Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood

by Michael Lewis

Small children are ungrateful; to do one a favor is, from a business point of view, about as shrewd as making a subprime mortgage loan.

This book is a snapshot of what I assume will one day be looked back upon as a kind of Dark Age of Fatherhood. Obviously, we’re in the midst of some long unhappy transition between the model of fatherhood as practiced by my father and some ideal model, approved by all, to be practiced with ease by the perfect fathers of the future. But for now there’s an unsettling absence of universal, or even local, standards of behavior. Within a few miles of my house I can find perfectly sane men and women who regard me as a Neanderthal who should do more to help my poor wife with the kids, and just shut up about it. But I can also find other perfectly sane men and women who view me as a Truly Modern Man and marvel aloud at my ability to be both breadwinner and domestic dervish—doer of an approximately 31.5 percent of all parenting. The absence of standards is the social equivalent of the absence of an acknowledged fair price for a good in a marketplace. At best, it leads to haggling; at worst, to market failure.

A brief thought experiment: Two couples—Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice—get together for dinner. They haven’t known each other for long, and will discover during this dinner that they have cut slightly different parenting deals with their spouse. Carol and Bob split their parenting duties 60/40; Alice and Ted’s split is more like 80/20. Bob and Carol think children shouldn’t watch the Disney Channel; Ted and Alice think the Disney Channel, properly used, can be an excellent babysitter. After an otherwise delightful dinner they: a. Go home and leave unmentioned how differently the other couple parents and divides the parenting chores. b. Acknowledge their differences but agree, privately, to disagree. Parenting chores aren’t chores at all: they’re a joy! Plus, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, or raise children. c. Go home and haggle. Not right away, of course. Alice gets home and stews and promises herself she won’t say anything. But at some point she fails to suppress the soundtrack in her head. “I really like the idea of reducing the influence Disney has on our family,” she says. Or: “It’s nice the way Bob drives the kids to school and frees up Carol in the mornings.” Meanwhile, down the block, Bob is wondering why the hell he has to drive the kids to school every morning. Just before they agree that they won’t be having sex anytime soon, he says, “Alice really is a great mom, isn’t she?” And a funny thing happens: These two couples never see each other again. They h...

Here’s the question: Why should social interaction with couples who parent even slightly differently so quickly lead to internal strife? How can putatively important and deeply considered decisions—how to parent, and what role the father should play—be so easily undermined by casual contact with a different approach? Why should even fictional representations of different parenting styles be an invitation to argue about who should do what? One answer: In these putatively private matters people constantly reference public standards. They can live with their own parenting mistakes so long as everyone else is making the same ones. They don’t care if they’re getting a raw deal so long as everyone is getting the same deal. But there are no standards and it’s possible there never again will be. We’re all just groping, then lying about it afterward. As a result, the primary relationships in American family life have acquired the flavor of a Moroccan souk.

I found pretty quickly that any thoughts or feelings or even dramatic episodes I didn’t get down on paper immediately I forgot entirely—which was the first reason I began to write stuff down. Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice.

For a while I went around feeling a tiny bit guilty all the time, but then I realized that all around me fathers were pretending to do one thing, and feel one way, when in fact they were doing and feeling all sorts of things, and then engaging afterward in what amounted to an extended cover-up.

I should be embarrassed and concerned. I should be sweeping her out of the pool and washing her mouth out with soap. I don’t feel that way. Actually, I’m impressed. More than impressed: awed. It’s just incredibly heroic, taking out after this rat pack of boys. Plus she’s sticking up for her big sister, which isn’t something you see every day. I don’t want to get in her way. I just want to see what happens next.

One of the many things I dislike about being a grown-up is the compulsion to have a purpose in life. People are forever asking why you are doing whatever you happen to be doing and before long you succumb to the need to supply an answer. The least naturally ambitious people can have ambition thrust upon them in this way. Once you’ve established yourself as a more or less properly functioning adult, it is nearly impossible to just go somewhere and screw off.

If you have a gift for frightening new parents, your fortune in this world is secure. New parents are not rational; they worry about all sorts of things that it makes no sense to worry about.

The French, of course, are famously expert on all sorts of rarefied subjects: wine, food, lovemaking, etc. But they are also expert in designating some slender body of learning as a “subject” and in establishing themselves as its sole authority.

The French know how to find categories ignored by the rest of the world and colonize them.

It is rare, even in a family of three, for everyone to be feeling the same emotion.

