural surround helping me along (one might even say pushing me along) in this direction. Every Sunday I looked forward to reading the now-defunct "About Men" column in the New York Times Magazine, in which, week after week, like reciters at an A.A. meeting, one sensitive-guy writer after another would stand up and profess to having lopped off whatever offending organ had stood in the way of his ascension to Better Fatherhood, Better Husbandhood, Better Manhood. (Full disclosure: I wrote one of those columns myself.) The one I remember best was Carey Winfrey's "Taming Ambition," about losing the old fire in the belly after the birth of twins. Everywhere I turned then, it seemed someone was telling me that my less ambitious, more lunchbox-conscious life was the new male life of my times.

But it really wasn't until I saw "Kramer vs. Kramer" that it all came together for me. I saw the movie on video, or maybe on network TV, and this was years after its first release. But life -- at least, my life -- had caught up with "Kramer vs. Kramer." I remember being struck by one scene in particular. It is the one in which Dustin Hoffman, playing Ted Kramer, the hustling ad executive turned full-time dad, is sitting in Central Park, distractedly talking to a mother while his son plays on the Jungle Gym nearby. Suddenly, there's one of those eerie silences in which you know something has gone wrong, followed by a child's wail. Dustin turns to look: his little boy has fallen, his little boy is wounded. He picks the child up and begins running. No empty cabs are to be found on the Upper East Side. He doesn't think to call for an ambulance. He simply runs, presumably toward a hospital, embracing the hurt child, a look on his face of total absorption in the role. Whatever he has been before, he has whittled himself down now to one pure thing: a father.

For Ted Kramer, it pretty much ends there: work will never again have the same meaning for him. He will do it, but only for the money, only so that he can provide for his son. The world of hustle, of power lunches, of office flirtations, all those lubricants of his previously exciting, superficial existence has been seen through. So has ambition itself. He has ascended to a kind of saintliness, and that is where he will stay.

It ought to have settled things for me as well. The "About Men" column, "Kramer vs. Kramer," and all those sons and daughters of it that filled my Saturday afternoons at the movies in the years to come  "Mr. Mom," "Mrs. Doubtfire," "Baby Boom," "Parenthood," "Hook" -- they all cohered around a central premise: we (men) were better off when we let go of hustle and allowed our inner nurturer out. I ought to have relaxed and just accepted this. My daughter, after all, was apparently thriving. My wife had gone back to school to become a labor and delivery nurse, and I had landed a nice, soft job teaching at a college. But a part of me couldn't accept this family-centric drift as the inevitable direction life had to take. I didn't know how to name this other part of me, but it bothered me the way grit bothers you when it gathers in the crotch of your bathing suit: only mildly annoying, perhaps removable, but still something to make you twitch. That was what I did for a couple of years after seeing "Kramer vs. Kramer," those years when I was supposedly lapsing into acceptance of this new role: I twitched, without knowing why.

It's doubly appropriate that the answer (if that was what it was) came to me while watching another movie. This time it was a movie I didn't really have to watch, but only to glimpse briefly, on the TV screen of a beach house in Ocean City, Md. We were there with friends, and my daughter, then about 6 or 7, had turned on the TV, midday. We discovered her watching, rapt, an old movie I recognized immediately. It was "40 Pounds of Trouble," a largely forgettable early '60s concoction in which Tony Curtis plays a Las Vegas casino owner, a man about town who is suddenly handed responsibility for a little girl. There is no point in glossing the plot of "40 Pounds of Trouble" except to say that Tony Curtis does not accept this responsibility as Ted Kramer does, by jettisoning everything about his life that made it exciting and fun. Instead, he takes the little girl along. There he was, on that screen, Tony Curtis in all his glory -- sharkskin suit, porkpie hat, shiny sports car -- living the vivid life of an American bachelor, circa 1963. And the little girl beside him in the red sports car -- did she look deprived because Tony hadn't cast all his selfish pursuits aside in order to settle down and read to her about Mr. Pumblechoke? Did she look as though what she wanted above all things was to be clasped to his bosom while he ran through the streets of the Upper East Side, a Saint of Fatherly Protection? Hell no. The little girl was having a ball.

Next Page: I saw the pain I carried at the thought of the life I had abandoned: The life of fun and excitement

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