Compared to Carol, Greg did less with the children and more with the house. He was the handyman. He looked at the mantelpiece with a carpenter’s eye; he thought about repairs on the septic tank in the back yard of the house in Little Creek. Carol was the parent who noticed a developing hole in Daryls trousers. At one point, as Greg pulled out the vacuum cleaner, he joked, “Carols just a woman. She hasn’t vacuumed for so long, she’d have to relearn. A man better handle this.” But, in fact, 80 percent of his tasks that day put him on the male side of the gender line.
Too, Carol was more child-centered than Greg when she was with the children. For example, when each parent stopped occasionally during the day to talk with me, usually Daryl was there, trying to join in (he loved talking into my tape recorder) or to get his parent’s attention. Carol would give Daryl time. (“Yes, Daryl, I think that Superman can fly higher than Batman. What do you think?”) But Greg was not indulgent of the interruptions (“Daddy has to talk with Arlie,” or “If you don’t stop making that noise, you’ll have to go to your room,” or “Go see Mommy”).
Carol’s breast-feeding of Beverly gave her a natural advantage in forming a close bond with the baby. Some fathers of nursing infants gently rock them, burp them, change them, and do everything they can until the baby drinks from a bottle, at which point the father is no longer disadvantaged. Other men seem to avoid their infants, focusing on older children, if they have them, until the “disadvantage” has passed. Greg took a middle path. He focused his attention on Daryl. It was he who usually helped Daryl put his pajamas on, had a “peeing contest” with him in the toilet (Daryl loved that), and tucked him warmly in bed.
Greg would take care of Beverly when Carol needed him to; but he held her like a football, and when she cried, he sometimes tossed her in the air, which made her cry more. Now when Greg picked her up, half the time she was fairly calm and half the time she would arch her back and fuss. The family explanation for this was that “Beverly doesn’t like hien.” As Carol told me flatly, “Beverly fusses when men pick her up, except for her grandfather.” But the only men who picked Beverly up were Greg and her grandfather.
Was this constitutional with three-month-old Beverly? Or was it “natural” male ineptitude on the part of Greg? I was wondering this when a telling episode occurred: Beverly was in her rocker in a pink dress and booties. Carol was cooking. After a while, Beverly began to fuss, then cry. Greg unbuckled her from the bear swing and held her, but she still cried. He sat with her at the diningroom table, trying to read over a dentistry magazine. She wailed. Greg called out, “Mom, come!” and explained to me again that “Beverly doesn’t like men.” I recalled a certain way I used to comfort my sons, bobbing slowly up and down as well as forward and back (we called it the “camel walk”), asked if I could try, demonstrated it, and she calmed down. Greg replied, “Oh, I know about that one. It works fine. But I don’t want to have to get up. See, when Carol teaches night class Tuesdays, .I have her all night and I don’t want her getting used to it.” To relieve Carol, Greg very often took care of Beverly ‘anyway.” But however unconsciously, he seemed to resist the extra effort of taking care of his three-month — old child in a way she liked.
Primary parents to a young child can offer contact to the child in the very way they talk. Carol could be saying, “You have your gray pants on today,” or “Do you want your apple cut up?” Her voice conveyed a sense of welcoming attachment to her children. She used a “primary parent voice.” Along with making ones lap available for sitting, and rotating ones head to keep sensing where a child is, it is this primary parents voice that makes a child feel safe at “home base.” Greg used it intermittently in the course of the day; Carol used it all the time.
One Tuesday, when Carol was teaching an evening class in a business school, I could hear the garage door closing, and the sound of Greg in the kitchen scraping the pizza pan in the kitchen sink. Soon Daryl came into the kitchen and the two went to watch TV. Once “Mousterpiece Theatre” was over and an absorbing documentary about an expeditionary team climbing Mount Everest had caught Gregs attention, Daryl moved to imaginative play with a car. He began to tell a long tale about a frog going “fribbit, fribbit” in the car. The documentary was now at a dramatic moment when the team had nearly reached the top. The expedition’s doctor was telling an indispensable team member that his lungs could not take the climb. Greg was listening to “fribbit fribbit” with half an ear. He tried to draw his sons attention to the program with fatherly explanations about Yaks, and snow caves, but no dice. Daryl brought out some cards and said, “Dad, lets play cards.” “I don’t know how,” Greg replied. “You can read the directions,” Daryl suggested. “No,” Greg said. “Wait for your mom. She knows how.”
