Mothering: My Day in Drag

The difference between mothering and fathering tell a significant story.  A couple of weeks ago, I dressed in a suit in order to make a contact about a possible job, and I experienced that difference first hand.

People looked differently at me when I was in my man drag.  They avoided my gaze.  Normally, when people see my 13-month-old, they smile, laugh or stick out their tongues at him.  But that day, they were far less likely to look at him at all, much less play with him.  On the rare occasion that someone did look him in the eye, they conspicuously looked away when I turned towards them.  I was an entirely different person than the tee-shirt and jeans wearing mop headed, Dad.  I was a Father.


Mothering
According to Sara Ruddick, the author of the 1989 book Maternal Thinking, "Anyone who commits her or himself to responding to children’s demands, and makes the work of response a considerable part of her or his life, is a mother."  The most common definition of mothering emphasizes caring for someone, usually a child.  Sometimes we say it derisively to indicate that someone cares so intensely that they have lost their boundaries.

Fathering
Fathering, on the other hand, is (as Webster's dictionary puts it) begetting.  It is a place of origin, as in, "He is the father of the social welfare state" or, "He fathered that child."  A father need only make a woman pregnant and then walk away.  However, fathering has also come to mean earning money for the household, like a conveyor belt in a factory.  The role of earning money fits well with our traditional view of a father as someone who is there at the beginning but doesn't see the parenting role through to completion.  The father is there in the morning, all the parenting happens, and then the father comes home at night for a glass of beer and maybe some disciplining of the kids.

From Dad to Father
While I was on that subway wearing a suit, to the people around me I was a father.  I was an originator, not an actively engaged participant in my son's life.  I was not a dad who responds to the needs of someone I love, but just a father probably taking him to daycare.  It was a sad experience for me.  There was a presumed distance between me and my son.  It felt like I wasn't getting credit for my "mothering."

But there was also a moment of realization of how far we have come.  Whenever I am dressed as Dad, people do see me as a mother.  They acknowledge Ms. Ruddick's statement that mothering is not female specific.  They look me in the eye and talk to me about my child.  When I go to playgroups and reading circles with my 13-month-old, I see other Dads who are met as equals by the mother's in the group.  I am heartened to see that the traditionally female skill of child rearing, not just child begetting, is becoming a human skill shared by men and women alike.  This barrier is falling as quickly as the workplace gender barrier was to fall in 1961.  We men are taking what should rightfully be shared with all of us.

Parenting?
As described in earlier posts, the stay-at-home mom is a recent invention made available to more than a handful of extremely wealthy women only through the invention of technology.  Before the early 20th cetnruty, most but the wealthiest women had to work even as they were raising their children, and the wealthiest women had servants that raised their children for them so it would be a teeny bit ridiculous to even call them stay-at-home moms. 

The real question is not whether we should all do what Judith Schafley tells us to do and have the women stay home with the kids while the men go to the office, but that we should all be able to find a combination of "mothering" and "fathering" that suits our individual talents, skills, and desires.  Perhaps for most people, we all want to mother and to father.  We all want to find a meaningful job where we can challenge ourselves and engage with other adults, and we all want to cuddle with our kids once we get home. 

Certainly, daycare can make that available to a larger swath of people, just as having one auncle stay home with all the cousins can free up the family to go to work.  But part time work is another option, where parents can trade off between one another.  In that world, perhaps a man in man-drag on a subway car with a stroller will be assumed to be as much a mother as a woman in sweat pants.

Recently, Sara Ruddick passed away, and we all lost a great mother who spent her life caring for us and trying to introduce us to the satisfaction of being great mothers ourselves.  And perhaps, for those women who want to be fathers, they can find equal satisfaction in being great fathers.  When it comes to parenting, Sara Ruddick showed the world that gender roles are artificially confining unless we can pick which parts of which gender role we'd like and which we wouldn't.

We won't be able to pick and choose our gender roles until we start valuing the woman's role as much as we value the man's role.  As long as the emphasis on gender equality remains on the importance of giving women a place in the office, we will always be valuing traditionally male priorities.  And it is not enough to smile and say, "Isn't that wonderful that he's a stay-at-home Dad," or "It sure is nice to have a man in the classroom."  We need to actively advocate for men in pink collar jobs and the home, and while it is good to have women allies, the impetus needs to come from men.

One example of this kind of liberating gender traitorship is the active and full engagement of a man in man-drag in mothering.  I felt deliberately defiant and a terrific rush of liberation when I sang songs with my kid the whole way home.  For some, the melody of liberation is "We shall overcome," for others it is actually, "Twinkle twinkle little star."