Category: Single parent

She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

Feeding the Hungry

My daughter has now graduated High School and will be going to college in the fall. Over the summer, she will be working with AmeriCorp and the United Way to connect children who are food-insecure to Free Summer Meals at hundreds of sites all over the county. This morning, she exclaimed with delight “It’s real food! Like fresh vegetables, produce, pita pockets with real cheese. Its healthy food! Delicious food!” She is so proud to be part of a first-class effort. Although in many typical ways a cynical, know-it-all teenager, her love for children and compassion for people in need comes through. I am so happy that she found this path.

Shortly after I started this particular blog in 2010, I wrote the following Devotion for a well-known charity newsletter:

“And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” — Phil 1:9-11

It seems a paradox to be both abounding with love and highly discerning.  Knowledge and discernment can make it easier for us to identify all that is flawed and not excellent about the world.  So Paul challenges us to sharply hone our senses, both our moral and physical senses, and not simply to condemn what is wanting, but to do the more difficult work of approving what is excellent.

Maybe its not accurate to say that Paul challenges us.  He prays that we do not become cynical and distrustful of loving, believing it to be naive. And for certain, it would be naive not to know that we live in a world where humanity is fallen, broken, and sinful. But it also takes more knowledge and discernment to understand that the Good News that Jesus Christ is the light that shines in the darkness and that we should seek him in the world, in others, and in ourselves. Paul’s prayer in Philippians 1 is for all of Christ’s disciples: those who teach, those who care, those who share and spread Jesus’ love. Paul’s prayer is also for those who are in need of abounding love: the children and family who need our help, but who also need to know that God’s love is within them, that it is excellent, and that through Jesus Christ it will grow more and more until the love is abounding.

Prayer:

Dear God,

Your excellence and the fruits of righteousness are the greatest knowledge. I love them, want to share them, and want to help others to discover them. Grant me the strength to do your work, the wisdom to do it well, the Joy to do it with love, and the faith to know that your Will shall be done. Amen.

For years, I would do some sort of variant on this prayer before we broke bread as a family. At some point, however, I stopped encouraging the kids to say grace at dinner. I became cynical, exhausted, and despairing. My children are skeptical — like true scientists. They are also full of hope and joy — like true Christians.

Here is the experience of Grace: Listening to my daughter discern with a scientific eye and scholarly mind that there are structural inequities and injustices which create a prosperous community that nevertheless has thousands of hungry children, and in the next breath express abounding love for the bringing good food to children who need it. It does not matter that I got discouraged and wandered away from a church home and stopped praying. It does not matter that I am tired. Somehow, the message got through to my kids and today my daughter is in the world doing good works. God’s Will be done. Amen.

The best a man can get

Like a lot of men, I have an opinion about how men ought to be and about being told that men are not how they ought to be.

I can’t not do my throat-clearing preamble to all this, so I will: 

I have encountered discrimination as a single Dad. The gist of the discrimination is that there is something inherently wrong about me being the parent who raised my children. By “wrong” I mean that there is a presumption that I am both inherently defective and inferior to the birth mother. By “wrong” I also mean that this is a default suspicion, the stink eye that one gets when they are assumed to be always guilty of something.

In this case, the hermeneutic of suspicion attaches to the man without a woman trying to be a single parent.

At times, I have been asked if I am a widower. That seems to be the easiest to believe explanation. It was, after the story, of a man named Brady, who was bringing up three very lonely boys. They were four men, living altogether, but without a mother to fill the inherent inadequacy of Mr. Brady, they were all alone.

People with even less self-awareness will sometimes asked if the mother is incarcerated, because that has tremendous explanatory power to them. I wonder if that is their way of saying that they think the birth mother ought to be incarcerated for the crime of leaving a child with someone as dangerous as a single Dad.

For the last few years, I have been engaged to a wonderful woman. Her existence makes me somewhat legitimate. When she is present, people look past me and look to her.

Only once people get to know actual facts and then get over their biases do some begrudgingly recognize that maybe it is possible for me to be the appropriate person to be the parent.

However, my observation and first-hand experience convinces me that most people are never truly convinced that a father can ever be as satisfactory as a mothers.

The family law system reflects this prejudice. The disparity between custodial mothers and custodial fathers is far beyond the wage gap, and the disparity between mothers who pay child support and fathers who pay child support is even greater. See U.S census data https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/P60-255.pdf

But of course, any man who points out that men face discrimination, will look like a sexists asshole to point. To wit: In another context when I pointed this out, somebody shouted “KARMA!” at me.

Haters. Bless their soul.

So… What is it about men that evokes disdain and even anger at the notion that making progress the notion of sex and gender means vilifying and destroying men?

My hypothesis:

The way “Toxic Masculinity” has played out during this moment in our American culture:

  • “Toxic masculinity” describes a breadth of behaviors that are posited as having the qualities of being simultaneously accepted and undesirable.
  • Frequently, the presentation of heterosexual men in mass culture is that all men exhibit the entire catalog of these behaviors all the time. To avoid seeming racist, mass culture also seems to assume that men of color do not fully count. This assumption happens in part because mass culture is actually racist despite the attempted appearance and considers all people of color to be less than. And in part it happens because mass culture is profoundly lacking in humility or self-awareness, so the cognitive dissonance doesn’t occur. (I’m starting to digress into critical race theory instead of gender studies; one graduate school culture war a time. )
  • To drive home the point, YouTube and twitter and 4chan and other places bring out white men, who obligingly put on their ugliest face and tone and confirm all the biases by saying some flavor of “Fuck you!”

This brings me to the Gillette commercial.

And one cue, there is a backlash against it by men who confirm the message of the commercial that all men are assholes, by acting exactly like the total assholes in the commercial.

One would not think it needs to be deconstructed, but here we are:

  • In general, boys get messages from their parents and from culture about how to be men. Therefore, it is possible for a brand that has for decades marketed itself as a cultural reference for masculinity to weigh in on the messages that both fathers and the brand itself ought to be giving to boys about masculinity. These aspects of the commercial work well both as commercial and as social commentary.
  • This message could have been presented in a manner that distinguishes the aspirational message from a gross stereotype that reinforces existing biases. But it probably wouldn’t have worked well as a commercial if it had done so.
  • There are aspects of this commercial that are cringeworthy in their self-congratulatory “wokeness.” In particular, the man crossing the street with his son to stop bullies chasing a kid is very similar in form, content, and structure to Kylie Jenner saving the day by giving a Pepsi to riot police. These aspects of the commercial don’t work either in terms of social message or as commercial,

See? That wasn’t so damn hard to understand.