A brief history of the (over)involved father

Seven years after our first daughter was born, my wife and I found ourselves pregnant with a second. Just as she was about to be born, I was invited to premiere my new play at a prestigious venue that would require me to be away from home for a month. Perish the thought! the more enlightened of our friends all shouted. (The women, mostly; the men tended to keep silent, while looking at me out of the corners of their eyes with a certain envy.) Of course I went. I committed the cardinal sin of missing my new daughter's sixth through tenth weeks on this earth. Further, I did it pretty much without guilt.

It has been, in fact, a different experience with this second child, one who came into existence just as I had determined to take a fresh look at my old, banked ambition. I vowed from the beginning that I would bring her up less guiltily, less voraciously, that I would deliberately miss some of her events, that I would try consciously (at least some of the time) to put Career ahead of Presence. In the past several years, there have indeed been moments when I catch sight of myself in the mirror and can almost see, like the covered page of a palimpsest, the old image -- the man in the raincoat -- looking back at me.

Almost. Mostly what I see in the mirror is a man on whom fatherhood and domestic life have exerted undeniable claims. Yes, I drove this new baby back and forth to rehearsals of a play of mine in New Haven, holding her in the famous crotch-hold while delivering direction to the actors. And yes, ten years later, at another of my plays, I got the tech crew to give her rides on the moving sets, and as I watched her, I could almost convince myself that I was as footloose a careerist as Tony Curtis in "40 Pounds of Trouble." But mostly, what I have to admit is that, having once given myself over to fatherhood as I did, it requires an extreme effort to boost career up to something like an equal footing. In spite of all my "seeing through" what the culture of the '80s and '90s tried to do to us as parents, I have to own up to the fact that those movies were on to something. Give yourself over to a child, and you are more or less spoiled for overweaning ambition.

The remarkable thing about all this is how little it has manifested itself in a struggle between me and my wife. There have been fights, to be sure, but she's also been remarkably generous, and largely unburdened by the conflicts between career and home life that drive me. (It might also help that when I am home, which is most of the time, I am so overbearingly overinvolved with domestic detail that she could well be relieved when I divert a little energy to career.) The battle has come to seem not a marital one but a struggle between competing ideologies I hold within myself: the image of men I grew up with, and could not quite let go of, and the emotional discoveries I made on those long afternoons with my first daughter in the park, which pointed to another way of being. Perhaps the best you can ever expect from a battle between internal contradictions is a truce. As my younger daughter turns 15, and wriggles out of my grasp, the pain I feel at this loss makes it clear that I have used my identification with Homo '50s not as a clear directive, but as a kind of guardianship against excess, a handhold to keep me from slipping entirely into what remains a much-desired embrace.

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