ON THE RARE days I do my fair share of the parenting, the mood in Paris changes. This is true especially on the mornings I agree to escort Quinn to her twice-weekly Gymboree class. In the few minutes between the morning feeding and my racing out the door, baby in arms, in a long and often futile search for a taxicab, a single unspoken sentence echoes off our kitchen walls. The sentence is: “Now you will get a taste of what my life is like.”

The truth is that parenting, in small doses, isn’t as bad as all that. At the Gymboree office, I am once again treated as a charming oddity: the wonderful father who has taken the morning off from work to spend it with his baby daughter. About a third of the other adults are nannies; the rest are actual mothers. All of them find the notion of a man free in the middle of the day amusingly lovable, which is what, of course, I strive to be. From this and other evidence, I deduce that the French male has cut an even harsher deal with his spouse than the American one has. The American deal—or at any rate the American deal currently fashionable in my socioeconomic bracket—is that unless you can prove you are out making money, you had better at least pretend to be caring for your child. You might think that the French male, so conspicuous in his disdain for commerce, would be left holding the Gymboree bag more often. Alas, never, except on weekends, when he is unable to pretend that he is in his office.

AT SOME POINT in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and—let us be frank—got fleeced. The agreement he signed foisted all sorts of new paternal responsibilities on him and gave him nothing of what he might have expected in return. Not the greater love of his wife, who now was encouraged to view him as an unreliable employee. Not the special love from his child, who, no matter how many times he fed and changed and wiped and walked her, would always prefer her mother in a pinch. Not even the admiration of the body politic, who pushed him into signing the deal. Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight. Men just look away in shame. And so the American father now finds himself in roughly the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain. The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH…YOU…POOR…BASTARD.

The domestic policy handbook clearly states that when anything goes seriously wrong with our child, I am to holler for her mother and then take my place at her elbow and await further instructions. As I say, the American father of a baby is really just a second-string mother.

The language of parenthood is encoded. When a mother says to a father, “I want to take her to the hospital,” she is really saying “WE are ALL going to the hospital, and if you whisper even a word of complaint, you will have proved yourself for all time a man incapable of love.” Maternal concern is one of those forces of nature not worth fighting.

From the point of view of the woman, “labor” is well named; from the point of view of the man, it really should be called “waiting.” Your wife goes into labor; you go into waiting.

A woman in labor needs to believe, however much evidence she has to the contrary, that the man in waiting beside her bed is directing every ounce of his concern toward her. This is of course impossible; and so the trick for the man in waiting is to disguise his private interests. He learns to camouflage trips to the john as grape-juice-fetching missions. When he is hungry he waits until his wife dozes off, then nips furtively down to the hospital vending machine for his supper of Ring Dings and Nacho Cheese Doritos. At some point in his private ordeal one of the hospital staff will turn to him and ask sweetly, “And how is Dad doing?” He must understand that no one actually cares how Dad is doing. His fatigue, his worries, his tedium, his disappointment at the contents of hospital vending machines—these are better unmentioned. Above all, he must know that if his mask of perfect selflessness slips for even a moment he will be nabbed.

THE LAST PLACE to recover from what they do to you in a hospital is a hospital.

You might think that people who work in hospital maternity wards have some special feeling for new mothers. You’d be wrong. Some of them enter the spirit of the occasion, and a few do it with obvious pleasure. But an astonishing number seem to resent any woman who has had the nerve to reproduce. To ensure that she thinks twice before she does it again, they bang bedpans against her door every twenty minutes, holler down the halls all hours of the night, ignore all her gentle requests, and, in general, exude the warmth and charm of an old Soviet border guard. “Oh, great, another fucking baby,” I half expected a few of them to say as they breathed their heavy sighs over my wife’s pale, spent body. For all I know, this is sound hospital strategy. Certainly, the atmosphere in the recovery ward discourages anyone from staying longer than necessary. The patient remains on the premises just long enough for the hospital to collect the data it needs to prove to the courts that it didn’t kill her.

Anyway, the last time around there was no question about what I would do after our child was born: I’d curl up in a little ball in the chair beside my wife’s hospital bed, protect her from the hospital staff, and pop down to the nursery every half hour or so to make sure that Quinn hadn’t been sold on the black market. This time is different. This time I’m free to go; indeed, it is my duty to go. By default, I’m now in charge of family harmony. Which is to say, I’m supposed to fetch Quinn from home, bring her to the hospital, and prove to her that her life, as promised, is now better than ever.

The parenting books don’t tell you where to go when your first move doesn’t lead to psychological checkmate. The only thing I had going for me was the toddler’s indifference to logic.

