The Unmade Bed Read online

  The acceptance of gay marriage would not have spread so rapidly if straight marriage were not in the middle of its own upheaval. As straight sex begins to include acts that were once illicit, the capacity to hate others for performing those same acts inevitably erodes. Along with the physical abjection, the morality it underpinned vanishes. How can you condemn a gay couple for what you’re doing? We can’t accept others without accepting ourselves first.

  * * *

  The straight family, as a mode, as a cultural practice, increasingly resembles, and aspires to resemble, the gay family. They have moved from pariah to paragon in a generation.

  I understand this more-than-tolerance is a luxury of my time and place. Toronto in 2015 is an exception; the premier of the province is a lesbian grandmother, after all. When I think of gay marriage, I do not imagine an abstract category. I think about a family I know with two dads and a bunch of kids, all living right out of a children’s story of the fancier sort, in a big old house in what looks from the outside like a nonstop caper. The kids originally come from around the world. A raft of nannies (what is the collective noun for nanny?) maintains order and fills in various blanks that arise in various schedules. The family is miraculous.

  Or, rather, my outsider’s fantasy of what is, no doubt, their own complex struggle finds them miraculous. Not that their evident happiness, even in my imagination, means anything more than the dads’ good fortune and hard work and strength. Plenty of gay families, I assume, are miserable. Their stories possess attractive qualities nonetheless, vividly attractive. Here are people who have built their family out of determined love and who have arranged their domestic life out of personal inclination and rational discussion, not inherited, discredited gender roles. They have made their own traditions. They have marriage without all the bullshit between men and women. They have marriage on the terms that suit their particular needs and desires. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?

  Obergefell v. Hodges was far more revealing about the state of straight marriage than the state of gay marriage. The conflict was not between competing interpretations of the U.S. Constitution but between competing feelings about intimacy and dignity. In the Supreme Court’s majority verdict, Justice Anthony Kennedy made a play for being recited at wedding ceremonies:

  No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.

  The dissent, from Justice Antonin Scalia, took a decidedly alternate view of the nature of marriage: “Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.” For Scalia marriage is an abridgment of intimacy, a restriction of the possibilities of human communion, a conclusion to the freedom of love. Obergefell v. Hodges revealed a whole range of oppositions crackling through straight people’s understanding of their marriages. Choice against duty. Engagement against obligation. Respect against traditional roles. But one side in all these oppositions is winning. Choice and engagement and respect are more powerful than duty and obligation and tradition.

  Support for gay marriage is as good a metric as any to see how quickly the new vision of the family is replacing the old one: at about 2 percent a year. Fast. More than fast. The change is coming suddenly and forever.

  * * *

  Someday the Republican Party is going to have a meeting in some Howard Johnson in North Carolina and realize that the people who share their most vaunted values—“personal responsibility,” “the importance of family,” and “liberty in the pursuit of happiness”—are gay people. They will then have to ask themselves many perplexing questions about why they have invested so much time and effort deliberately and loudly despising people who believe what they believe.

  A few Republicans smell an opportunity in the new research on the family but don’t quite know what to do with it. In January 2014, in a marquee speech on poverty, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida put the family at the center of his economic policy: “The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by eighty-two percent. But it isn’t a government spending program. It’s called marriage.” Republican preoccupation with family values is nothing new, but the economic motive is. And their math, this time, is correct. They have so far used their new appreciation of the crisis of fatherlessness and the rise of the new family values to do little more than launch broadsides against various something-nothings of culture and to reject the idea that public policy can have any effect on the family whatsoever. For them the new fatherhood is mostly an excuse for inaction.

  If Republicans looked more closely at the mechanics of fatherlessness they might gain insight into a host of policies. For instance, immigration reform is vital because the policies in place today destroy families. At the current rate 1,100 undocumented immigrants are deported each day. By one estimate deportation will separate 152,000 children from one of their parents. Now that we know how deeply family structure matters, destruction of families on such a scale can only be considered a kind of cultural genocide, just as the drug war, by incarcerating African-American men at four times the rate of white men for negligible possession offenses, amounted to cultural genocide. A few Republicans who actually deal with the fallout of government policies on families, like governors Rick Perry and Chris Christie, have recognized the cost of these disastrous policies. Both have spoken about ending the drug war.

  Democrats don’t want to hear about fathers much either. President Obama could approach family structure only tangentially. In February 2013 he announced a private-public partnership, My Brother’s Keeper, a tentative first step in addressing the problem of minority boys, who are the most vulnerable. At the announcement Obama said, “Nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life.” It’s “American families” boilerplate, of course. But the data show that it’s actually true as a matter of policy, and not only for minority boys but for all boys. My Brother’s Keeper was a gesture, an important one—possibly a trial balloon?—but a small one. A family-based approach to inequality has the aura of a host of outmoded prejudices many on the left have spent their entire careers fighting against. They prefer to focus on the traditional approaches of grievance politics, with the emphasis on class and race. But the most powerful way to alter those inequities is through family structure.

