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4 Marriage The Women in the Middle When we had them, it was always very important for my wife to stay home with the kids. I see a lot of people at work that their wife gets pregnant, has a baby, and two months later they’re back at work. And they never see their kids. They don’t see them walk or crawl or anything like that. And that was always real important for me that my wife be able to stay home and raise the kids and not have to worry about things. She likes it but it’s hard. It’s hard raising two small kids. All day long. I don’t know how she does it. I couldn’t. —Phil When I asked men about their parents, they talked mostly about their fathers, but when I asked them about becoming fathers, they talked about their wives. What emerged from my conversations is that, for the men I talked to, the father–child relationship could not be described or thought about independent of the relationship between husband and wife. Some of the paradoxes of men’s relations to their children may be understood by appreciating the relative positions of men, women, and children, and specifically the crucial linking or mediating role of women. Appreciating the linking role of women is not to say that men do not care about children, or that they think that children are entirely women ’s business. Certainly becoming a parent is more separated from biological reproduction for men than for women. One can scarcely imagine a woman saying, as one of the men I talked to did: “Actually I have had a child before, although through very strange circumstances I didn’t know I had a child before he was a year old and someone sent me a Christmas card saying. ‘This is your baby.’” Equally certainly, men consider childbearing and child rearing to be predominantly women’s responsibility. In an investigation of the attitudes toward parenting of men whose wives were pregnant with their first child, some men were distinguished by their intention to be “involved” in their children’s 81 lives (Angell n.d.). That some men express this intention may index a change in attitudes and behavior, but pregnant married women are not likely to see being involved in their children’s lives as a matter of choice. Walzer (1998), who examined the relationships between new parents and their babies, also notes the distinction between mothers’ and fathers’ expectations of themselves as parents. Other studies of the transition to parenthood also show that mothers and fathers have different expectations of themselves and each other and that gender differences in behavior are increased by having a child (Belsky and Kelly 1994; Cowan and Cowan 2000). There is also an asymmetry in the ways that men and women think about becoming parents. For instance, many women are prepared to consider single parenthood as a possible, though usually less desirable, route to motherhood; the men I talked to, on the other hand, did not even register it as a possibility. This is not to say that men are indifferent to having children. They have strong feelings about the number, timing, and characteristics of the children they want, but at crucial points in their lives they find that their paternity depends on the cooperation of women. Many single childless women are able to consider and talk directly about whether they want to have children. In doing so, and in reading the advice and examples they are offered in books and magazines, it is clear that they see having a child on one’s own as a possibility . It is an option with definite emotional, social, and financial drawbacks as well as opportunities, and it is an option that they may well reject, but it remains a possibility. Because of this, women are able to weigh and articulate their specific desire for children outside the matrix of family and relationship with a man. They can think directly and in isolation about the relationship between mother and child, the activity of mothering, and the transformation of self into a mother. The men I talked to did not talk about having children without talking about “having a family” or “being a family man.” For these men, “having children ” was part of the package deal of “being married and having a family .” They could only conceptualize the relationship between father and children within the matrix of a...

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