Presented at 2nd Annual Male Studies Conference, April 6, 2011 (New York, NY) The Case of the Disappearing

Dad: Divorced Fathers in Fiction from Homer to Home, Away Jeff Gillenkirk
Abstract: The divorced father in a startling number of books and films simply vanishes at the beginning, never to be seen again. From Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn to Mona Simpsons The Lost Father, absentee dads have launched a thousand plots but rarely have been allowed to stay on board for the journey. This paper will not argue with statistics showing the distressing number of men who do leave their families behind, oftentimes with devastating consequences for their kids, nor will it condone or apologize for such behavior. The point is, since Homers Odyssey we seldom get the story behind why a father leaves, or what he feels or experiences while away. This paper will highlight prominent examples of literature that omit or demonize divorced fathers, and discuss the corrosive effect this cultural clich has on fatherhood and family. It will then move to the few examples of novels and films that portray the complex and oftentimes painful circumstances divorced fathers face, and the ways fathers have successfully overcome them: perseverance, constructive co-parenting, acceptance that father is a verb. Included in this discussion will be my own novel Home, Away, in which a Major League baseball player gives up a $42 million contract to care for the troubled son he lost in a custody battle. Its time to move beyond the tragic clich of the divorced-father-who-takes-off and create a new literary model that allows for the love, commitment, humanity and heroism in a good fathers heart.

Introduction Its been a year since Dad left and its my birthday again.1 "My mother and I lived alone. My father was supposedly dead, and I found out only years later that he'd left, walked out when I was eighteen months old."2 I figure its because I never had a father that I dont want one now. A person cant miss something she never had.3 Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.4 Paternity may be a legal fiction.5 1

Pap he hadnt been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable for me; I didnt want to see him no more.6 She couldnt remember the color of their fathers eyes, or exactly what he looked like; just his voice. Not surprising since she was seven the last time she saw him.7 Only sometimes do I understand the crush of stories without us. Then we are light as a shadow, or radio static swarming the Messiah: unto us a son is given But there are no fathers here.8 I havent seen him since the divorce. Hes a runaround and he drinks too much and his checks are late every month.9 Author and former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor Digby Diehl passed this pearl of wisdom to the struggling members of the West Los Angeles Writers Group some years back: The basic plot of every popular story, film or novel is simply this one man alone, against insurmountable odds. If this is true, which examination of popular dramatic plots shows it is, then divorced men in modern fiction and film have been largely missing in action when it comes to stories involving family and fatherhood. The quotations listed above are representative of hundreds of others one can find in popular narratives which portray fathers as lost or unfeeling louts who leave their families and children behind, or even worse, were never there to begin with. Rather than heroic figures, it is far more likely to find fathers depicted as destructive forces, either for the brutality of their presence or the cruel finality of their absence. From Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) to Mona Simpsons The Lost Father (1992), absent and divorced fathers in fiction have been characterized as a kind of anti-matter, a negative impression or force that is left behind in the wake of the departing pater, a dark and compelling shadow force that pushes the plot forward and affects the remaining characters often in dysfunctional ways. After years of such literary convention, there developed an unfortunate acceptance of fatherlessness in literature which allows a story to begin today,

