Two Dad Memoirs and the End of Fatherhood

In 2005 I married a man whose detailed thoughts about parenting, childcare and family life I knew very little about. We’d agreed that we wanted children—or, rather, I’d said I wanted a large family and he’d said, “well maybe not too large,” and we’d each believed the other to be in agreement. In retrospect, this seems insane, but it’s not so unusual, really: People who move to New York City generally do so in pursuit of ambition; they’re choosing themselves and their dreams over good conditions for child-raising. Parenting for us was a haze on the horizon. So I was surprised a few years in when my husband and I found ourselves locked in bitter conflict during my pregnancy with our first baby. He, an American-educated Russian expatriate who’d never shown previous signs of being a social conservative, turned out to have traditional ideas about childcare: as in, it was my job, and if he did any, it was a favor to me. I, a typical American liberal-feminist of my class and region, was appalled and vehemently disagreed with him. I thought our contributions should be equal. I also thought gender was a construct, money didn’t matter, and cloth diapering was a moral imperative.

Thus, my husband and I found ourselves outliers on the bell curve of a battle that was going on in the houses of heterosexual couples all over Brooklyn, where everyone was suddenly discovering that women do more childcare, and finding themselves in unanticipated conflict. Who should work, and how much, and how would the work be valued? How would the couple split the childcare? Where did one spouse’s art or passion fit in, and how is it valued when money becomes tight? Our problems were worse, but they weren’t fundamentally different from those of our friends.

Also, everyone was miserable. This, at least, was something my husband and I agreed upon. On the playground, in the library, at the cafés and at the birthday parties (Bounce U on Fort Hamilton Parkway, anyone?), we encountered dirty, surly, grouchy, resentful adults snapping at each other, fighting about parenting strategy, and unable to control their snot-nosed brats. In some cases, letting a child wear a thick carpet of snot on the upper lip, or have a bird’s nest of unbrushed hair, or hit anyone they wanted, was the parenting strategy—let them be their natural selves, or something like that. We were hideous, and everyone around us was hideous, and we hated our lives. Does it have to be this way?, my husband and I asked each other—when we were speaking to each other—What is going wrong?

My answer at the time, and the answer of many women around me, was sexism. The problem was men who weren’t sincere enough in their feminism and commitment to co-parenting. If only the guys would tackle the job like a full partner, it would be less annoying, less depressing, more fun, our houses would be cleaner, our children better behaved, we’d have more time back for ourselves, and so on. Nothing filled me with more rage in this era than my husband, or anyone’s husband, denying that some kind of child-work needed to be done—and they all did it. You saw it everywhere: some man addressing his wife with the smirking, gaslighting edge that she’s just being crazy by doing all this needless work. The kid doesn’t need all those snacks, the diapers, the sunscreen, the pacifier, the toy, that huge bag, that ugly stroller. If the man did it, the whole process would be chill; he’d just waltz out the door, freeballing it. The sole woman I knew who seemed even remotely happy with her husband was the one who’d fully given up on making him do anything.

The fault seemed so clearly on the side of the men that even at the time I had the lingering feeling I must be missing something—there’s never just one side. I’ve spent the years since wondering what it was I couldn’t see. I want my son and daughter’s experiences of marriage and parenthood to be different than ours was—and I want them to have that large family I ended up missing out on. Endless mommy-memoirs haven’t helped—we all agree too much—but two excellent recent dad memoirs, Charles Bock’s I Will Do Better, published in October 2024, and Keith Gessen’s Raising Raffi, published June 2022, have suggested some ideas to me.

Charles Bock, the author of acclaimed 2008 novel Beautiful Children, writes in I Will Do Better about being left as the single parent of his three-year-old daughter Lily, after his wife Diana’s tragic early death from cancer in 2011. Bock is a New Yorker of my type—an ambitious transplant with artistic aspirations—and was a distant acquaintance at the time of Diana’s diagnosis; we’d had children at almost exactly the same time. I remember a fundraising email circulating for his wife’s treatment, and my own incuriosity and lack of concern. She’s so young, I thought, she’ll be fine. The next thing I heard, she’d died.

I Will Do Better stands out as a parenting memoir for its wit, sensitivity and high-quality writing, but its true contribution is the rigor with which Bock holds himself to account. If most mommy memoirs are some form of “I’m doing okay despite the chaos,” this book is the opposite. Bock admits that he hadn’t wanted to do be a parent in the first place. He chronicles his heel-dragging on the long-suffering Diana, and acknowledges that she deferred her dream for his need to succeed in his career, “sitting on her ovaries through what turned into the heart of her thirties.” When Beautiful Children is published and he can delay no longer, he agrees to have a child with the unspoken intention of participating as little as possible. His attitude, he writes, was “Diana wanted to be a mom? Let her.” Left alone with his three-year-old after her death, he writes, “Until recently, I’d been one of those fathers who sometimes, despite himself, referred to the infant as ‘it.’”

