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Fatherhood is to some extent “an extended cover-up”, says Michael Lewis. His new book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, aims to uncover the cover-up and reveal the underbelly of dads’ feelings about the subject. Like any good parenting book, it is full of dead-pan humour, often at Lewis’ own expense. There are no attempts to Disneyfy the dad process.
This is not a heroic, sugar-coated portrayal. This is dad thinking about his dinner during labour, passing out from excess alcohol consumption at the first birth and getting virtually no sleep on a camping trip. In short, it is about dads who try to do their best but struggle to come to terms with what parenthood means. What is curious about it is that there are not that many books that talk honestly about the transition to fatherhood. This will surely change as men become more involved in the whole parenting thing.
The book takes the format of a series of short articles on significant episodes in the births and lives of Lewis' three children. He compares notes with his own dad, saying that, unfairly, his dad got just as much love from his children as his mother, even though she put in all the effort. However true or not this is, he does point out ruefully that, in the early days, it is the mum who the kids want most of the time. What is clearly true, though, and Lewis recognises this, is that dads who put in the effort feel more attached to the child.
Lewis is great on the way fathers are expected to feel certain things, like to fall instantly in love with their offspring, and then believe they have to pretend that they do feel that way when in fact they feel something entirely different. He suggests women love their children immediately and that men have to learn to love them – whether or not this is entirely true is a moot point, but it is what he and probably many men perceive to be the case. He talks about his lack of involvement or avoidance of involvement in his children's lives when he is writing books or, with his third child, when he is busy trying to look after - or pay someone else to look after – his two daughters.
His wife, he thinks, knows how to do the whole parenthood thing. She appears as a bit of a shadowy figure, cajoling him to bond with his children, making him love his newborns by selling him their good points and generally looking totally sleep-deprived. It would be nice one day to have an account that gave both the mum's and the dad's view of parenthood to compare notes. They may find that they have more than a little in common with each other and that perhaps mums are not quite as in charge as they might appear and that basically everyone is "covering up" and no-one on the boat really has a clue where they are paddling towards.
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Posted November 11, 2009 8:59 PM