Fatherhood
Feb. 13th, 2020 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livIn my 20s, I had a series of break-ups of quite serious relationships, because my partner wanted kids and I don't. By the third time I pretty much assumed that sooner or later all my peers would pair off in co-parenting arrangements, leaving me as the childfree odd one out. I never predicted I would find a life partner who was willing to make a commitment without the prospect of becoming a parent, and I certainly didn't predict that I would end up in a serious relationship with people who already had children when we got together.
One of my exes tried to convince me that we should stay together and have children together. She offered "You could be the father!" She meant that she was willing to carry any pregnancies; nowadays with more awareness of gender stuff we might say 'the fetching parent' rather than 'the father'. Certainly I don't find the idea of pregnancy particularly appealing, but it's the 20 years after that I don't want, if I positively wanted kids I would put up with a year or so of physical misery. My immediate thought was, I can't be a father because I want to be an academic, and a father doesn't get to prioritize an interesting and fulfilling career over financial security for his family. I was being sexist, of course; it's not true that a father has to be a breadwinner, and even if he is, it's perfectly valid to agree a compromise with his partner. (And having actually worked in academia I know any number of fathers who entirely expect their partners and children to put up with low wages, serial short-term contracts, and having to move countries repeatedly to climb the career ladder. If their partners are female, even if they are academics too, many successful male academics simply expect their wives to pick up the slack when they work unreasonable hours. But that's another topic.)
But even if my reasoning was flawed, I was right to conclude that I don't want to be a father any more than I want to be a mother. I was right not to bring any actual human beings into the world just to keep a relationship with someone I was in love with.
Except, well. I can't entirely suppress the thought that maybe if I were actually male I'd feel differently. There are really quite a lot of perfectly decent men who go along with having children because their partner wants them, and are broadly supportive but never end up devoting their whole lives to parenting in the way women are expected to. It's probably less the case now, but when I was a kid lots of my friends' fathers were not that much more involved in their children's lives than I am now in the lives of my partners' children. Yet I emphatically insist that I'm not a parent. I don't quite meet the bar of being considered a "good" stepfather, but I'm maybe not that far off. A big difference is that a stepfather is assumed to be partnering a single mother who already has kids, whereas I am in a relationship with two fully involved parents.
The other day we were doing fortune cookies, and mine said something like, the best time of your life is still ahead of you. One of the kids suggested it might mean that the best time would be when I was a grandma. I pointed out that it's quite tricky to become a grandma without being a mother first, which is something I don't intend to do. I mentioned that I used to have a daydream that when I retired I'd marry a widow who already had grandchildren, in order to get round that very restriction. And we agreed that my existing relationship with the children is somewhat like a granny relationship: I have wonderful children in my life and I get to have a really close, loving relationship with them and have fun with them, but I'm not ultimately responsible for them. I "get to give them back", as the saying goes (not my language, but yeah, it applies). And OK, I happen to be the same age as their actual parents, but there are grandparents with no more than the thirty-year age difference I have with partners' kids. I can think of grandmothers who do more active childcare than I do, but I can really easily think of lots of non live-in (step)fathers who do less.
Maybe if I were male I wouldn't feel like the luckiest person in the world to be in this unusual family set-up, where I get all the fun of having children and basically none of the hard work. Maybe I would just expect that's what parenting is like by default. I wouldn't be saying, I'm not a real parent because I get to take breaks and I don't have to make any decisions or do any planning. Another of my exes, also trying to persuade me to change my mind and stay with him and have children with him, made the argument that he didn't expect our lives would change very much once kids came along. That did not give me any pause at all; I had to stop and think about whether being a "father" seemed more appealing than being a mother, but the idea that you could pretty much carry on like a childfree person seemed completely implausible. Nevertheless, even in the 21st century, even in our general enlightened circles, it's not the default for men to give up or even severely limit their careers and their hobbies and their regular social life and their religious life and their alone time once they become fathers.