  Obama understood the craving for the fatherly bond perfectly, instinctively. He ate dinner with his family almost every night; no doubt he enjoyed the time with his girls. But he must have understood how much that gesture represents the ideal of a new masculinity. He himself embodied the transferred status of fatherhood: once the president was the Father of the Nation; now the president must just be a father.

  The changes the politicians are trying to gauge are far more profound than those that can be reflected in mere policy shifts. The subterranean rivers are churning. The ancient conception of the family as a social reflection of a biological distinction—man and woman united by an imposed code of rights and obligations—has given way to an idea of the family as a contract of equals, whose arrangements reflect the diversity and particularity of all human desire. The family is shifting from social arrangement to work of art.

  * * *

  A single small but vital fact distinguishes men of the past fifty years from all other men in history: most of us see our children being born. I
remember my mother telling me over coffee one afternoon that Lamaze was the most important moment in gender relations over the course of her lifetime. It wasn’t the publication of The Feminine Mystique. It wasn’t the Pill or Playboy. Women have knocked down many walls to get into many powerful places. Men knocked down the wall to the delivery room. Up until the mid-1960s the mysteries of birth were strictly the preserve of women. Then, suddenly, they weren’t. Men insisted on being with their wives as they gave birth and with their children as they came into the world. This single act changed the position of men in relation to women and to children and to domesticity itself. It was a fundamental shift in the gravity of family relationships.

  The old fatherhood was a series of unexpressed assumptions. The new fatherhood requires intelligence. It requires judgment. The new fatherhood is messy. It has to be. In the face of this messiness there are men, and not just a few, who retreat into fantasies of lost idylls, worlds where men were men, whatever that might have meant. Only the truly lost man would want to return to his grandfather’s way of life, to the bad food, the boring sex, the isolation, to being financially responsible for a family and then never seeing them. The new fatherhood is a huge gain for men, the chance for a whole new range of pleasures and agonies, a fuller version of our humanity, a deeper intimacy.

  For women the canard of failure on both fronts promises to vanish. Experience is forcing the vanishing. I never once thought of my mother as “absent” because she worked. Studies from as early as the 1950s have consistently shown that the children of women who work have no significant differences in attachment to their parents, in psychological health, or in achievements at school; there are not even significant differences in the amount of time stay-at-home moms and working moms spend with their kids. It makes sense: there’s only so much time parents and kids can stand to be with each other.

  Of all the grand upheavals between men and women over the past two generations—the sexual revolution, the rise of women in the workplace, and the rest—the new fatherhood has been the easiest for men. Despite no historical examples of male nurturers, almost no literature of the macho caretaker, men took to the new fatherhood in all its fleshiness and complication without much struggle, indeed with relish. Today the overcaring father is a mockable cliché; you’ve seen them comparing stroller models at the playgrounds, giving baby a bottle in a bar during the Final Four, discussing the latest studies on the merits of early music education on “executive function.” Witnessing birth was the beginning. The new father is an engaged father by instinct. The new father holds his babies. He bathes them. He reads to them. The new father knows that the role of the father is not merely to provide. The role of the father is to be there, physically and in spirit.

  Not that I remember all the times my own father was there. Who could remember all the times he waited in the middle of winter in Alberta, reading a day-old newspaper in the car, for me to finish my piano lesson? Who can remember the money he gave me? Or the advice? Oblivion is not ingratitude. His presence was auratic, a warm glow, the weight of a thick hand on my shoulder, the heaving of his chest while he napped. The aura is identical to the inexpressible sense that he loved me. It was known to me. But this did not need to be said. Not often anyway. It was not said often enough. As I went to pick up my son, I remembered my father’s hands, pinched lovingly by the golden band. Childhood is filled with hands at eye level. Despite all his hands had done, despite their various caresses, I remembered them at rest.

  * * *

  The day Dad died I brought my son back to the house and sat him down in the living room with his mother. I told him his grandfather was dead. He wanted to know if that meant he would never see him again. I said yes. Then he started to weep. The lesson was harsh for a six-year-old: people are here, and then they’re not. He threw himself into my arms. I was his father. And that meant, right then, that I was there. I was there for my son. I would be there until I wasn’t. And that was enough.

  * * *

  I. As I recall, I read them. Steve didn’t. I told him about what I read and blathered on about their conflicting expert opinions, but I’m pretty sure he never read any himself. Nothing made me feel more like a failure than William Sears’s ubiquitous attachment parenting manual, The Baby Book. He’s an evangelical enthusiast of back-to-nature practices like breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and baby wearing, which he argues can be scientifically demonstrated to be better for your kid, even though, if you do all of it in the way he instructs, it is hopelessly incompatible with having a career or, actually, a life. All my working mom friends read it religiously and then felt crummy about themselves for failing to measure up. Then we all read the Harper’s article “The Tyranny of Breastfeeding” by the French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter and we all forgave ourselves and moved on. When I’m an old lady, I plan to look back at the Dr. Sears mania and wonder what the fuck we were all thinking.