without question or dismay: My father was supposedly dead, and I found out only years later that he'd walked out when I was eighteen months old.2 Imagine a story beginning with the same line about a characters mother. The readers antennae would certainly go up, questions formulated, objections raised: Where did she go? Why did she leave? What happened to her? Did she ever come back? Why not? Under the convention of The Missing Father, however, these questions are rarely raised. The unfortunate default of modern literature and modern society to accept the Disappearing Dad even today reflects partially the impact of huge economic and social forces in modern society that have shattered the traditional family structure; it also reflects until just recently the unfortunate internalization by fathers themselves of this negative image. Thankfully, things are changing with fathers themselves, and with their characterization in the media. More and more divorced fathers are emerging from the shadows and insisting on assuming their role as equal caretakers of their children. Hopefully what will follow in fact, what needs to follow in order to create a new cultural narrative that will help draw more men back to the care of their children is a new image of divorced fathers in fiction and film that holds them in full focus in the modern family drama. The Case of the Disappearing Dad will be solved only by dads themselves reappearing in their childrens lives, both literally and in literature. Ancient Heroes and Out-of-Home Experiences The marriage of fatherhood and fiction has always been a fitful relationship. Traditionally, the kinds of stories that most excited peoples imaginations were epic tales involving out-of-home experiences exploring the world, defending the realm, seeking fortune for family, king or corporation. Homers Iliad and Odyssey, Julius Caesars accounts of the Gallic Wars, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the bawdy picaresque novels of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, Herman Melvilles South Sea adventures, Typee and Omoo, then the massive, masculine Moby Dick, the muscular works of Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Norman Mailer and Irwin Shaw along with the maritime novels of Patrick OBrian portray an ideal of manhood honed far from the hearth. The art of fiction, after all, runs primarily on the engine of conflict, and the larger the conflict the more engaging the story for many readers: Man vs. Nature, Man 3

vs. God(s), Man vs. Fate, Man vs. Family, Man vs. Self are just a few of the archetypal struggles portrayed in storytelling throughout the ages. The greatest contrast between the classically absent father and the modern missing dad is that in the classics we know where the father is, what he is doing, and why. He is on a mission to save the king, to save the village, to save his soul with the knowledge and in most cases full support of the folks at home. Relationships between husband and wife, father and children, are stretched but rarely broken. And as opposed to the modern Disappearing Dad, whose story isnt even a part of the tale, absence of the classical dad in the epic tale not only makes the hearts at home grow fonder, his absence is the tale itself. In one of the western worlds first recorded epics, the Odyssey, Homer tests the limits of the family dynamic with his heroic tale of Ulysses making his way home from the Trojan Wars to his long-waiting wife and children. Flushed with victory and weary from battle, Ulyssess ship is blown off course by capricious gods who deposit him in various locales throughout the Mediterranean where he must surmount more heroic challenges before he can reach his family. One of Ulysses tests is to survive captivity by the beautiful goddess Calypso, with whom he must sleep each night. This comes dangerously close to the story of the wayward husband, though Homer is careful to portray Ulysses as an unenthusiastic lover in Calypsos bed who pines on the beach each morning searching for a ship to convey him home. An adventure for sure, though at its core The Odyssey is a family story a father struggling against nature, gods and his own weaknesses to claw his way back to his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus. No matter how far their relationship was stretched, it never broke. This was true for centuries of sagas involving kings, soldiers, explorers, hunters of fortune and other prey adventurous men valued by their society and honored by their family. Despite their absence from home in many cases because of it -- they were considered the paragon of male virtue: courageous, strong, wise, generous, and yes, selflessness. Todays generals, corporate heads, political leaders and cultural superstars all get similar free passes from home in their quest for honor, riches and fame, providing they can demonstrate convincingly to society and loved ones that they are still connected at the heart to their families. 4

With the closing of agrarian society and the advent of modern industrialism, the fatherfamily dynamic changed enormously. Rather than stretched, the relationship between a father and his family reached the breaking point. In literature, the father not only became missing from the home front, but his story itself was missing from the tale altogether. Unfortunately, it would take more than a century to reunite the wayward father with his family in literature. The progenitor of the modern Disappearing Dad whose story we are never told and whose shadow self haunts the spirit of the story and provides negative energy that fuels the plot is none other than Mark Twains most miserable manifestation of fatherhood, Huckleberry Finns father, Pap. Fortunately for its author, but unfortunately for American fatherhood, Ernest Hemingway himself one of Americas most celebrated absentee fathers declared that all modern American literature comes from one book, Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn. The image of fatherhood embodied in Huck Finns Pap could not be more negative. Then I turned around, and there he was, Huck describes encountering Pap at the beginning of Chapter V. I used to be scared of him all the time, he tanned me so much. I reckoned I was scared now, too; but in a minute I see I was mistaken. Hucks fearsome Pap, so threatening and demoralizing in absentia, reveals himself as a pathetic and essentially helpless drunk in the living flesh. There wasnt no color in his face, where his face showed, Huck describes. It was white; not like another mans white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a bodys flesh crawl a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes just rags, that was all. As if to reinforce the notion of Hucks Pap as shadow figure, Twain penned a hilarious exchange in which Pap threatens to beat his son for reasons exactly opposite to those a normal socialized person would give. If I catch you about that school again, Ill tan you good, Pap threatens Huck, who he accuses of putting on frills after showing hed learned how to read. First you know youll get religion too. I never see such a son. Anti-religion and anti-education too you cant get more low-down than that.