This kind of father was common in the parenting milieu that I raised children in, though few would have dared be as open about it as Bock is able to be retrospectively. And the man who has to be corralled into it by his female partner becomes the shirker and gaslighter, who won’t voluntarily do anything with the children, who denies that most things need doing as his first line of defense, and who sulks and resents his way through the things the woman forces him to do, or does them so incompetently it’s not worth her while to ask him. From Bock’s telling of it, Diana, in the short time she had on earth with her baby, seems to have let him off the hook without resentment. I was not such a woman, and I felt a shameful, vindictive satisfaction in watching a man of his type left alone to actually do the work.

He does it badly. He lets the stroller roll off the curb. He fears he will let the toddler run out into traffic while he’s texting, or that he'll forget her gloves and she'll lose a finger to frostbite. He considers packing it in and letting her grandmother raise her. He doesn’t feed her healthy food. He doesn’t teach her to clean up after herself. He shows up at preschool pickup with a single melted cheese stick in his pocket. He loses his temper. In one especially ignoble moment, he’s so harried and destroyed by an evening of child melt-downs (a state of mind that most mothers will understand) that when a passerby compliments his cute kid, he tells the man to get fucked. 

But the beauty of I Will Do Better is that very slowly Bock realizes his error. “I was an overgrown adult child myself,” he writes. “Ten years after the fact,” he says, “I can see how I wanted to have it both ways: to make sure Lily was cared for and happy, yes, but at the same time to continue to basically sweep in on the weekends and tickle, doing the minimum, or the near minimum, so as to stay inside my pillowy bubble of creative, arrested development, claiming I was taking care of the kid when actually I was avoiding the true work of parenting.” He also finally realizes the true value of mothering. He looks back at Diana’s short life as a parent and recalls with heartbreak how she’d stay up late studying for final exams with the sleeping baby strapped to her chest, or pump breast milk to continue working while caring for an infant, or teach seminars while a sitter kept the baby outside in a stroller. He sees what a gift to Lily Diana’s time and mother-work was. He sees women on the playground at preschool pickup with “Tupperware containers of prepped pasta and fresh fruit” and how Lily longs for them, and is stricken with envy and grief. Every woman who has ever hastily packed a snack box while her husband stands by the door, irritated at her uptight, no-fun, unnecessary commitment to snack boxes, will feel vindicated.

 This doesn’t mean, however, that the problem with modern parenting really is simply sexism as I thought it was, or that women in my position really were entirely blameless for the difficulties we encountered. Keith Gessen, author of Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, presents a cautionary tale of a different nature. Gessen is a co-founder of the ideas journal n+1, and he’s married to the writer Emily Gould, one of the founding personalities of the early Gawker days, and currently a features writer at New York Magazine. The two are celebrities in a small New York City–media-world way, so the first pleasure of Raising Raffi is to discover how truly nice and sympathetic both seem to be as human beings. Keith Gessen, bless him for all eternity, is a man who is 100-percent in on co-parenting. His book, to some extent, is about being part of the “first generation” of men to be so.

Without being at all self-congratulatory about it, Gessen seems like everything a modern woman could want. He writes attentively about Emily’s desire to have a home birth and the various issues that arise. He’s fully present in the early days when the baby doesn’t sleep and the couple searches for answers. He reads books, he researches strategies. He experiences the changes in daily texture that usually happen only for mothers and writes thoughtfully about them: Your neighborhood is transformed when you have a baby; you suddenly see parks and playgrounds; you meet all kinds of people and talk to them. The book glows with love for Raffi and makes delightful observations about him. (Raffi loves to sing “Twist and Shout” and Gessen observes that he’s pretty sure he thinks “Shake It Up, Baby” refers to an actual baby—you can’t make these things up, and they are a joy of the early years.) He even humbly acknowledges his own beta role and the gender-divide that stubbornly still exists in parenting: “Almost without exception, in every male-female relationship I encountered” he writes, “the mothers knew more about their kids than the fathers and parented them better.”