  II. Those first few months after my father-in-law’s death, with a newborn in the house, a bewildered and grieving family, and a sweet little six-year-old boy jumping around in the midst of it all, were almost too much to bear. We lived in a hot, painful stew of tears, breast milk, baby poo, and laundry. During that period my family was tended to, largely, by a raft of professional women, friends, neighbors, and family members—lawyers, doctors, professors, journalists. Having big careers did not stop them from taking care of us. No wonder women so often complain of burnout! Something I learned acutely during this period: you never forget the kindness of people who help you survive a personal tragedy. Every sympathy card matters; to this day I can quote lines from some of them. You remember every loaf of banana bread hand-delivered to your door, every casserole and jar of soup found on your porch, every bottle of scotch dropped off. This essential life-sustaining work is mostly done by women (with the exception of my wonderful cousin John, who baked and cooked and kept coming around). Why mostly women? Is it because women are better at anticipating what a distressed family needs? Is it because women learn how to hand-write cards and cook lasagna (even while they are earning their MBAs)? Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that in the next stage of the feminist revolution, men will become caregivers too. I suspect this will take a long time.

  THREE

  * * *

  Straight Camp

  A FEW weeks after the birth of my daughter and the death of my father, my mother gave me my grandfather’s war watch. Curled in crepe paper inside an empty shoe polish can in the back of a cupboard filled with other family ephemera, blackened and defaced by time and indifference, the thing looked more like a crust of rotten bread than machinery. I was grateful to have it. My mother was grateful to give it away. I wanted things that lasted. My mother wanted to give away as much as she could. Grief was rummaging through us in opposite directions. Also, small point, I needed a watch.

  If my father was an icon of the changes of a previous generation, my grandfather was an icon of the way men used to be. He fathered and raised seven children and supported his family by working the railroads and hunting and fishing and tending to a garden with neat rows of staunch corn and feathery lettuces, thumb-thick beans, and candy-sweet carrots and with boundless rhubarb patches whose crisp stalks I was free to rip and chew. My memories of him were mostly of the summer vacations I spent on the family homestead in New Brunswick, memories of a shirtless boyhood, my grandfather egging on the boxing matches between me and my older cousin James, who had a foot in height on me and two feet in reach (although my grandfather admired my scrappiness—I could take a punch), or leading us to the camp tucked onto the edge of the Canaan River to fish for tiddlers with corn niblets that reeked of the tin they came in, or driving the pickup to the local dump, suppressing our gag at the reek, to pore through the fly-rifled piles. Once we found a Swiss Army knife with only a few of the attachments snapped off. James, entitled as elder, kept it.

  They were sunny memories, memories of the freedom a city kid enjoys with country relatives, but I knew, even then, t
hat shadows followed by grandfather. I could sense their darkness exactly because they were so scrupulously kept from me by my mother, by my grandmother, and by my grandfather himself. His means of retreat was rum, which he camouflaged in pineapple juice. The source of his darkness, I knew, was The War. He had flown only once since 1945, when he traveled across the country to see me, just born. He had to get so drunk to get on board nobody ever suggested he fly again.

  When my mother handed me the rusted, abandoned war watch, it fit into my hand like something the hero at the beginning of a fable might receive, an amulet or a clue. I took it to a fancy jeweler in downtown Toronto, where a devoted, monkish master craftsman, accent from somewhere in the Caucasus, undertook its restoration the way engineers undertake the bridging of rivers, with a kind of basic human determination to overcome the forces of nature. He soaked the face in a solution for three months. He ordered parts from Switzerland, which took half a year to arrive. He fiddled. He rebuilt. Nearly a year later he handed me the burnished machine with a lesson on how to wind it and what amounted to a massive compliment: “This is a good watch.”

  It is a good watch, as it turns out—a 1940 Rolex with the original nylon band. Its hands are painted with radium, and its back is inscribed with my grandfather’s name and RAF number. The band is in good shape, the restorer explained, probably because my grandfather took it off after the war and never put it on again. Whatever history the watch connected me to, my grandfather wanted to forget all about it.

  When I wear it now, the watch gives me a strange, undeserved confidence. It’s as if the watch were leading me (again, like an amulet) with an almost tribal feeling, an intimate sense of belonging to a numinous tradition that I could never articulate but that I would never be able to deny. It is the inarticulate feeling of manliness, and at my father’s funeral I needed that manliness, even as an abandoned, nearly ruined accessory.