IN WADING THROUGH the parenthood literature, I have read exactly one piece of writing that comes close to capturing the potential misery of it. It was an article in The New Yorker by John Seabrook, in which the author hunted down a man named Ferber, whose research gave birth to a cold-blooded method of training babies to sleep. As I recall, Seabrook and his wife had been made miserable by their newborn’s tendency to holler through the night. Addled by lack of sleep, they set out to “Ferberize” their child. This meant shutting the door and clinging to each other as their baby in the next room shrieked with greater and greater urgency. Ferber extremists believe that parents should leave their infant to learn how to fall asleep on its own, even if the poor creature becomes so upset it vomits. One book even suggests that parents spread a plastic sheet under the baby’s crib to catch the mess. Before Seabrook went this far, he set out to find Ferber. When he found him, he also found that Ferber had recanted. He was no longer quite so sure about his early research. Millions of babies were being tortured without a theory.

Even if we had a theory, we couldn’t abide by it. It’s unnatural to leave a baby to cry alone in its crib; it makes you feel about as humane as a serial killer. And so our lives have now resumed a pattern they last had three years ago, when Quinn was born. Only this time it’s worse because Quinn is still here. Dixie—who is now referred to by the other three members of her family simply as “the baby”—wakes up every hour between seven p.m. and seven a.m. and bleats just loudly enough to alert Quinn to the possibilities. Quinn wakes up at eleven at night, then again at one, three, and five-thirty in the morning, and each time screams a horror-movie scream that sends a chill down the spine of the man across the street.

There is no way my wife and I could function if we each had to deal with both children, and so we’ve split the family in two. I sleep downstairs with Quinn, Tabitha sleeps upstairs with Dixie. On good nights, we meet for dinner. Essentially, we are both single parents. I reckon that Tabitha averages maybe three hours of sleep each night, broken up into forty-five-minute chunks. I get more like five broken hours, and while I should be pleased about that, I am, in truth, pissed off. That’s what happens whe...

I decided to keep this diary for a couple of reasons. The first was that I wanted a written record for Dixie, who, as a second child, runs a risk of being a blur; and I knew that there was no way I would take the trouble to record her arrival if I didn’t have an editor breathing down my neck for the material. The other was that I noticed a tendency to gloss over the unpleasant aspects of parenthood, in part because it’s unseemly to complain about one’s children but also because there is a natural inclination to forget that there was anything to complain about. But there is. In the first few weeks after ...

Here’s what my typical day now looks like, for example, beginning at what used to be bedtime. I awaken at eleven at night, and then again at one, three, and five-thirty in the morning, to persuade Quinn that there isn’t a spider in her bed. At seven a.m. she rises for good, somehow fully rested, and hollers at the top of her lungs for her mother. As battered as Rocky going into the twelfth round against Apollo Creed, I wrestle her to the ground, dress her in clothes she does not want to wear, and drag her out of the house, still screaming, to my office, where I feed her a breakfast she does not want to eat. She demands chocolate; I offer a fruit plate; after tantrums on both sides of the bargaining table, we compromise on an Eggo waffle. Around nine I get her to school and enjoy a brief...

This cheering thought lasts until I get home and find my wife in tears. Often I try to hide, but usually she spots me, and when she does, she will usually say something poignant. “I feel like I am going through this alone,” for instance. Or, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” Whatever she says neatly undercuts my belief that I am carrying far more than my share of our burden; indeed, it makes it clear that I am not a hero at all but a slacker, a deadbeat Dad. Demoralized, I trom...

In truth, I usually wind up curled up in a little ball of fatigue until dinner, which is my job to throw together. After dinner, I put Quinn to bed while Tabitha nurses the baby for the twenty-thousandth time. Then the cycle begins all over again.

I know that all of this will soon pass and our family will once more achieve some wonderful new equilibrium. With one more person on hand to love and to be loved, we’ll soon be drowning in finer feelings. But for now we’re drowning mainly in self-pity. You would think that someone would have come up with a humane, economical method for absorbing a new child into a family. Certainly there’s billions in it for whoever does. As it stands, there are three approaches to the problem, all of them inadequate. You can pretend to believe the books and do whatever you must do to your children to ensure a good night’s sleep for yourself. You can throw money at it and hire squadrons of night nurses to tend to your children while you move into the local Ritz-Carlton. Or you can do what we are doing and muddle through as best as you can, grabbing at any old piece of advice that comes your way, less because it will actually help matters than because it offers hope. You tell yourself that eventually this baby will learn to sleep, just as eventually it will learn to walk and to use the toilet. After all, you don’t see a lot of adults who wake up hollering at the ceiling every forty-five minutes, just as you don’t see a lot of adults who crawl around on all fours, or who crap their pants twice a day. So it stands to reason that the problem will solve itself. Here’s hoping.

