Fatherhood
Nov. 13th, 2004 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloWhat's with this this father-son thing that Hollywood keeps shoving
at us?
Spielberg can't leave it alone. Catch Me If You Can was sharp and funny so long as Leo was sticking it to the Man, but then we found out that his delinquency was down to the lack of a father figure and all it needed to reform him was for Tom Hanks to offer him unquestioning love.
Yesterday I was watching Finding Nemo. Great film in its way, but Albert Brooks's fussy lttle everyman of a soccer-dad made me feel queasy. If Ellen DeGeneres hadn't happened along I might well have walked out.
It's like the nineteenth century cult of motherhood. It gives off a sickly smell. I think there's something rotten that's being covered up.
Actually, I know perfectly well what it is. A very high proportion of dads who walk out of a marriage lose contact with their kids within two or three years. And a high proportion of those who stay behind are bullies, brutes and abusers. Of course there are good dads, but there are an awful lot of absolute shites as well.
Do families need fathers?
We daren't say "no" because if we did it would hurt the feelings of men. And that would be tricky because it's men who run the world. So we tell ourselves these cute little stories to keep ourselves from thinking too much about the facts.
There was once a little fishy and his wife got eaten by a barracuda so he had to look after his baby son all by himself and he loved his little son so much that he got a weeny bit over-protective; and then one fine day...
at us?
Spielberg can't leave it alone. Catch Me If You Can was sharp and funny so long as Leo was sticking it to the Man, but then we found out that his delinquency was down to the lack of a father figure and all it needed to reform him was for Tom Hanks to offer him unquestioning love.
Yesterday I was watching Finding Nemo. Great film in its way, but Albert Brooks's fussy lttle everyman of a soccer-dad made me feel queasy. If Ellen DeGeneres hadn't happened along I might well have walked out.
It's like the nineteenth century cult of motherhood. It gives off a sickly smell. I think there's something rotten that's being covered up.
Actually, I know perfectly well what it is. A very high proportion of dads who walk out of a marriage lose contact with their kids within two or three years. And a high proportion of those who stay behind are bullies, brutes and abusers. Of course there are good dads, but there are an awful lot of absolute shites as well.
Do families need fathers?
We daren't say "no" because if we did it would hurt the feelings of men. And that would be tricky because it's men who run the world. So we tell ourselves these cute little stories to keep ourselves from thinking too much about the facts.
There was once a little fishy and his wife got eaten by a barracuda so he had to look after his baby son all by himself and he loved his little son so much that he got a weeny bit over-protective; and then one fine day...
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-13 11:22 pm (UTC)I wonder if he regrets it now. And if he feels guilty.
There was a difficult patch- as the kids moved from adolescence to adulthood- where contact became strained and patchy, but we're through it now I think. One of them, the soldier, has gone of the radar at the moment, but the other two I talk to regularly.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-14 12:00 am (UTC)link
He's still very young, and circumstances may bring him back again. Many children pull away from awhile, for many reasons that have little to do with their families--especially boys, I think!
Anyway, I hope you will hear from him soon.
You did your best, and that counts for everything. I can only imagine how hard it must have been, but I admire you very much for having done it, having seen the pain that not making a relationship can cause a child.
And I think I can also say that letting go and attempting a clean break ("I now consider them your children") doesn't really work. There's still something left.
You can't shut off bonding like a faucet, I don't think.
I still care for the boy I once knew whom I married and loved, who was with me when our children was born.
I was glad to think about him after he got out of the hospital, still not breathing well, but with his kind and patient wife to take care of him (as I never could). I still like to think of him sitting by his window, reading.
Even though he lives 18 miles from my house, and never calls my daughter.
What remains is: Why wasn't what we offered him enough? And does he have regrets? Guilt? We'll never know.
I can't just shut him out of my heart. I remember him when he was a boy, when he got his first three-piece suit and was so proud of how he looked; and how much he wanted, for awhile, to be a good person.
I guess, because I can't love him now as a woman, I love him as a mother might. That will have to be enough. It is enough.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-14 09:45 am (UTC)No, I've felt it from the other side. I came north as much as anything to get away from my parents (who whether they meant to or not left me feeling I didn't matter) but I haven't been able to break the bonds. I had something like a reconciliation with my father just before he died, and I am now closer to my mother than I ever was. She's a spirited woman who has embraced the opportunities of widowhood and now (in her 80s) has a much livlier and varied social life than I do.
These relationships play out over decades and only death can really end them.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-14 12:37 pm (UTC)It seems there are two lives playing out--the surface life and the archetypal one below--
Many years after my divorce I dreamed about marrying a man who was made out of ice (subtle!)--we joined hands at the altar, and the ice man turned to the camera (me the dreamer, watching) and said "Watch this!" and stabbed me in my extended arm with an icicle.
I think where we have made rituals we have in a way marked as with standing stones the presences of archetypes--which are the outcroppings of great emotional energy.
It does seem to me that we on the surface of life are playing out a role, that the real drama is being played out by other aspects of our selves--where we are ice men or devils--down there in the roiling psychoid of the collective.
Maybe when we die we here on the surface just snuff out, and our only usefulness is to contribute to the collective at some quantum level.
You ever read Whitehead's The Concrete God? He thought, like other process theologians, that God was rolling along and picking up information from the collective energy of people, and that, finally (I guess at the Omega Point--) he would concretize--that our lives were contributing to God's evolution.
Maybe my marrying the ice man was a data point.
I hope God is Good. Maybe He's an archetype, too.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-14 01:31 pm (UTC)Also it's kinda vampiric.
OK, I've thought similar thoughts myself, but they rather devalue the individual. I think I'm more attracted to the Jungian idea that we're here to "individualise" ourselves- that the individual persona is valuable in itself- as a work of art- and the more idiosyncratic we are the better.
Actually I suppose the two ideas go together- two halves a single Jungian thesis.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-14 01:36 pm (UTC)Okay, now I'm smiling. And off to church. Thanks!
The Stay-Puft man! With his frown. Wasn't he wonderful!