Hucks Pap makes one more appearance in the book, in an extended account of holding his son captive in order to deprive him of his schooling and keep him from putting on more frills like reading. But Pap fails miserably in his attempt to transfer his negative values to his son, done in by his predilection for liquor and complete lack of compassion. Despite his current prominence in Hucks life, nowhere in the book is it made clear where this distorted father figure comes from, how he developed into what he is, why hes a drunk, or what his motivations and goals might be. Paps primary role in this seminal American novel seems to be a seminal one itself: to provide the negative impetus for Huck Finn to flee down the Mississippi and begin his picaresque adventure, which begins with Hucks dramatic escape from his fathers shack, using pigs blood to create the impression he was killed by intruders and his body dumped in the murky Mississippi. Once Huck escapes downriver, his father becomes only a menacing shade, never to reappear in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The literary father in Americas first piece of modern American literature had arrived in a cloud of alcohol fumes and cuss words and promptly vanished, never to be heard from again. He would not be the last. A Fragile Social Invention While the American frontier faded, the absentee American father did not. The reasons for his departure and the nature of his absence did change considerably, however. Men still left home for war, to seek fortunes, to find work when none could be found close to home. In addition, the accelerating Industrial Revolution and explosive growth of cities destroyed Americas agrarian tradition and the traditional structure of the agrarian family along with it. Families no longer worked together on the farm, gathered together in small towns and rural churches, or worked side by side sending their children during non-harvest times to study in nearby school houses with neighbors families. Fathers now had to work long hours in the factory while mom labored at home raising the kids. Dad was now absent, even when he was there.

This was no small change in the nature of American fatherhood.

Anthropologist

Margaret Mead marked these developments in great detail in her 1969 study, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World, in which she made the profound observation that human fatherhood is a social invention. (p 190). As a social invention, the power of fatherhood is based in a shared social contract and efficacy of application. Mead waxed effusively about the importance of the social invention of fatherhood. Every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men, she further explained in Male and Female (p. 195). Each new generation of young males learns the appropriate nurturing behavior and superimposes upon their biologically given maleness this learned parental role. Unfortunately, this fragile social invention had been battered by a half century of economic dislocation, two world wars, tectonic demographic shifts from immigration and internal migration, and other enormous economic and cultural forces. She described the profound consequences of this, again in Male and Female: When the family breaks down as it does under slavery in periods of extreme social unrest during wars, revolution, famines, and epidemics, or in periods of abrupt transition from one type of economy to another this delicate line of transmission is broken. Men may flounder badly in these periods, during which the primary unit may again become the mother and child, the biologically given, and the special conditions under which man has held his social traditions in trust are violated and distorted. (p. 198) The literature of this time reflected these macro upheavals of war, depression, dislocation, disillusion and dissipation, with fatherhood itself continuing to be an ancillary subject. The post-World II America that both male and female soldiers returned to was a far different place from the one they left. Many men had been killed, wounded, or psychologically damaged. Many women moved into the work place, from necessity or desire, emboldened by their own experiences during the war and inspired by the stirrings of a new era. Male writers William Styron, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike still dominated American letters, but it wouldnt be long before more women writers emerged and shifted the fictional terrain from the battlefield and the hunting lodge and the brothel to the American home. 7