On some days she hollers insults at me the whole way to school—“You stink” and “You’re dead” are two favorites—and if she can find something to hurl at my head, she’ll do that, too. Driving her around these days is like playing right field for the visiting team in Yankee Stadium.

Never having had good habits myself, I was poorly situated to argue the point, and if I had, I wouldn’t have been believed. My wife was raised in a military household that left her in full possession of the martial virtues. I was raised in a home where it was possible for me every couple of weeks to steal a jumbo sack of Nestlé’s chocolate-chip cookies from the kitchen and secrete them under my bed at night without anyone being the wiser for it. I was meant to be six-foot-three and make straight A’s through high school but as a result of skipping dinner and instead eating a dozen Nestlé’s chocolate-chip cookies every night I wound up five-foot-ten with a D in biology my sophomore year. I could see my wife’s point. She had spent two and a half years drilling her better qualities into her first child only to see them sucked out in three and a half weeks of prolonged exposure to me. She was the ace of the pitching staff who had shut down the opposing batters for eight innings only to watch the closer blow the game in the ninth. (I’ve had baseball on my mind.)

In the past three years I have tried on occasion to imagine what effects I am having on my child. I do this dutifully rather than naturally because it seems like the sort of thing a father should do. But I never get anywhere with it. The fact, as opposed to the theory, of life with a small child is an amoral system of bribes and blackmails. You do this for me, you get that. You don’t do this for me, you don’t get that. I’ve always assumed that if a small child has enough joy and love and stability in her life, along with intelligently directed bribes and blackmail, the rest will take care of itself. And my approach appeared to be working. Right up until the birth of her sister, Quinn excelled at childhood and did so, it seemed, effortlessly. It honestly never occurred to me that I should be in some way shaping her. I was one of those easygoing CEOs who believe that excessive discipline crushes the creativity of his employees. I believed in managing by hanging around. In retrospect, the only reason I was able to get away with this pose is that I wasn’t the CEO. I was more like a titular chairman, allowed to sit at the head of the table but never actually listened to. Now, clearly, I must take a different approach. The CEO’s attention has been diverted by a difficult acquisition in a foreign country. The chairman is, however briefly, in charge. Everyone else is anxious.

THE THING THAT most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel. Clutching Quinn after she exited the womb, I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement. The worst was hatred. I distinctly remember standing on a balcony with Quinn squawking in my arms and wondering what I would do if it wasn’t against the law to hurl her off it. I also recall convincing myself that official statistics dramatically overstated the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome—when an infant dies for no apparent reason in her crib—because most of them were probably murder. The reason we all must be so appalled by parents who murder their infants is that it is so easy and even natural to do. Maternal love may be instinctive, but paternal love is learned behavior.

Here is the central mystery of fatherhood, or at any rate my experience of it. How does a man’s resentment of this…thing…that lands in his life and instantly disrupts every aspect of it for the apparent worse turn into love? A month after Quinn was born, I would have felt only an obligatory sadness if she had been rolled over by a truck. Six months or so later, I’d have thrown myself in front of the truck to save her from harm. What happened? What transformed me from a monster into a father? I do not know. But this time around I’m keeping a closer eye on the process.

Here as best I can determine are the factors contributing to what appears to be another miraculous shift in feeling occurring inside me at this very moment:

Maternal propaganda. I am a professional writer and therefore am meant to be keenly observant. Without Tabitha, however, I would notice next to nothing about my own child, and certainly nothing admirable. All I am able to see by myself are the many odd-colored substances that emerge from her that need cleaning up, and the many unpleasant noises she makes that shake me from my sleep. But there are all these other, more lovable things about her, too, and her mother sees every one of them and presses them upon me with such genuine enthusiasm that it thaws my frozen heart. Her facial expressions, for instance. She has her Smurf Face and her Bowel-Movement Face and her E.T. Face. She has her How-Ya-Doin’-Today Face and her Call-Me-at-the-Office Face and her Mafia-Hit-Man Face—which is the one when she curls her lip at you and you half expect her to say, “You talkin’ to me?”

Her gift for mimicry. A five-week-old baby is for the most part unresponsive to ordinary attempts to communicate with her. You can scream at her or you can sing to her, and all you’ll get in return is a blank stare. But if you press your face right up close to hers and contort it into grotesque shapes, she’ll copy whatever you’re doing. Stick out your tongue, she’ll stick out her tongue; open wide your mouth, and she’ll open wide hers, too. Lackin...