Less than one week remains before the move to Evanston. The house is about three-quarters packed. And I'm starting to pick up the professorial reinsa couple of students have emailed about the books for my classes, and I've also been charged with the pleasant task of welcoming John Kinsella to the Lake Forest campus for a reading on Tuesday, September 25put that in your calendars now, Chicagoans.
In my spare moments I'm thinking about the baby and what it means for us and for me. And I've been utterly appalled by the level of the material out there that's directed at fathers and fathers-to-be. Every book and article I've found, almost without exception, assumes that men are clueless, incompetent, and not nearly as interested in pregnancy and babies as women. The title of one of the books out there says it all: The Caveman's Pregnancy Companion: A Survival Guide. That is, you're expected to embrace a self-image as a big, not too bright, but loyal lug for whom the pregnancy is a kind of mastodon stampede that you simply have to get through aliveas opposed to something you've actually chosen. It's infuriating. Oh, there are plenty of clinical books out there with the information you need about the stages of gestation, the birth itself, and a million things beyond your control that you can worry aboutbut what I can't seem to find is a book on the experience of new fatherhood that doesn't insult my intelligence.
This was bothering me even more in the early days when the pregnancy was still a secret, and so I had few people to confide in. That's when I needed good books most, and I couldn't find them. Do people have recommendations? Armin Brott's The Expectant Father is the best I've come up with, but it still doesn't quite speak to me as someone who's always expected to be an equal partner in child-rearing. What say you, dads and moms? What have you found useful?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
This is gonna be a loooooong post. What follows is a freely edited transcription of my notes from the Zukofsky/100 conference at Columbia t...
-
Midway through my life's journey comes a long moment of reflection and redefinition regarding poetics (this comes in place of the conver...
-
Will be blogging more or less permanently now at http://www.joshua-corey.com/blog/ . Or follow me on Twitter: @joshcorey
-
My title is taken from the comments stream of an article recently published by The Chronicle of Higher Education , David Alpaugh's ...
-
Elif Batuman has amplified her criticism of the discipline of creative writing (which I've written about before ) in a review-essay that...
-
Thursday, September 29, 2011 Berlin. Fog of sleep deprivation coloring an otherwise perfect blue autumn day a sort of miasmic yellow i...
-
Trained it down to DePaul's Loop campus this morning to take part in a panel, "Why Writers Should Blog," alongside Tony Trigil...
-
In one week Lake Forest will hold its commencement and I'll take off my professor's hat for the summer. A few weeks later, in June, ...
-
Farewell, Barbara Guest .
-
That's one of my own lines. From an untitled (they're all untitled) severance song: After form fails a furling, reports dying away, ...
No comments:
Post a Comment