Its a home the new American father would occupy either as a ghost, or not occupy at all. While World I and II, the Korean War and the flowering of the Industrial Revolution temporarily separated the father from the American family, the flood of post-war prosperity, the political, sexual and economic emancipation of women, the drug culture and other upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s blew the American family entirely apart. Couples didnt need to be married to sleep together; you didnt even need to be confined to a couple to sleep together. Marriage was no longer a prerequisite for having a child. Men were encouraged to wander and find themselves, to not be tied down by family and job but to search, however aimlessly and endlessly, for the meaning of life and the Self. Economically, women no longer needed a husband. Sexually, a man no longer needed a wife. Divorce grew from a Hollywood curiosity to a widespread social and cultural phenomenon. The problem was, kids still needed parents, though even that became a debatable subject in the ferment of the times. As divorce became more common rising from just under 20% in 1960 to nearly 50% of marriages today the Industrial Age father who had been so commonly absent from home for work now became absent from the family altogether. The extent and ramifications of this new face of American fatherhood has been catalogued by many writers and social scientists, including David Blankenhorn in his exhaustive study, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem. Through a review of modern American popular culture and a distressing recitation of statistics, Blankenhorn describes the growing crisis of fatherlessness in America which was peaking about the time of his books publication in 1995. While the causes of these conditions are complex, the facts speak loudly for themselves: Nearly 25 million children are growing up in American without fathers making America the worlds leader in fatherless families. A distressing 28 percent of white kids, 39 percent of latino kids and almost 70 percent of black kids will wake up this Fathers Day without a their biological fathers in the home. Distressing, because the impact of fatherlessness on children also has been well documented: teen pregnancy, depression, drug use, academic failure, school drop out rates, delinquency, gang activity, incarceration and a greater chance of a lifetime of poverty have all been strongly tied by researchers to the absence of a father in a childs life. 8

Many fathers today in fact are missing in action after divorce or separation from their partners, and with devastating consequences for children. As psychologist Bruno Bettelheim so poignantly revealed in his National Book Award winning work, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, The child begins to feel himself as a person, as a significant and meaningful partner in a human relation, when he begins to relate to the father. (p. 219). The depressing corollary to be drawn from Bettelheims statement is: no father, no development. The massive cleaving of the American family by the forces of the 20th century had disrupted the flow of Margaret Meads learned nurturing behavior of men. David Blankenhorn expanded his study to identify multiple categories of modern fatherhood which shows the distortion and disintegration of this learned parental role. Among the modern manifestations of the dysfunctional father stereotype, Blankenhorn identifies what he calls the Unnecessary Father, an image inspired by the economic rise of women and the zeal by many women to experiment with husbandless households; the Old Father, the stereotypically authoritarian father, largely absent and distressingly brutal when present; the Deadbeat Dad who flees his marriage and any and all responsibilities to his offspring; the Visiting Dad, the divorced father content with being a peripheral avuncular figure in their own childrens lives; the Sperm Father, whose only utility is biological, and The Stepfather and the Nearby Guy, father surrogates whose voluntary availability supplants the need to keep the real father around after a divorce or sperm exchange. At the heart of the problem facing todays fatherhood is the absence of what David Blankenhorn calls a fatherhood script, a set of commonly recognized values and behaviors which would celebrate the shared positive experiences of fatherhood. Part and parcel of this persistent erosion of the image of fatherhood, Blankenhorn contends, is the erosion of American social cohesiveness itself. At the center of our most important cultural imperative, he wrote about the need for males to learn their parenting role, we find the fatherhood script: the story that describes what it ought to mean for a man to have a child. That script today is seriously flawed, and the 9