It sounds idyllic, but I knew parents like Gessen and Gould too when my children were young, and despite what you would expect, they never seemed to have it much better than everyone else. They were still dirty and harried and sniped at each other and acted resentful. There was still the sense of chaos and misery and things going wrong. Gessen writes about this too, compellingly. The couple’s problems are both apocalyptic and commonplace. Raffi is defiant, willful, won’t go to bed, won’t get dressed, won’t walk up the stairs, dawdles, shoves other children, has to be dragged from the playground screaming. (Lest we seem to be blaming Raffi here, these features are very familiar to me from raising my own son.) In a representative anecdote that will be horribly, wonderfully familiar to many parents, Gessen writes about the “not great system” developed for Raffi’s bedtime, which involves Gessen lying on the floor next to his toddler bed while he drifts off:

“Recently this had become an invitation for him to roll over onto me, or reach out and pinch my cheek, or kick me. Eventually I’d lose my patience and tell him I was leaving and do so, locking the door behind me. He would then bang on the door with all his might. Since I feared this would wake [his baby brother], I would relent and come in and plead with him to be quiet. He’d agree and lie down, and I’d lie down also, and then after a few minutes he’d start rolling and pinching and kicking again…. [It] was always a struggle and there would be various points at which I’d very, very quietly (so as not to wake the baby) yell at him.”

Raffi tells Gessen at one point during one of these struggles that “‘You’re a bad dada.’” Gessen writes, poignantly, “I felt he was right. I was not a good dada. But I didn’t know what else to do.” He reads more parenting books. He and Gould run the gamut of popular remedies in the gentle-parenting repertoire. They attempt sticker charts. They reward good behavior and attempt to ignore bad (a laughably, awfully impossible directive). They try to understand the child’s point of view. None of it really works. They blame each other, or at least the inconsistencies between their parenting styles. Emily, Gessen writes, “thought I was too strict, a yeller.” He thought she was “too permissive.” Even in this most perfect of modern couples, Gessen, too, stands by the door, irritable, as Gould rushes to put their child’s shoes on. You shouldn’t be doing that, he tells her. He should do it himself. During the many similar circumstances of my marriage, my silent, resentful reply to this kind of comment was, Yes, he should be, but teaching him to do that is work, and I have enough work already because you aren’t doing any.

With my own ten-plus years of hindsight, I see both of these situations and my own as created in part by the loss of the concept of fatherhood as an active virtue, at least in the elite, urban spaces we are writing about. Bock blames himself for being selfish and dragging his heels when his wife wanted a child, but he’s really just like most of us, only perhaps more prescient. There’s very little prestige in parenting, little cultural inspiration for it, and most male virtues that might be associated with fatherhood specifically are considered suspect. Men, much more so than women, have been left without a map.

Some fathers Bock evokes: Daddy Von Trapp and Daddy Warbucks (outsourcers), the dad from The Road (situational), and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” (nightmare patriarch). Gessen discusses his Jewish-Russian emigré father and all the fathers of his childhood milieu with adjectives like tough, butch, and macho, which he attributes to their having known hardship in the Soviet Union. “None of these fathers were violent men, nor were they large men. They were all about five foot six, worked as computer programmers, and liked to play chess,” he writes. “But they had come from a violent place, and they had had to adapt to it.” Much of the book’s last section is his struggle not to be harsh or authoritarian in the Russian way. Here are some traditional fathering qualities: to provide financially for a family; to be the higher authority, the disciplinarian, the boss; to bring a boy into the world of men through sports or other bro-activities; to protect the sexual virtue of a girl; to fight, to toughen up, to encourage risk or violence; to master or husband people or things; to master the self. It’s basically unspeakable in our culture to suggest that these things should be done by men in particular, or in some cases, that they should be done at all.

So is it such a surprise that an ambitious man busy fulfilling his dreams like Bock can’t quite see beforehand how parenting will benefit him, though this is the lesson of the book in the end? (I mean that not in a shallow sense but in a moral and spiritual one.) He doesn’t give himself much credit, either, for the traditionally male part he does well (desperately try to keep the bills paid). Gessen heroically steps up as a co-parent, but his troubles indicate a different malaise: Raffi, quite obviously, is desperate for the structure, authority and limits that traditional fathering would provide. My own household suffered from this, and I can see in retrospect how it harmed our son. What our toddler needed, in those years, was not empathy, but to learn self-mastery. To some degree our household had the problems portrayed in both books. My husband and I both had the selfish, career-focused gene, and I suspect one of the reasons we fought so much was that we both wished to avoid the work. I also think that at least some of his resistance to sharing my labor was an inchoate attempt at imposing structure and limits, which I maligned and ignored because I came from a parenting culture that didn’t value it.

It now seems so simple: One person should pack the snack box, the other person should make the child put on his own shoes, no one should wait angrily by the door. It seems like it shouldn’t really matter which gender does what role, but somehow insisting on neutrality has lost the dad-role.

Valerie Stivers, a columnist for Compact, cooks from literature for The Paris Review.