What Actually Is Fatherhood?

My world has a new center

I sat down to write this morning intending to polish off the next installment of our Gulliver's Travels reading challenge, followed by part 2 of my survey of the music of 1980. But these things are not occupying my mind today. Those of you who have been regular readers of PCF have probably noticed that my writing has become more sporadic in recent months. This is not because of burnout or disinterest, and it occurred to me as I started working this morning that I can trust this generous readership to be interested in the real reasons for this change, and it occurred to me also that the beauty of Substack as a publishing platform, where no editors or gatekeepers are directing content, is that I can write about whatever I want. This may seem obvious and is the reason that we are all here, but I have set certain expectations over the last year about the kind of writing that will appear in PCF and its frequency, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. I have, after all, expressed here my disinclination to write personal essays, though I have broken out of that shell from time to time. Today, I think I'm finally ready to leave that shell behind completely.

First, I will assure readers that the reading challenges and the music writing will continue, that I am excited about this work, and that I hope that the PCF readership will continue to thrive.

But, as some of you are already aware, my life has changed recently, as have my priorities. This week, I found myself in a courtroom, asking a judge to grant us custody of a 16-year-old girl.

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A bit of background: in my twenties and early thirties, I was absorbed in graduate school and my early academic career. I had neither interest in starting a family nor the financial means to do so. I also felt ambivalent about bringing a child into a world that seemed to be tumbling toward environmental catastrophe. I resigned myself to focusing on my academic vocation, and, beginning in 2013, on my marriage.

When Yndra and I got married, she already had two grown children, Sofia and Aldo, and we were probably beyond the age at which we could have children of our own. I love Sofia and Aldo very much, and they are an important part of my life, but I have never been a father for them, and that's fine. They don't need me in that role, and I think that they appreciate that I have allowed our relationship to develop naturally, that I haven't tried to insinuate myself into some role of artificial authority. They call me John, and that's as it should be.

So, until a few months ago, this was my place in the world: an English professor at a midsized regional university, content with my wife, my dogs, and a small group of close friends—with no aspirations other than to do my job well, to do some writing, and to work toward my modest retirement over the next fifteen years or so.

But this summer, everything changed.

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I was emptying the dishwasher one afternoon, when I got a text from Yndra: "Do you want to adopt Madisson?"

I laughed. Yndra tends to bring home stray dogs and then announce that we are adopting them, so I assumed she was joking that she was now going to bring home a human in the same manner—progressing, as a friend suggested, from quadrupeds to bipeds.

But she wasn't joking, though she later apologized for asking me this momentous question in a text.

Yndra teaches ESL at a local public high school, and over the past few months, she had gotten to know a new student, a small, quiet, pretty girl named Madisson, who seemed always to be sad, but who also, as the weeks went by, began to spend more and more time in her classroom. Each day, as this girl entered the room with a world-weary sigh, Yndra would say to her: "Madisson, you look so happy today," and this would get a smile and even a laugh out of her.

Finally, Madisson began to open up to her. She was from Honduras, and her mother had brought her to this country in order to escape from an abusive extended family. She didn’t know her father, that her home was unstable, and that her mother now lived with a man she didn't like. Her self-esteem was terribly low. She would often say things like "I am shit"—in Spanish, as her English was very limited.

In the interest of protecting her privacy, I will not say much about Madisson's mother, except that she, too, came to trust Yndra and eventually to trust me, and we began, collaboratively, to discuss the possibility of this adoption. In fact, her mother actively encouraged the idea. While we are not wealthy, it became apparent that we would be able to provide a different kind of life for her, to protect her, to some extent, from our country's endemic racism and xenophobia (especially in this current political climate), and to help her acclimate to the alien culture of her new home.

And so we cleared out our spare room and painted it, and Madisson picked the color: a vibrant pink. We bought some new furniture. And at the beginning of August, she moved in.

I suddenly found myself in an entirely new role: father. What did this mean?

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I am lucky, because my own father is the finest man I know. He never exhibited any of the toxically hypermasculine tendencies of fatherhood that our culture continues to model for us. When I was a child, he was always nurturing and kind. He never tried to impress me. He always let me win when we played basketball in the backyard, but he never made it obvious that this was what he was doing. He was (and is) a southern gentleman, with all of the positive attributes of that category and none of the baggage. He is a white man who grew up in Alabama, but he attended Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in 1968. He is an academic without being a snob, and he is deeply religious without being proselytizing. He taught me to accept all people for who they are, regardless of race, gender, or creed, and to try to empathize with them. At the age of 84, he is still all of these things—except that he doesn't play much basketball these days.

I could ask for no finer model of fatherhood. And this is the kind of father that I want to be.

But this is new for me. Yndra has had plenty of practice at motherhood. But I jumped in at the deep end with no life vest: a new father to a teenager, and one who speaks very little English.

And this means that I can't pretend to offer any lessons here. I am a neophyte. But I can say that I didn't realize that I wanted this until it presented itself to me, and now that it has, I can say that this is a new sort of love that I am feeling. It is unselfish, and it is complete. My world has a new center.

I suppose that this is what fatherhood means—at least to me.

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And so, readers, this is why my writing has been more sporadic in recent months. It will continue to appear, though perhaps at somewhat wider intervals. I have a huge backlog of essay ideas and partial drafts that need some time to incubate. As my family adjusts to our new life together over the next few months, I will pick up the pace once again. And perhaps I'll let you know how fatherhood is going from time to time.

As always, thanks for reading, from my fancy internet family to yours.