consequences are devastating. Our societys conspicuous failure to sustain or create compelling norms of fatherhood amounts to a social and personal disaster. Missing Script, Missing Fathers For the last forty years American publishing, film, news outlets and other informational enterprises have perpetuated the flawed fatherhood script with a succession of works which either ignore the divorced father, dismisses him as an irrelevance, or reduces him to an irresponsible and irascible peripheral caricature not unlike Huck Finns Pap. The stereotype of the disappearing divorced dad grew alongside the ballooning statistics of divorce, creating a crippling cultural narrative that reinforces the negative impressions of divorced fathers and almost none of the positive. Books, television series and films about single mothers began to proliferate. The

divorced dad or sperm dad, or incidental dad was barely mentioned, if at all. Not only had the divorced dad disappeared from the family he disappeared from stories about the family as well. Judy Blumes Its Not the End of the World, written for young readers in 1972, features the machinations of 13-year-old Karen Newman, who strives valiantly to stop her parents impending divorce. Karens neighbor, Val, doesnt help by characterizing her own divorced father this way: I havent seen him since the divorce. Hes a runaround and he drinks too much and his checks are late every month. nonsupport. This is not an uncommon portrayal of divorced fathers in this era, in any medium. The only mention of Diceys father in Cynthia Voigts 1982 Newberry Medal-winning childrens book, Diceys Song, is Diceys recollection or lack of recollection of her father: She couldnt remember the color of their fathers eyes, or exactly what he looked like; just his voice. Not surprising since she was seven the last time she saw him. Anne Tylers Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant turns on the unexplained exit of the paterfamilias and his equally incomprehensible explanation of why he left in the first place when he resurfaces in the familys life many years later: What it was, I guess; it was the grayness, grayness of things; half-right10 Once my mothers lawyer had him picked up for

and-half-wrongness of things. Everything tangled, mingled, not perfect any more. I couldnt take that. Your mother could, but not me. Yes sir, I have to hand it to your mother. Unmarried mom Annie Lamott (Operating Instructions) has made a career out of documenting, in essays and memoir formats, how she raised her son Sam without a father, as well as arguing the case that neither he nor other children need one. Gretchen Supers 1991 young adult novel, What Kind of Family Do You Have? features a young woman struggling with the absence of her father. "Carly doesn't remember when her dad lived with them. He moved away when she was a baby. Sometimes Carly wonders what it would be like to have a father. 'Can you miss someone you never knew?' she asks herself." Divorce is not only a complicated sociological phenomenon, its also complicated psychologically, legally and logistically. A divorced fathers plight can be exacerbated by flawed custody laws which throw legal barriers between a father and his children, economic pressures that can impede his ability to provide child support, inadequate or inadequately enforced parental leaves laws, and the lack of any kind of positive father role model in his life to draw from. Rarely does one see this kind of complex background included in the story of a divorced dad, however. One encounters only stereotypes that conform to one of David Blankenhorns categories of flawed fatherhood. Unfortunately, divorced fathers themselves have been too willing in the past to let these stereotypes go unchallenged, yielding the home turf to mothers and accepting the title father without really fighting to be one. Even men writing about divorced dads have portrayed them with the same distorted fatherhood script as have other writers. In Richard Fords Independence Day, divorced dad Frank Bascombe begins the novel with yawning ambivalence towards his two children, describing his role as an ombudsman in their lives and explaining their situation thus: Both my children live there too [in Connecticut with their mother and stepfather], though Im not certain how happy they are or even should be. In the course of Independence Day, Bascombe joins and quits a Divorced Mens group, takes his troubled teenage son on a long-delayed trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 11

