Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family by Jeremy Adam Smith

Author:Jeremy Adam Smith [Jeremy Adam Smith]
Language: rus
Format: epub
Tags: aVe4EvA
ISBN: 0807021202
Publisher: Beacon Broadside Press
Published: 2009-02-25T21:00:00+00:00

7

The Astonishing Science of Fatherhood, or Three More Myths about Male Caregiving

Jackie Adams and Jessica Mass met ten years ago. “I think we were destined to be parents,” says Jackie. “We would stay home, we would watch movies, then we moved in together. It was always about creating this home. We always talked about having a kid.”

It didn’t take long for Jackie and Jessica to locate a sperm donor or for Jackie to get pregnant. After a twenty-eight-hour labor, Ezra (“the only name we could agree on”) was born. Both parents are women and thus, some might think, both are biologically programmed for motherhood and intrinsically predisposed to understand each other’s experiences. But though Jessica had read dozens of books on birth, nothing prepared her for the reality of the labor —or the demands her new role as breadwinning, nonbiological parent placed on her.

“I remember during the labor feeling really useless,” she says. “After we got home, we had this situation where she was in bed with him and I was on the couch. I was like, ‘Are you OK, can I get you anything?’ That surprised me. Because I think culturally we’re trained to assume that that’s what the father does. In the movies, the mother does stuff and the father runs around looking silly and saying, ‘Are you OK?’

“I did feel silly,” continues Jessica, “but I definitely didn’t feel like a father, because I’d grown up learning to be a mother. I think anyone who gives birth has this instinctual knowledge of what that baby needs, but I didn’t know how to make myself a part of the nourishing of this little person.”

Gopal Dayaneni knows exactly what Jessica is talking about. Gopal, a former preschool teacher and stay-at-home father of two kids, had always wanted to be a parent. “I entered into parenting with way more confidence than was appropriate,” says Gopal. “Because I’m a preschool teacher, people think I’m an expert with kids; they assume I must be a great parent. And I just assumed that I knew what I was doing.” It turned out that he was wrong. Being a parent and being a teacher, he discovered, “are two fundamentally different things.” He enjoyed a special, but highly complex, connection to his children—and that connection raised basic questions about his identity.

“The first time we gave her a bottle, that was something,” he recalls of his daughter Ila. “She was six or seven weeks old. I sat down with her in a rocking chair, and I gave her the bottle. She totally took the bottle, right up against my body, comfortable and warm. She looked up at me and I was so taken with her. And it occurred to me that my entire life, I didn’t want to be a father. I actually wanted to be a mother, and I would never have that. I started crying. I was happy, but I wanted that relationship with my child that I will never have.”

This story has a punch line: “After that, she never took a bottle again,” says Gopal.

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