The Cat’s In The Cradle Syndrome

I’m SO sick and tired of women bleating on and on and on.

And on.

About what? About how THEY are the biggest losers in this parenting biz. About how being a mother is SO difficult and how fathers have it SO easy.

“Oooh the glass ceiling”; “ooh sexism in the work place”; “I wish I could have a career”; “raising kids is a job too, you know, we just don’t get paid for it”.

etceterA, etceterA, bloody etceterA.

But what about us men? Eh? We’re stuck in high stress jobs for often quite poor pay with ever-extending hours. It’s often mind numbing and the source of not a few heart attacks. We’re losing our hair. Losing our erections. Losing our minds. Yes. What about us?

It isn’t fair.

I don’t want to do a Jerry Maguire on your lame dad-hating asses but I think maybe it’s mission-statement time. I’m going to stand up and speak for the Dads of this world who are not only fighting all day at work but driving for an hour or so in horrific city traffic so they can enjoy the relaxing and inspirational wonders of fighting at home! Guilt. Then sleep. Then more work.

All this talk about sexism is a damnable one-way street. As far as women are concerned, they’ve cornered the market when it comes to family and hardship and difficulty.

You want hardship? Pain? Suffering? Well listen to THIS:

The Harry Chapin song called “Cat’s in the Cradle” is the best expression I know of the suffering of men when it comes to their children. The pain. The guilt. The regret. ALL the Dads I know feel the anguish of that song! Every single one of them. It’s a universal truth about the worry of fatherhood – and, as work hours increase, I think it’s getting worse!

“Cat’s in the Cradle” is heartbreaking and yes, it scares me and all my dad friends to death.

“He learned to walk while I was away.” Jesus. Are you kidding me???

I know the pain of this very well. I have to work away from home a lot. And, relatively speaking, I have missed major chunks of both my children’s lives. This is something I can’t get back. It’s gone forever.

For a long time now, male and female roles have been set in stone. The women did the domestic work and the men went out into the world and brought the cash home. The philosopher Friedrich Hegel described it as men doing the external work of struggle and labour and women doing the internal, ethical, work of home, feeling and labour of a different kind – child birth. Each role was a self-less part of a greater unity – the family. Interestingly, he thought of the female as much more connected to real substance of life, feeling and family than men. This disconnect from home and hearth is certainly something men can suffer from. Hegel saw this conflict between family and work as the source of a fundamental human tragedy! The Greek tragic heroine, Antigone, who defended her family and stood for ethics against the evils of public law and authority was exemplary in his eyes.

Things are changing today. Yes, slowly, but they’re changing. At least in Western countries. Increasingly, women are demanding that they also be able to “labour and struggle” outside the family; that they also get a shot at “being themselves” in ways that aren’t simply family-centered.

And, conversely, men want a bigger piece of the home life pie. They’re saying they don’t want to bear the Cat’s in the Cradle syndrome anymore – they don’t want to be just like their dads. So they’re getting in touch with their feelings. And they’re reducing their work hours or maybe going part-time – basically getting their Daddy groove on. See this recent article in the Guardian.

Nevertheless – and this is a pretty big nevertheless – despite over a hundred years of feminism gender roles are still pretty firmly split. Women continue to do most of the domestic labour and the child-care. Think about it. Who does the bulk of the cooking at your house? Or the clothes washing? Who drives the car on a family trip? Gender roles are proving very tough to change. Even though there are dudes like this guy in Sweden who’re attempting to breastfeed. Check this out – it’s a pretty confronting picture!

A few years back, the Australian economist Nick Gruen wrote about the intransigence of gender roles and suggested that there may even be a neuro-biological reason for it. Men and women may be ‘hard-wired’, he thinks, to perform different functions. At least they start out that way. As little boys and girls they begin with different preferences and then cultural stereotypes finish the job.

And here’s an interesting thing: Even if men and women BOTH work part time, and even if women earn more money, women will still do the bulk of the housework. Now what’s THAT about?

Most importantly, Gruen pointed out that even though women might complain about men doing less housework, only one in seven actually say they’re dissatisfied. So it’s possible that a lot of men and women actually enjoy their different roles in the family. Maybe men prefer to mow the lawn and women prefer to cook and breastfeed. Biologically speaking.

But I don’t buy this biological hocus pocus. Not really. In the end, it’s just another way of locking people, BOTH men AND women in their little gender role prisons. It’s Gruen’s way of maintaining the essential nuclear family basis of his preferred economic system. Sticking to the status quo. People just LOVE the term ‘hard-wired’. I don’t even know what it means…

It’s time to think outside that box we’ve all got ourselves into!

We DO need to change. Women want more. Men want more. No matter how you cut it, the “life/work” balance is a problem. Either too much “life” for women or too much “work” for men.

But maybe the idea of balancing life and work IS ITSELF the problem. I never liked this work/life balance cliche. Ideally the two should come together as a single entity. It shouldn’t BE about balancing the two!

What needs to change is the way in which we approach our lives and our work. Perhaps we should stop thinking of ourselves as separate, isolated individuals maximising our own happiness quotient. I mean, that’s the problem right there. And I think that parenthood, being a mother or a father, shows the way. Being a part of a family is essentially self-less. People give without expecting returns. They contribute to the whole in an often quite self-less way. They put other people’s happiness above their own. They’re no longer individuals – they’re family members.

So I have a solution. An easy fix. How about a bit of solidarity for a change? Isn’t it time to admit we’re BOTH, us mums and dads, in this thing TOGETHER? No more blame game. No more ‘you didn’t’ and ‘you never’. Under the current conditions – we are BOTH suffering and struggling to make ends meet. Trying to work it out.

Having kids is a difficult thing. But so what? It’s also profound in a way that not many things in our lives these days are. Truly, madly, deeply profound. We need to take responsibility for it. Having children is IMMENSE. It’s the definition of immense-ness. And awesomeness. It’s life changing, life defining and life affirming. Let’s remember why we did it.

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