Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

On Writing and Rearing

We have two computers and three papers due. My essay on nineteenth-century poetry is already weeks late. My daughter has to write five paragraphs responding to Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. Her fifth-grade teacher wants to know, from “Sunrise” to “Cloudburst ,” what each movement makes her feel. My son has seven pages to cover the history of comedy, starting with Lysistrata and ending with Seinfeld. We have to marshal our time carefully. Like a general sending battalions into battle, I pace from room to room checking the family’s progress. “How many pages have you written?” “What is your argument?” “How many paragraphs since we last talked?” “Do you need to use the same phrase in three consecutive sentences?” On this rainy Sunday afternoon, I harass my children with questions, urging them to finish their work. My wife, whose profession involves unusual patience and listening, wisely escapes to the gym. By 3:00 p.m., the burdens of language , law, and patriarchy have left me very tense. My own dissatisfactions loom over my children’s prose. I have been staring at my notes since Friday, and my progress has been slow. For all the harangues about getting work done, about finishing those essays up, my sentences have been coming out as if they were the last smidgen of toothpaste in a meticulously rolled-up tube. As the rain comes down, I realize how central writing is to the man I have become—this father, professor, hypocrite. When it comes to fatherhood, I am not a reflective practitioner, and I spend little time thinking about the di¤erent roles one can play in a child’s life. Fatherhood, to me, is an unqualified commitment and an unexamined fact. It is making sure the lunches are ready, the carpools arranged, the schedules de-conflicted so we can attend the fifth-grade concert. It is keeping track of how long the kids are on the Internet and asking why the On Writing and Rearing david haven blak e 50 01 Part 1_Manu 7/1/2010 5:29 PM Page 50 browser always closes when a parent walks in the room. It is quizzing my daughter on electrical circuits and stumbling through geometry with my son. To put it bluntly, fatherhood means little to me in terms of ceremony and myth. I am neither the diminished patriarch searching for his Promise Keepers nor the pious, introspective New Age dad. Being an academic has given me the flexibility to care for sick children, volunteer in classrooms, and prepare snacks after school, but the last parenting guide I picked up was What to Expect: The Toddler Years. To the extent that these blessings have gone unexplored, I also recognize how much my experience of fatherhood has to do with writing, with articulation, with seeking the right words. In my neighborhood, some fathers have massive workshops and teach their children how to handle tools. Others have shrines to the New York Yankees and throw batting practice for hours after work. One neighbor has a music collection that lines his basement walls; he and his children jam on the instruments he has scattered about the room. For better or worse, my daughter and son associate our relationship with language, with the delights of books, newspapers, magazines, lyrics, the repartee on television shows. My head can be halfway inside the dryer, my arm grasping at some elusive sock, and my son will stand directly behind me and begin to read a favorite passage from a book. How can I find this frustrating when he has seen me do relatively the same thing hundreds of times before? I come by this mode of parenting naturally. I am an academic father whose father is an academic as well. My grandfather taught eighth-grade Latin and English in a small K–8 school. His sons sent letters home from college, and he promptly sent them back, each blunder carefully marked with an editor’s red pencil. Retiring after more than twenty years as headmaster , he wrote a history of his town and a history of his school. He edited the town newsletter with my grandmother’s help. One summer vacation, my grandfather greeted my sisters and me at the New Jersey shore with the promise of a ten-dollar bill for each of us. For the next two weeks, every stylistic error we committed would result in a small fine—say, five cents for answering a...