Salvaging the vocation of fatherhood
Todd David Whitmore
The Common Good
It is 3:39 a.m. and our 20 month-old daughter, Flannery, has just fallen asleep. She has some unidentified and perhaps unidentifiable bacterial infection. For the first couple of days, we thought it was just a cold, or at best a minor infection, with a mid-level fever, cough and runny nose. But today (I have not gone to sleep yet, so what is technically yesterday is still today for me), what were whimpers of protest turned into howls — yes, a 22-pound person can howl — and we took her to the doctor.
Flannery has a double ear infection. Even after antibiotics and children's Motrin have pressed the pain back to whimpers and an occasional wail, she cannot settle into any sort of rest unless we lie down with her. My wife Susan and I have been doing a tag-team vigil. The shoulder of my shirt is stained with snot because Flannery's nose is raw, and wiping it causes even more pain. So I simply let it drain on me.
This is the vocation of parenthood. I am still awake because it is difficult to cease this kind of vigil at will. Sleep will come when exhaustion takes over. It is hard to watch your child suffer.
I am waiting until she feels well enough to give me the kind of joyful greeting that she does when I come home from my work vocation — she runs to the door the moment she hears my key turn in the lock. It will be at least a couple of days before this part of my vocation as father can return.
In my last column, I talked about the lay vocation of work. I also mentioned that most adults are called to multiple vocations — life activities through which they work out in a deliberate fashion their relationship with God and neighbor. Parenthood, when understood in its full sense, is a vocation.
I want to focus specifically on the vocation of fatherhood. This is in part because it is what I know, but also because of the two — motherhood and fatherhood — it is the one that receives less social attention. The results of this lack of attention are not good. The National Fatherhood Initiative reports that four out of 10 children do not live with their fathers. The reasons for this are multiple and complex. Divorce and divorce law, sexual mores, the lack of adequate training or living wage jobs for unskilled workers and many other factors are in the mix.
In previous columns, I have written about how Catholic teaching can help ameliorate and perhaps even overcome certain social problems. This time, though, the question has to be raised whether, however unintentionally, it aids and abets the other forces at play.
Official Catholic teaching holds that women have a biologically and even ontologically — that is, from their very being — grounded predisposition for self-sacrifice. Such self-sacrifice displays itself most of all in motherhood, such that even those women who do not have children take up mothering-like activities for others who are in need.
What do fathers do? There is far less guidance here. It is noteworthy that both John Paul II and the American bishops' conference have written or attempted to write major documents on "the dignity and vocation of women," whereas neither one has undertaken similar efforts with regard to men. One Catholic commentator notes the "constant reference to the gifts of women without reference to the giftedness of men ... [O]ne would hope that maleness would be more than the remainder of what is left over after all the dimensions of femininity have been articulated."
The language of most documents that discuss the living wage display the assumption that the male head of household is to earn it. What we can glean from these statements is that men put bread on the table while women display self-sacrifice by caring for children. Such a depiction first of all underestimates the self-sacrifice in working to earn a living wage. But the problems are even deeper. Women can work outside of the home as long as it is in keeping with their "proper vocation" as wife and mother. There is no similar qualification given to men — no references to the vocation of work being limited by the vocation of husband and father. This may well be because the two are held to be virtually one and the same, though I have yet to come across a document that applies the term "vocation" to fatherhood at all.
There are dangers in understanding fatherhood as almost entirely taken up with the vocation of work. One of the ways a father can be absent from his family is to give all of himself to work. Such distance is a frequent contributor to adultery and divorce. Of divorced fathers, studies have indicated that they are most likely to keep up with child support payments if they have a significant emotional attachment to their children. In both of these cases we see that the successful implementation of the role of financial provider is deeply dependent on success in bonding with one's family in other ways, ways that require self-sacrifice.
There are exceptions to what I've described of official documents — see the American bishops' "Follow the Way of Love." But such exceptions are few and most often are brief sentence-or-two reminders to dads to pitch in.
This is insufficient. The continual emphasis on women's unique ability to sacrifice for others sets up the presupposition that men lack this ability, and thus lacking it have no obligation — no vocation — to fulfill it.
Todd David Whitmore is an associate professor of theology. His column runs every other Thursday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, February 17, 2000