During the season when she was working longer hours than
Greg, Carol said, “There have been nights when I’ve come home and Daryls dinner was popcorn.” “Does he do that as a treat for Daryl?” I asked. “No, just lazy,” she said with a laugh.
Greg was a very good helper, but he was not a primary parent. Many of his interactions with Daryl took the form of inspiring fear or aggression and then making a joke of it. For example, one evening when Daryl had finished dipping his dessert candies into his milk, and was waiting to be taken out of his high chair with milky hands, Greg playfully wiped his hands with a cloth, took the boy out of his high chair, and held him upside down. “Гт going to wash you off in the dishwasher.” “No!” “Yes! You’re going to be shut inside to get all cleaned off.” “Haah.” The boy half — realized his father was joking, and was half-afraid. Only when a sound of alarm continued in Daryl’s voice did Greg turn him right side up and end the joke. Again, when Greg was fixing the water bed with some pliers, he held the pliers up to Daryl. “These are good for taking off eyelashes.” “No!” “Yes, they are!” Only when the boy took the pliers and held them toward the father’s eye, did Greg say, “That’s dangerous.”
There were safer jokes that Daryl always got, about “taking off your nose.” “Daddy’s going to take off Daryl’s nose and eat it.” Or, “I’m going to throw your nose down the garbage disposal.” But another often-repeated joke was a less sure bet: “Ow. You kicked me. I’m going to kick you back.” As often as not there was a scuffle, serious protest from Daryl, and serious explanation from his father that it was “just a joke.” All these were gestures unconsciously designed, perhaps, to “toughen” Daryl, to inoculate him against fear, to make him cry less, to make him more like a man, more like a good soldier.
Carol and Greg talked about Greg’s sense of humor as if there were something a little unusual about it. Carol warned me early on that “some people think Greg has a disquieting sense of humor.” When I talked to him alone, Greg said spontaneously, “Sometimes Carol doesn’t understand my sense of humor. Daryl doesn’t either. But its how I am.” Gregs “humor” was unusual among the families I studied, but only in degree. Fathers tended toward “toughening” jokes more than mothers did.
Some fathers answered childrens cries less readily, and with a different mental set. One father worked at home in a study looking out on the living room where a sitter tended his nine-month — old son. When asked whether his sons cries disturbed his work, he said, “No problem, I actually want him to fall and bang himself, to get hurt. I don’t want anything serious to happen but I don’t want him to have a fail-safe world.” When we’d finished the interview, the husband asked his wife (who also works at home) how she would have answered the same question. She said immediately, “I hate to hear him cry.”
Many parents seem to enter a cycle, whereby the father passes on the “warrior training” he received as a boy, knowing his wife will fulfill the child’s more basic need for warmth and attachment. Knowing she’s there, he doesn’t need to change. At the same time, since the husband is rougher on the children, the wife doesn’t feel comfortable leaving them with him more, and so the cycle continues. Greg carried this warrior training farther than most fathers, but the cycle was nearly obscured by the overall arrangement whereby Greg and Carol otherwise spent an equal amount of time and effort on the second shift.
Primary parenting has to do with forging a strong, consistent trusting attachment between parent and child. For small children, a steady diet of “toughening” is probably not good primary parenting. Greg seemed to presume that “someone else” was giving his children the primary goods. He could afford his “jokes,” because Carol would come forward with her warm, out-reaching voice and watchful eye, to neutralize their effect.
Ironically, Greg felt more confident about his parenting than Carol felt about hers. In discussing parenting, Greg compared himself to his father, who was less expressive than he, while Carol compared herself to the baby-sitter, whom she thought more patient and motherly. Neither drew a comparison to the other.