Lessons of a Father By Roland Merullo

From Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine; Reprinted in August 2003 Reader's Digest

I grew up in a family of three boys in a fairly macho neighbourhood, so it is fitting that the sprit that decides such things gave me daughters. Two, in fact. Exactly what I needed to get a feel for the other half of the human condition.
Most of my friends insist there is an inherent difference between the ways boys and girls act. The rap on boys is that they're wild and destructive. They'll race through your house with a toy machine gun, knocking over lamps, scuffing your new kitchen floor and flushing Nerf footballs down the toilet.
Some modern-day fathers can't accept that part of a boy's behaviour because they can't accept that part of themselves. "My son wants me to wrestle with him and things like that," a good friend told me. "Yech."
But I love the exuberance of boys. I loved it when I was a boy myself - climbing over neighbours' fences, winging snowballs at city buses, imprisoning garter snakes in mayonnaise jars - and I love it now.
So, growing up, I fought (though I hated it), and played hockey (because I loved it), drove a pickup, shot pool, watched my share of football on TV, drank my share of bad beer. I have, in other words, a resume of macho credentials and think I would have been a good father to boys. But after 18 years of childless marriage, my wife, Amanda, gave birth to a daughter, Alexandra, and three years later, to another.
I could not be more pleased about it.
Juliana is two years old now, and Alexandra five, so I'm still at the beginning of the rigorous adventure that is fatherhood. Because my office is at home, I spend more time with my children than most fathers I know. I change diapers, watch Sesame Street, drive my child to preschool, tell her stories at night and hold her at four o'clock in the morning when she's shaking and crying from a nightmare.

What Should a Girl Be? I try to chart a fair course for my girls in terms of what has come to be called gender identity. That course lies somewhere between the ideas of the macho fathers I remember and those of the sensitive New Age fathers who surround me now.
I try to encourage my girls to be who they feel like being, not creatures caged in boxes of someone else's making. At the same time, like every parent, I have to draw a certain line as to what behaviour is acceptable and what is not. Finding that line and holding to it is not always easy.
When she was two, Alexandra went through a stage of acting like a linebacker on the playground. If she saw a smaller kid, or a kid she did not like the look of for some reason, she'd lower her shoulder and just knock him or her over. Amanda and I wanted to make her understand what she was not capable of understanding: that it felt awful to be on the other end of one of her body blocks.
What she was doing would have been bad behaviour in a boy; in a girl, it was, for me at least, somehow worse. So I wanted to teach her right from wrong, on the one hand, and let her see that certain types of assertiveness are acceptable, on the other. I wanted to keep my love for her burning beneath my feelings of distaste and my sense of what a girl should be.
These days she does much better on the playground. At home, she builds towers and knocks them down happily, ecstatic at her own power. She scuffs the floor, hugs her sister too hard, throws stones in parking lots and likes loud noises. But she is also into Barbie, takes ballet lessons, persuades her mother to paint her toenails and pretends to breast feed her dolls.
All of these things are pieces of the mosaic of who she is. My job, as I see it, is to let her hold that multitude within herself.
Others don't always agree. When Amanda was pregnant the first time, a close friend and committed feminist said, "What if she turns out to be a girly girl?" in a rather sarcastic tone. "Then we'll love her," I said. The sentence just came tumbling out of my mouth, unexpected, unrehearsed; the bare truth rolling.

How Do You Make a Child Feel Loved? I have my own prejudicial notions of what I want my girls to grow up to be: fearless, feminine, independent, humble, grateful, spiritual, confident. But after my long apprenticeship in locker rooms and the last few years around dolls and fancy dresses, I have finally been able to throw away some of my ideas about what is right and wrong for a boy or girl. Not what is morally or behaviourally right or wrong; I mean in the sense of what is girlish or boyish.
But, really, I don't spend all my time worrying about gender indentity when I am around my two girls. What I worry about, besides their basic physical well-being, is how best to make them feel loved. That seems to me the essence of a father's job.
For me, being a father is an impossible challenge. It's like trying to be a saint, or a perfect psychotherapist, teacher or coach who works 24 hours a day. A stand-in for an absolutely loving God. Except that, as my own behaviour reminds me hourly, I am frustratingly human. "You make 750 decisions in the course of a single day hanging out with your kids," I said to a young friend who has not had children yet, "and 250 of them are wrong."
To make your children feel loved, you have to feel beloved yourself - that's the trick. And it's an uphill walk to feel beloved in a society, that tells you constantly, in a thousand different ways, that you are somehow lacking.
The messages about modern fatherhood are confusing and insidious. Be nurturing, be tough. Spend a lot of time with your kids. And 50 or 60 hours a week going to the office and making a living. And help clean the house. And take your wife out for romantic dinners. And make sure you have a retirement portfolio and that it's being managed well.
Sometimes it feels as if a powerful propoganda machine is trying to define manhood for you and is itself confused.
In the midst of this thick fog of conflicting models and pressing demands, you're supposed to provide your children with a perfect and selfless love. You know you're supposed to do this. You feel it. At moments you are even able to accomplish it, and at those moments, you feel as if you have been dipped neck-deep in a stream of paterfamilial affection that extends backward in time to Adam.
My own ability to achieve this state from time to time has been a surprise in my short career as a dad. There have been other surprises as well: that the strain of bringing up kids has brought Amanda and me closer, not pushed as apart; that she could be so unselfish; that I could be awakened three times in the night by a child who can't find her pillow, and not be angry; that I had inherited such a quick temper and could learn to control it because it embarrassed me so much in front of Alexandra; that changing diapers was somehow less than what people had made it to be; that there are people out there actually trying to bring up a child without a mate or helper; that I could possibly love someone so much.
One of the greatest surprises has been that having daughters has made me so much more comfortable with who I am as a person. Some of this has to do with tapping into that river of love. It is as if, understanding that what my children really need from me is my own tolerance for their uniqueness, their quirks, their occasional misdemeanours, their fear and frailty, I have at last come to allow myself to be quirky and unique, unafraid and occasionally frail.
Manly, not macho. Imperfect.

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