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| The Priceless Purpose Of Fatherhood |
Category Two is Entertainer Dad, who is good at amusing the kids but useless at everything else. Does not help around the house, avoids having to discipline anyone, but great fun at parties, to which he wears a revolving bow-tie. Most mothers want Entertainer Dad killed, and may hire someone to do it.
Then we have Useful Dad, who does his bit domestically and regularly looks after the kids, but always defers to the authority of his partner. He sees himself as helping her out, rather than taking responsibility for things himself. The Equal Opportunities Commission nearly approves of Useful Dad, but not quite.
Finally, there is Fully Involved Dad, who is 'equally involved in running the home and family' says the report. He does more than his fair share of everything, can cook to cordon bleu standard and is dynamite in the sack, with the fingers of a concert pianist, a tongue that could lift weights and the lung control of an Olympic swimmer. The EOC likes Fully Involved Dad a lot. The rest of us are going round to his house now to kick him.
What a choice! Any father reading this rubbish would become profoundly depressed, although in reality most of us combine all these stereotypes in various proportions. We are all probably a combination of Entertainer and Useful, and little though we may wish to admit it, have a smidgen of Fully Involved too. We are Slightly Fully Involved. I suspect you have to be a bit touchy-feely if you are going to be any good at fathering. Most of us probably are, naturally and spontaneously, without thinking about it. We are all NEW Men now, after a fashion.
YOU STILL HAVEN'T ANSWERED MY QUESTION
Yes, impressive, isn't it? But it isn't an easy one to answer. We on see clearly what the mother is for. She is likely to be what social workers call 'the primary carer'. She has these breasts which solve 90 per cent of known infancy problems. She seems to have nurturing instincts that most men, quite simply, lack. We have to learn everything, and however hard we try we never seem to be quite there. This can be hugely frustrating.
As men we are used to being at the centre of everything, so to be shoved out here on the margins, watching our child's earliest weeks and months at one remove, can be dispiriting, not to mention demotivating. More often that not, the arrival of a child drastically reduces family income, so the father finds himself working harder to make up the difference. Gravity weakens the further you are away from an object. And as the father drifts off, in some cases never to be seen again, the newly single mother says, 'What use are fathers anyway?'
I am not going to demonise single mothers. Frightened and angry people do this already in certain newspapers. My mother was a single mother for a while; my girlfriend's mother was a single mother for rather longer. They are both splendid and impressive people, for whom life has at times been a struggle. They would rather not have been single mothers - not because society might disapprove (who cares about that?), but because bringing us and our siblings up was grindingly hard work. As if it's not tough enough for two parents. But this is my point: if the father has any function at all, it is to Be There. Looking after a baby's grindingly hard work, and it helps if there is more than one person around to do it. Simply by taking part do you justify your existence. To find out more, you can check out The Priceless Purpose Of Fatherhood.