Man enough to be a mom?

By BILL DURYEA, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 14, 2000

William has two mommies.

I know: I'm supposed to be one of them.

No, I'm not the one breast-feeding my 9-week-old son. No, I'm not on extended leave from work so I can attend to his myriad infant needs.

So maybe I look like your traditional idea of a dad, but beneath my Brooks Brothers dress shirt beats an inner-mother.

I've just finished reading this book, Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First (see review in Perspective), and it plainly states the best kind of father should behave a lot more like the woman he shares a bed with than the guy who taught him to throw a baseball. More like the parent whose life is consumed by her child than the guy whose child is a compartment in his life.

A screwy notion, some might say. But when the author, Suzanne Braun Levine, makes the observation, "Not one man I spoke to wanted to be the same kind of father he had had," I knew she had a point.

There are thousands of men just like "Conrad," the foreign correspondent in Father Courage, who are looking in vain for role models of the kind of father we want to be. "It's funny," he says, "that something so fundamental as fathering is something you should grow up with no conscious exemplar of . . ."

Who actually wants to be the Pluto of the family solar system? Who wants to be the guy too preoccupied with a job he hates or a bass boat he adores to play with his own child?

If Levine had asked me, I would have told her exactly what I have told Alliston, my wife:

I do not want to be like my father, I've told her, and moreover, I won't be.

Big talk.

Exactly what being a better, more involved, father entailed, I had not worked out precisely. I knew it started with simply being there, though that's not much of a feat. It's like the SAT; you get points just for spelling your name.

If someone had pressed me before William was born on the specifics of being the father of an infant, I would have mumbled something about everybody pitching in. You know, pretty much like Alliston and I already were doing, except with a baby.

We've always cooked together, because we like to. Sometimes I would do the laundry, sometimes Alliston would. I wrote out most of the bills, but both of us were kicking in our salaries to the cause.

That kind of sharing works great on Barney, but it's a whole different story with a baby in the house.

Suddenly, there were things that I could only observe. Breast-feeding topped the list. In the new heirarchy of our house, I was an overpaid gofer.

I confess that I wasn't completely unhappy with this assignment. Fetching water for Alliston while she breastfed, bringing a blanket in here, a bassinet in there, and back again, bothered me not at all. Oh, I did my share of stair-walking and jogging in place, the only two soothing techniques that worked for William in the first weeks. I sang to him, which may only have prolonged his displeasure, but it made me feel good. I gladly changed diapers.

But I know, too, that I ceded authority to Alliston. It was easier. If William was crying, I looked at her plaintively, hoping to entice her to feed him. That way I could go back to being on call, and maybe read the paper for a couple of minutes between baby duties.

More than once Alliston grew weary of bailing me out. She said she didn't feel we were a team anymore. I fired back with a list of my duties and told her she was being unfair.

It didn't help matters that the time of day William would melt down -- and it wasn't every day -- generally coincided with my arrival home. I never dreaded coming home, but I know I wasn't devastated to be sent to Miami to cover the Elian Gonzalez saga. Several thousand screaming protesters for one screaming baby didn't seem like such a bad trade.

As if in punishment, William began smiling for reasons other than stomach gas while I was away. Alliston, it should be noted, managed alone beautifully.

When I returned, Father Courage was waiting for me to review.

Written by a founding editor of Ms. magazine, the undiluted feminist viewpoint was hard to miss. The dare implied by the title -- "Hey, Pops, are you man enough for this job?" -- only stoked my defensiveness.

And yet, I recognized myself in her interviews with fathers who were actively seeking a balance between jobs and family. The important word here, I realized later, is actively.

As if on cue, Alliston offered me a chance to fly solo. (The first draft of that sentence ended with "a chance to do her job." The words "her job," Alliston pointed out, show how ingrained are my ideas about child-care.)

Though I knew Alliston would be away only a couple of hours, I balked.

Not so subtly I campaigned for her to take William. "Why don't you show him off to your friends?" She wanted a break, just a short break. Shamed into it, I prepared for an evening with my occasionally colicky son. If things got dicey, there was a bottle of expressed milk in the refrigerator.

Things went great for 10 minutes. Then he began to cry, and I began the checklist of solutions. Nothing worked. Finally, I went for the bottle, but by this time he was so riled that I couldn't risk waiting while the milk warmed up. I fed it to him cold.

He inhaled 4 ounces. Seemed to smile. And promptly threw up.

Once again, his stomach was empty.

The crying recommenced.

Alliston checked in several times and I assured her everything was fine, which I knew it was even if all was not calm. I didn't want her to come home early and bail me out, which is not to say I wasn't counting the seconds until her return. Alliston came home to find father and son both upset and hungry.

I realize now I shouldn't have given him a bottle less than half an hour after she'd fed him, and I probably didn't burp him correctly. Rookie mistakes.

In just a few weeks, Alliston and William have bonded in ways that I envy. I come home to find him slumped sleepily over her shoulder, and I want to feel that delicious weight, too. So I take him and . . . he cries.

Bummer. I walk him around, hoping he'll settle. Nothing doing. Alliston throws me a bone.

"It's the witching hour," she says. "He's just super-tired."

But I know it's that he's not as familiar with me as he is with her.

Alliston, bless her, tries again.

"Maybe it's my smell. Some day he may realize it's b.o., but right now it feels like home," she says.

And my peculiar funk would be perfume, too, if I spent the same amount of time with him.

But I can't spend that kind of time. At least not yet.

We decided recently that Alliston would not return to work until September, a full three months longer than we expected. I'm happy to be the sole paycheck. I'm happy to be the one who cooks the meals at night and does the dishes.

This support work makes our lives more enjoyable, and it makes it easier for Alliston to care for William and feed him without stress. Alliston would say that the division of labor is just fine. But being a helper, orbiting on the periphery, doesn't get me any closer to my son.

If I want to bond with him, I need to work harder in the limited time I have. I need to press to feed him, a role Alliston admits she is reluctant to give up. I need to wake him up, bathe him and put him down for the night, do the thousand little things that tell him who I am.

Waiting in the wings until he's old enough to catch a baseball is not going to cut it. Anyway, I don't want my child delivered to me in several years as if I'm a parenting program he's graduating to.

It's true, I am not William's mother. He'll never need a better one than he already has.

But if being a better father means I'll be trying to imitate Alliston, then William should plan on getting used to my smell.

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