Cooperstown in an attempt to renew his role as father, and ends the story still carrying a large load of ambivalence towards his son, though with stirrings of a more nurturing narrative. Where Paul is concerned, Banscombe says in a diffident but for him, emotionally revealing way Ive only just begun trying. Naturally, our societys casual acceptance of fatherlessness has invaded the world of popular film. In the 1985 movie St. Elmo's Fire, the character of Billy admits at one point that he thought about hanging around and being one of those 'I'll see you on the weekend' Dads. But that's not what Melody needs. Besides, it would just confuse everybody." So instead of becoming a weekend dad, he chooses to be no dad at all. In the 1993 film, Mrs. Doubtfire, the only way for the divorced father to be involved with his kids is to dress as a woman and serve his former household as a domestic. Played for laughs to great effect by comedian Robin Williams, the underlying message about divorce and fatherhood is rather grim, however. Daniel Hillard's wife is divorcing him. In order to transcend her objections, the court's regulations and the American public's stereotypes about men and fathers, he has to become a woman. A man a father couldnt possibly live up to the demands of nurturing children. Being a father, let alone a divorced father, simply isnt enough. The film Thirteen provides a deeply disturbing look at teenage girl, raised by a single divorced mother, getting lost in the world of drugs, sex and delinquency. The girls father briefly shows up during the time frame of the story and is, by all appearances, as emotionally and sociologically challenged as his unmoored daughter. Hes no help to his daughter, his ex-wife, or himself. Just last year, proving the resilience of the flawed fatherhood script, the Academy Award-nominated film The Kids Are Alright revolved around the son in a lesbian household contacting the donor whose sperm helped bring him into the world. Mark Ruffalo received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of the hapless sperm donor who becomes a sexual plaything for one-half of the lesbian couple, and is eventually locked out of the familys life as

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irrelevant and absurd for daring to think he could ever be a father. Unfortunately, Ruffalo didnt win the Oscar either. Back in the Story Many of the unraveled threads of the post-industrial, post-feminist American family are rewoven in the pages of Mona Simpsons masterful 1992 novel, The Lost Father. The book begins with a brutal portrayal of fatherhood through the eyes of Mayan Atassi, whose father had disappeared from her life when she was 12 years old. All you have to do to become somebodys God is disappear, Mayan says at one point, before she makes the decision, at the age of 28, to find her father. Far more than any book Ive seen, Mayans quest reinforces David Blankenhorns point about fatherlessness being a poisonous script in our culture. Never informed about why her father left her quite crazy mother, Mayan fills in her fathers narrative with one of fearful, and sometimes hateful, speculation. That was something Id done all my life: held my pillow in my arms at night and closed my eyes and tried to see my father, Mayan reveals. I had nothing really, not even pictures. My mother had burned every trace of him when hed left that first time I fell asleep at night trying to imagine my father different ways. He could have been anywhere, in jungles, hotels, alleys, casinos, on stage somewhere, and even when I saw the president with his children on television, it seemed easy to blur and forget and feel happy in my chest for a moment like a dissolving taste, that it was him Mayan succumbs on many other occasions to the power that the shadow father has to project his image on the imagination of his abandoned children. I tried to think of my father in a Salvation Army shelter, she says at one point. Maybe he was a con artist or a terrorist, she speculates at another time. Then, I tried to think of the worst thing my father could be prison. Federal prison. Finally, He might be dead, she thought. Or, There was still a chance, just a flint chance, he was a great man and then we all were too. Good, I meant. After more than a year searching using private detectives, driving coast to coast, flying to her fathers birthplace in Egypt Mayan locates her father in a nondescript residential 13

neighborhood in Modesto, California. After the humiliation, confusion, frustration and befuddlement of growing up wondering why her father had left her, Mayan draws this startling yet ultimately comforting conclusion: He was only a man. He was only a man with his own troubles who didnt manage to keep track of his wife and child. After all those years, I was wrong about him. He was only a man. The long search for Mayan Atassis father mirrors the search by American society for the fathers missing from all the divorces that have taken place over the last fifty years, and still taking place today. A culture reveals itself through the stories it tells its cultural narrative. It also expresses its ideals, what it values and strives to reproduce and reinforce. Up until just a few years ago, our society showed a decided lack of ideals pertaining to divorced fathers. In many of the books, films and narratives we have looked at, a divorced fathers absence has been accepted by both men and women alike. This acquiescence reached a kind of crescendo in 2005, when San Francisco society turned out in force to celebrate publication of the book, Raising Boys without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men, by socialite academic Peggy Drexler, at the same time the city was plagued by gangs of youth led by fatherless sons. Stories like Tessa Hadleys Honor continue to appear in mainstream publications like The New Yorker, despite the casual dismissal of fatherhood with the terse set-up line, My father was supposedly dead, and I found out only years later that he'd left, walked out when I was eighteen months old. As post-industrial society has evolved, so has our definition of manhood and fatherhood. Adventure, exploration, even warfare are no longer the exclusive reserve of men. The American frontier today is characterized more by Silicon Valley than Death Valley, a landscape accessible to women and teenage and college-age geeks of both genders. Men and women alike seek adventure on Wall Street and the conduits of the Internet, others pursue art, writing or other passions, working from home with a child or two in the next room or several houses away at a day care provider while their spouse is at work as the familys primary breadwinner. 14

