A brief history of the (over)involved father

Two things happened to me, simultaneously, as I focused for five or ten minutes on that movie. The first was that I recognized how much inadmissible pain I carried around at the thought of the life I had abandoned: the life of fun and excitement, the life that I once thought had been my natural inheritance as a man. (Whether he is represented by Tony Curtis or the man in the raincoat, he is the same man: call him -- though, admittedly, it doesn't sound quite right -- Homo '50s). Much as the culture had gone to work debunking that man's life, much as the ascension of women as full partners had utterly changed the way most people would regard Homo '50s, I found I couldn't dismiss him, not all the way. His power was still there to haunt me, in the movies, even the silly movies, that stood as testaments to a way men had once believed it was right to live.

The other part of my response had to do with my daughter's reaction, or with what I read into my daughter's reaction. She looked -- well, is "envious" the proper word? Had she, too, been deprived of something in having a father who'd signed on to the '80s notion of fatherhood? There was no way I could know these things, of course, but it began, at the very least, a line of questioning. Hadn't I grown up under the sway of movies like "40 Pounds of Trouble," and hadn't they created in me a fierce desire to become an adult?

What were the images of "Hook" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" -- those adulthood-hating stories we were now telling our children -- doing to my daughter's sense of what was to come? In those movies, whether the parental figure is Robin Williams as the hustling businessman of "Hook" or Michelle Pfeiffer as his female counterpart in "One Fine Day," the main narrative thrust has to do with getting this worker drone to face the boss, jettison work, and sacrifice the career so that he or she can make it to the place where we all truly belong -- on the sidelines of the soccer game!

It may seem silly, or at least wildly eccentric, to have been this affected by watching ten minutes of an old movie. Nonetheless, it began something for me. I started watching more carefully the movies of the '50s and '60s, comparing the culture of those years to the one in which my daughter and I were living. And as a result, I found myself asking more and more questions about the '90s cult of Presence.

Where did it come from, exactly, this new insistence that parents be always present at their children's sporting events, and even at the most minor of school events? '50s children like me had seemed to do fine spending their childhood in roles largely subservient to their parents', unwatched much of the time at our baseball games and school activities, at least not watched with the anxiety with which today's parents watch. As always, the movies offered helpful clues as to what might be going on: at a certain point in the movie "Multiplicity," the chronically overworked Michael Keaton comes home, late at night, to watch a video of his child's grammar school play, one that work has forced him to miss. So dreadful does the play seem that you find yourself thinking he must be secretly glad he missed it, until you look at the screen and see Michael Keaton weeping uncontrollably. It's a deeply unbelievable moment, but it says a great deal about the ways in which, between 1979, when "Kramer vs. Kramer" opened, and 1996, when "Multiplicity" made its bow, a generation of parents enshrined the notion of itself as childhood-worshipers, unforgivable unless we're there, a notion deeply at odds with the experience many of us had as children. No one had bought into this notion more than I had. But I became determined, once I'd seen through it, to sneak away from my identification with Ted Kramer, and to move ever more consciously back toward an earlier version of myself.

Next Page: Give yourself over to a child, and you are more or less spoiled for overweaning ambition

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