The Work of Staying

On the ordinary labor of becoming a father

There is an hour at the end of the day in a house with young children when the whole place begins to reveal what the day has been: shoes scattered across the floor, a half-finished glass of milk abandoned somewhere it should not be, if not spilled, dinner still in the air as you’re asked for a bowl of yogurt and honey, one child asking for another story while another begins to cry at the precise moment you thought the evening had finally come to a close. It is not an hour in which any man appears especially impressive, nor one in which love generally takes the form we imagined when we first spoke our vows, yet something important is decided there, in the small and almost unnoticed question of whether the father returns fully to the life before him or retreats from it while remaining close enough to be mistaken for present.

Children do not remember every moment of their childhood, and perhaps it is better that they do not, but they live inside the atmosphere their parents make. They learn the meaning of love before they have language for it, not from the things we explain to them at the table or from the principles we hope they will someday inherit, but from the way a father speaks to their mother when he is tired, from whether his disappointment enters the room like weather everyone must endure, and from whether he treats the woman he married as a beloved companion in the work of building a family or as one more demand upon a life he would prefer to keep for himself.

A child who sees his father honor his mother is given something rarer than a lesson. He is given a world that holds together. He sees the hand placed gently at her back while passing through the kitchen, the apology after a sharp word, the father who carries some unglamorous burden without making a performance of it, and the thousand little gestures by which a man tells his wife, and therefore tells his children, that she is not an obstacle to his ambitions, an assistant to his comfort, or merely the mother of his children, but the woman to whom he has bound his life.

This is easy to praise from a distance, but difficult to perform when love stops arriving in its brighter forms and begins asking for the duller, more costly ones: patience when patience has already been spent, attentiveness when the mind is scattered, tenderness when irritation would be simpler, and the willingness to take up one more thing when every part of you has begun making a reasonable case for being left alone. I know that case well, because it rarely presents itself as selfishness; it speaks in the language of duty, exhaustion, efficiency, and earned rest, until a man can almost persuade himself that retreat is wisdom rather than the old desire to preserve some protected part of himself from the cost of being needed.

Our age has made this sort of departure almost effortless. A man need not abandon his household in the obvious sense, for he can simply give himself away in smaller pieces: to the phone in his hand, to work that always offers one more task, to an endless supply of information and entertainment, to the private world of his own fatigue and resentment. He can sit in the same room as his wife and children while withdrawing from them by degrees, and because he has not gone anywhere, he may not notice that he has left.

But a household cannot be built from partial presence. It cannot be sustained by a father who provides from afar, manages from a distance, or appears only when the demands of family life have become pleasant enough to suit him. A child needs to know that his father can be found, especially after the father has failed, especially when the room has become difficult, especially when the easier path would be to disappear into silence, work, anger, or distraction and wait for everyone else to recover without him.

Marriage has a way of exposing the parts of us that solitude allows us to hide, and fatherhood intensifies the exposure. The home becomes the place where a man discovers whether he is capable of giving himself without first calculating what will be returned to him; it becomes, at its best, the place where God steadily removes the illusion that a meaningful life can be built upon self-protection. The work is not glamorous, and it will not always feel triumphant, but it is the work by which a man becomes trustworthy to the people who know him best.

Over many years, that trust becomes the hidden structure beneath a child’s life. He comes to understand that love does not vanish when the house grows loud, when money is tight, when tempers fail, when bodies are tired, or when the people he loves become difficult to love. He learns that strength is not a man’s ability to remain untouched by other people’s needs, but his willingness to give himself steadily to what God has placed in his care: his wife, his children, his home, his work, his prayers, and the particular life that has been entrusted to him.

This is what Father’s Day brings to mind for me. Not a sentimental image of fatherhood, and not the flattering notion that a father is merely a provider or protector who appears at the important moments, but the much harder and more beautiful vocation of returning, again and again, to the people one has been given. It is found in the father who comes home, carries the child, honors the mother, asks forgiveness when he has failed, keeps the promise when it becomes inconvenient, and chooses his family not once in some grand act of resolve, but so often and so quietly that the choice becomes the shape of his life.

Happy Father’s Day to all my fellow dads out there.

Greg