I expect if I were male I would feel qualified to have lots of opinions about parenting based on my limited experience of being adjacent to parents. As it is I'm just kind of tentatively setting out some thoughts that have been swirling in my mind since I started dating parents.
One of my exes tried to convince me that we should stay together and have children together. She offered "You could be the father!" She meant that she was willing to carry any pregnancies; nowadays with more awareness of gender stuff we might say 'the fetching parent' rather than 'the father'. Certainly I don't find the idea of pregnancy particularly appealing, but it's the 20 years after that I don't want, if I positively wanted kids I would put up with a year or so of physical misery. My immediate thought was, I can't be a father because I want to be an academic, and a father doesn't get to prioritize an interesting and fulfilling career over financial security for his family. I was being sexist, of course; it's not true that a father has to be a breadwinner, and even if he is, it's perfectly valid to agree a compromise with his partner. (And having actually worked in academia I know any number of fathers who entirely expect their partners and children to put up with low wages, serial short-term contracts, and having to move countries repeatedly to climb the career ladder. If their partners are female, even if they are academics too, many successful male academics simply expect their wives to pick up the slack when they work unreasonable hours. But that's another topic.)
But even if my reasoning was flawed, I was right to conclude that I don't want to be a father any more than I want to be a mother. I was right not to bring any actual human beings into the world just to keep a relationship with someone I was in love with.
Except, well. I can't entirely suppress the thought that maybe if I were actually male I'd feel differently. There are really quite a lot of perfectly decent men who go along with having children because their partner wants them, and are broadly supportive but never end up devoting their whole lives to parenting in the way women are expected to. It's probably less the case now, but when I was a kid lots of my friends' fathers were not that much more involved in their children's lives than I am now in the lives of my partners' children. Yet I emphatically insist that I'm not a parent. I don't quite meet the bar of being considered a "good" stepfather, but I'm maybe not that far off. A big difference is that a stepfather is assumed to be partnering a single mother who already has kids, whereas I am in a relationship with two fully involved parents.
The other day we were doing fortune cookies, and mine said something like, the best time of your life is still ahead of you. One of the kids suggested it might mean that the best time would be when I was a grandma. I pointed out that it's quite tricky to become a grandma without being a mother first, which is something I don't intend to do. I mentioned that I used to have a daydream that when I retired I'd marry a widow who already had grandchildren, in order to get round that very restriction. And we agreed that my existing relationship with the children is somewhat like a granny relationship: I have wonderful children in my life and I get to have a really close, loving relationship with them and have fun with them, but I'm not ultimately responsible for them. I "get to give them back", as the saying goes (not my language, but yeah, it applies). And OK, I happen to be the same age as their actual parents, but there are grandparents with no more than the thirty-year age difference I have with partners' kids. I can think of grandmothers who do more active childcare than I do, but I can really easily think of lots of non live-in (step)fathers who do less.
Maybe if I were male I wouldn't feel like the luckiest person in the world to be in this unusual family set-up, where I get all the fun of having children and basically none of the hard work. Maybe I would just expect that's what parenting is like by default. I wouldn't be saying, I'm not a real parent because I get to take breaks and I don't have to make any decisions or do any planning. Another of my exes, also trying to persuade me to change my mind and stay with him and have children with him, made the argument that he didn't expect our lives would change very much once kids came along. That did not give me any pause at all; I had to stop and think about whether being a "father" seemed more appealing than being a mother, but the idea that you could pretty much carry on like a childfree person seemed completely implausible. Nevertheless, even in the 21st century, even in our general enlightened circles, it's not the default for men to give up or even severely limit their careers and their hobbies and their regular social life and their religious life and their alone time once they become fathers.
I expect if I were male I would feel qualified to have lots of opinions about parenting based on my limited experience of being adjacent to parents. As it is I'm just kind of tentatively setting out some thoughts that have been swirling in my mind since I started dating parents.
