The comments on the Growing Fatherlessness post have been an occasion of deep, deep thought for me, and prayer for one commenter in particular, New Divorcee. I learned several years ago to simply shut up and listen, actively listen to women when they speak as they have here.
This is a topic that deserves more than a drive-by posting, and so I return with the greatest respect for the women who have offered searing insight and commentary, because I believe their voices ought not be buried in that thread. A few quotations from the thread (which really should be read in its entirety for ALL of the women who posted) and a few thoughts of my own in response.
Mary Catherine responding to New Divorcee:
“What I can’t see is how to break the cycle. He can’t provide what he doesn’t know and what he isn’t mentally well enough to offer. I can’t be the father that he should be and I can’t give him the skills to do it, I can only be the mother that I am. I just don’t see where the healthy substitute father figures are supposed to come from, and there sure don’t seem to be enough of them available.”
Yup. These men can’t give what they don’t have. We learn to be mothers because our biology really does help us along.
But men have it much tougher and maybe that’s why the example of a living breathing at-home father is so very important.
And of course the media message is that fathers are useless dumb-asses whom women can do without anyway.
Donna responding to Gerard Nadal:
“What feminism has destroyed is mutual respect, which starts with an understanding and acceptance of the fact that men and women are very different creatures.”
Indeed we are very different creatures.
However, Gerard, there is more to “mutual respect” than that. It’s treating your spouse – regardless of the gender difference, and regardless of their financial contribution – as your equal. Conservatives, including my father, will never own up to the fact that the caste system at home was a driving force of feminism. I grew up in a home where my stay-at-home mom was nothing more than an indentured servant. My father made ALL of the decisions, regardless of my mother’s wishes. If she asked for help with the children, she was told, “That’s YOUR job.” That is the short version of what she endured. And she is one of MANY who endured the same. It wasn’t a picnic for us children, either. We would have been better off without my father.
So much for the Biblical quotes (Ephesians, et al) about cherishing one’s wife. Nice concept. Realistic? Not so much. (My parents were Catholic, for what it’s worth.)
Geek Lady:
I will confess myself disappointed and distressed by the continual focus, in homily and the prayer life of the Church, on vocations to the priesthood and religious life while the vocation of marriage and the foundation of a stable society just crumbles around us.
(I’ve been saying the same for years, Geek Lady.)
Getting to the roots of the alienation that produces these rates of fatherlessness:
I heartily agree with Donna on the need to treat one’s spouse as an equal. However, radical feminism’s conceptualization of equality is that of identicalness; that which we are not, nor shall we ever be.
The equality so sorely lacking is one of establishing an authentic communion of persons through the acknowledgement of our complementary differences which are to be celebrated and not held in derision. Along this line of thought, Geek Lady has written a brilliant commentary in the rest of her comment on the loss of women’s unique contributions to family and home life post-World War II, which set the stage for radical feminism.
New Divorcee, barring the specifics of her husband’s emotional difficulties, makes the prescient observations:
“I just don’t see where the healthy substitute father figures are supposed to come from, and there sure don’t seem to be enough of them available.”
Mary Catherine rightly responds that the men cannot give what they haven’t got.
If I may suggest to young men, it is our wives who are the font of life in marriage.
Young men are testosterone-fueled and pretty untamed in their perceptions of love and sexuality. Pornography has only catered to their adolescent expectations of what sexual union is all about. Not only is the porn devoid of love and commitment, but the acts themselves bear little resemblance to the sexual expression of love and devotion. They are devoid of all tenderness and affection.
My counsel to young men is that we men can only learn the language of conjugal love from our wives, in the context of a lifetime commitment. If we are to forge the bonds of intimacy necessary for a lifetime of commitment, we must enter into the inner sanctum of women’s being with reverence, much as one enters a house of worship.
It is there that men learn to “settle down”, because it is there that we encounter the civilizing influence of women’s very nature, which is love. Men who don’t do this do not develop meaningful and lasting sex-lives with their spouses. They fail in the expressions of intimacy in all other areas of the marriage as well.
In marriages marked by reverence, men learn to slow down, to appreciate beauty, to learn the language of communion from our wives, or we never learn it at all. If we fail to establish communion with our spouses, we fail at the next step, which is fatherhood beyond the biological act of reproduction. It takes tenderness as well as strength to be a good father.
The commitment to our children ought to flow freely from the commitment to our wives. We learn much of that nurture from our wives if we’re wise enough to open ourselves to it.
Of course, with every pre-marital sex buddy, we diminish the fundamental capacity to enter with reverence into women’s inner sanctum. We learn to avoid that encounter during the sowing of wild oats, as the consequences are simply too messy and unsustainable for a lifestyle of casual sex.
So to answer New Divorcee’s question, we break the cycle by being very honest with our children about the language of conjugal love and how it is learned. In so doing, we reveal to our young the great dignity of women and their civilizing influence, without which marriages and society crumble, as duly noted by Geek Lady.
And yes, we need to let our sons know that they will be perfected as men in marriage only if they learn to make that encounter with women on women’s turf, in women’s inner sanctum.