A New Fatherhood Script Thankfully, the narrative and the reality of fatherhood and divorce are beginning to change. Part of the reason they are changing is that society, and the economy, are changing as well. So far, in all known history, Margaret Meade says in that same seminal work, Male and Female: A study of the Sexes in a Changing World, human societies have always re-established the forms they temporarily lost. In other words, the learned nurturing behavior of men can, and will, return to our society. In fact, it has already begun. Studies, statistics and U.S. Census tracks show that more American dads are spending more time doing more things with their kids than at any time in our post-agrarian society. Fully 15% of todays single parents are single fathers. The number of stay-at-home dads rose nearly 60% between 2003 and 2008, and experts predict that the 2010 Census returns will show as dramatic an increase. than ever before. Millennial fathers those under 29 spend an average of 4.3 hours per workday with their kids, which is almost double that of their counterparts in 1977, Newsweeks Julia Baird reported in her column on April 19, 2010 (A quiet revolution in male behavior). In that same article, Baird cited a report from the Families and Work Institute that these same young dads are spending more time each day with children under 13 than mothers between the ages of 29 and 42 are with their own. Those wishing to follow the factual documentation of the consequences of fatherlessness can start with David Blankenhorns book, Fatherless America. Those wishing to follow that factual trail into the sunshine of promise and hope should move to Jeremy Adam Smiths The Daddy Shift, in which he reports more positive changes in the fatherhood script: Since 1965 the number of hours that men spend on child care has tripled, Smith writes, and since 1995 it has nearly doubled. Men are spending more time on housework (33% more between 1965 and 2003, according to an Oxford University study), paying more child support, and worrying more 15 A report prepared by the Council on Contemporary Families showed that fathers in general are spending more time with their kids

about the balance between and family. Lisa Belkin of the New York Times cited a Lever study that found that four out of five dads who responded show more physical affection to their children than their parents did with them. Thats change. Through the work of organizations like the American Council on Fathers and Children, Fathers & Families and others, more fathers than ever before including divorced fathers are stepping up to the plate and playing an active role in their childrens lives. And just in time. The fatherhood script must be rewritten, and that rewriting, or course, must begin with the renewed lives of fathers themselves. As Randall Flanery, a pediatric psychologist at St. Louis Behavioral Medicine Institute concluded in an article in Psychology Today, young children often look at the absence of their father as a personal rejection. They see not having dad around as proof theres something wrong with them. There isnt, of course. Nor is there anything wrong with dads either in most cases. Many just have to work harder to overcome flawed custody laws and conflicts in the workplace, and begin the process of creating a new kind of fatherhood by being a new kind of father. Along with this changing reality, the narrative of fatherhood has to change as well. Excised from literature and film, or relegated to the role of plot starter or mythological boogie man, our society needs to begin seeing the stories of divorced fathers from beginning to end. The overriding motivations for The Lost Fathers Mayan Atassi in seeking to find her absent father, the questions that she craved to have answered after sixteen years of separation were, 1) why did you leave and what were you doing all that time? and 2) why was I not wanted? In other words, Dad, what was your story and why wasnt I part of it? Children people society everyone first of all needs to know the story. The details that a child uses to fill in the shadow outline of her absent father will rarely be flattering. While a missing father can sometimes be imagined as a distant God, in far more cases the child will imagine him as something much less than that, as in Mayan Atassis case: as a philanderer, a terrorist, a felon a corpse.