Those who reject God’s wise design in a lifestyle of promiscuity make their path so much more difficult than the process of mutual submission is, and learn to scoff bitterly at scriptural injunctions to do so.
The perversion of promiscuity is the very perversion of mutual submission.
My generation has raised this to an art form.
In the end, the epidemic of fatherlessness is the expression of despair that mutual submission could ever be a reality, that the authentic communion of persons is nothing more than an abstract theological construct.
Whether we have come to these truths through a lifetime of faithful obedience to God, or have learned through the painful consequences of past infidelity to God, we need to break the cycle by witnessing to the great dignity of women’s civilizing influence, as well as the great power and dignity of male sexuality perfected by women’s love.
I greatly appreciate your taking a second look at this difficult topic and posting your thoughts. Not many people will take a second look, and continue the conversation, at the same time taking another person’s point of view in mind. Thank you.
I agree with you that much despair is due to the loss of awareness of what true mutual submission truly can be in a marriage.
I would just ask that as we continue this discussion here or elsewhere with others, that we continue to resist treating people as objects, as roles, as their genes, or their body parts. This limits men to being oafs traipsing around after their genes and women as objects on pedestals, clean and pure and full of love. In this view, men automatically want to sin and women don’t. In this view men are helpless, either they have to be saved by a woman or they are inadequate to creating civilized society, and women have to receive men and civilize them otherwise we are all lost. This view permits the us-against-them mentality, “Men, jeesh” or “Women, ooo”.
We have to expect the best possible ideals, of ourselves and all people, if we want to have the best. Not tell ourselves what our limits are, but look to the best possibilities. And then live up to them.
Hi Kathy,
Your points are well made and well taken. I hope that my commentary didn’t seem that I was portraying men and women in the extremes that you describe.
Men can, and do, bring a great deal of civility to the table- at least a percentage of us do. But I do believe that successful marriage depends on men entering into women’s inner sanctum, and that male sexuality is perfected by women’s love.
This doesn’t objectify the sexes, but rather draws us into closer orbit where our complementarity perfects each other.
As for not all women being clean and pure and full of love, that’s certainly true {with the exception being the women who have taken their time to comment here🙂 }, but even then…
Even among hardened prostitutes whom I counseled for years in Times Square, there was an undeniable softness at the core that even streetwalking could not extinguish, which is a powerful witness to women’s nature.
Gerard,
Thank for this very well-articulated insight. I believe you’re spot-on, and I’m so glad you’ve written this.
Somehow we have to return to the fundamental understanding that our differences are good and they are meant to complement and complete one another. The longer I live with and love my husband, the more I find I am becoming my best self, and it is the same for him. That is God’s wisdom and plan for happiness.
I couldn’t agree more with you more that a man’s sexuality is perfected by a woman’s true love; her “inner sanctum” as you so eloquently put it. Bravo.
God bless you.
I am lucky that my father is now being grandfather and father to my kids. This brings much joy to him and he really needed this second chance at fatherhood. Find a male substitute who loves you and the kids enough to step up. Doesn’t have to be a romantic nature just a fatherly influence, laughter, smile… ride on the tracker down to the Dairy Queen for icecream. God sees all you struggle with and he will reward all those seemingly invisible mommy’s out there doing thier best every single day for their kids and themselves. We aren’t alone… not ever!
I think the first obstacle to be overcome in the language of equality, is to come to an understanding of the role of women, both in society at large and in the more intimate context of marriage and family life. Women have no role now, we are neutered men who can do whatever men do for the same motives and compensation.
Unfortunately, all we do is fight about details. Women that stay at home harangue women that work for abandoning their family and their duties. Women that work berate women who stay at home for failing to recognize their potential and betraying women as a whole by living a stereotype. It’s both vicious and ignores the pressing problem of women who are increasingly torn between the need for meaningful work and love for their children.
I love my son dearly. And, if finances permitted, I would happily have more immediately. Even if though it meant not working for several years, three or four very young children would keep me mostly occupied. But finances don’t permit, and so I work half time at the bottom of the lab hierarchy essentially for my bus fair and health insurance. And it infuriates me to be told I am sacrificing my children for my ambition, and sacrificing my career for my family when all I am trying to do is my duty. My husband works a job he loathes to provide for us, and I could never live with myself if I did not similarly sacrifice to care for our family.
*While raising children is the certainly meaningful work, there is an element of idleness in staying at home which I find distressing. The longing for something worthwhile to do is universally human and our method to stave off relentless contemplation.
“…undeniable softness at the core…”
I admit, that made me laugh out loud.
I can assure you that not all of us women have this — or want it. I like to think that my husband and I both have cores of basic human decency, neither hard nor soft.
Not all women are the same, and not all men are, either, which is why finding marriage partners who compliment each other is imperative. An equal marriage does not mean partners are the same, and have the same roles — in fact, a marriage can be very traditional and still be equal.
And not all feminists think men are incompentent oafs. Some of us love them very much.