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Years ago, asking friends and colleagues for examples of novels in which the divorced father is a good guy, I drew blanks. So I wrote one myself Home, Away, published by Chin Music Press. Home, Away is the story of a major league baseball pitcher who gives up a $42 million contract to raise a troubled son he had lost in a bitter custody battle years before. Its a dramatic story about the conflict in a mans heart between his life-long love for baseball and his overwhelming love and loyalty to the son who needs him. I based it partly on my love for baseball, partly on my love for my son whom I have joint custody of, and partly on my passion to see the fatherhood script rewritten in American society. I think Ive gotten partway there. One reviewer, Don Hazen of the online syndicated news service, Alternet, called Home, Away an important book that digs into a topic that seems quite unexplored in our culture the challenges facing a single father who fights to stay part of his sons life after divorce. While its distressing to hear that this important topic remains quite unexplored in our society, Im proud to have done some exploring. Its up to fathers everywhere to begin changing the fatherhood script in deed, and help to turn the wheel of history that Margaret Meade refers to and reconnect the thread of our lives with the learned nurturing behavior of men practiced by previous generations of fathers. As a father, leaving your child is rarely the right thing to do. If there are problems, work on them. Never let an ex-wife, or your own shame and fear of failure, or the flawed cultural narrative of the absentee dad, dictate what you do. Stay in the story. Do everything you can to create the narrative of the good father, the compassionate father, the loving father, even if you do have to leave or are separated from your children for whatever reason. Let them know where you are. Let them know who you are. Let them know you love them. The first part of any good story is to live it. So to fathers everywhere come home. Pull up a chair and stay in your childrens life. Write yourself in as a hero in their story. If you do that, no one will have the opportunity to write you in as a bum.

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Biography: Jeff Gillenkirk is an author, journalist and communications strategist for foundations and non-profit organizations. His books include Bitter Melon: Inside Americas Last Rural Chinese Town (Heyday Books), and Home, Away (Chin Music Press), a novel about divorce, fatherhood and the power of commitment. He lives in San Francisco with his son and extended family.

Notes and References:

1. Dolber, Wendy. 2008. The Guru Next Door:A Teachers Legacy, Montclair, New Jersey: Dialogues in Self Discovery Press. P. 55 2. Hadley, Tessa, 2011. Honor, short story, The New Yorker, February 7. 3. Stead, Rebecca. 2009. When You Reach Me, New York: Random House, p. 28. 4. Simpson, Mona. 1992. The Lost Father, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 144. 5. Joyce, James. 1922. Ulysses, originally published by Shakespeare and Company, Paris; reissued by Everymans Library, New York/London 1992. p. 38. 6. Twain, Mark. 1885. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New York: The Modern Library edition, 1993, p.19 7. Voigt, Cynthia. 1982. Diceys Song, New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 7. Winner of the John Newberry Medal, a project of the American Library Association, For the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. 8. Digges, Deborah. 2001. The Stardust Lounge, New York: Doubleday, p. 194. 9. Blume, Judy. 1972. Its Not the End of the World, New York: Random House Childrens Books. p. 74 Bettelheim, Bruno. 1989. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, New York: Vintage Books. Blankenhorn, David. 1995. Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, New York: Basic Books. Cameron, Peter. 2007. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ford, Richard. 1995. Independence Day, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gillenkirk, Jeff. 2010. Home, Away, Seattle: Chin Music Press. Mead, Margaret. 1969. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World, New York: Dell Smith, Jeremy Adam. 2009. The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family, Boston: Beacon Press. Super, Gretchen. 1991. What Kind of Family Do You Have? Troll Associates. Tyler, Anne. 1982. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, New York: Random House.

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