Fathers & Sons

Abstract

Fathers & Sons Joshua Doležal (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Julian Ortiz [End Page 118] I When my wife and I scheduled an ultrasound during her third pregnancy, I expected another girl. The odds were pretty much fifty-fifty, but after watching the coin fall the other way two times previously, I had come to think of myself—and with some relief—as a father to daughters. One does not expect to be struck down on the road to Thebes by one’s daughter, for instance. But it might also have been that the cultural narratives available to me translated more readily into mentoring girls and young women who might imagine every avenue open to them. Masculinity had become a dark energy to guard against, the systemic foil to every plot in the Rebel Girls podcast series my daughters loved. In fact, I had been redefining my own understanding of manhood for many years and wasn’t sure I had firm enough footing on that ground to point a boy in the right direction. Perhaps that was why my first thought, when the nurse drew an arrow to a [End Page 119] short appendage on the screen, was Oh, no, the poor girl has only half an arm. When the knowledge that we’d be having a boy hardened into certainty, I felt a curious swirl of elation and panic. I can’t say exactly why the stakes felt higher in raising a son. Maybe it was that my likeness in my daughters felt a step removed, more figurative than literally true. A father does not think to name a daughter Junior, even if she is the spitting image of himself as a child. I felt that a boy would seek to emulate me more thoroughly than my girls had and that this carried a unique responsibility to offer a worthy prototype for the person my son might become. Over the next few months, I searched my memory for guidance, and I was dismayed to remember only one conversation about what it meant to be a father. It was not wisdom imparted by my own father or even advice given directly to me but an exchange relayed secondhand by one of my high school basketball teammates on one of our long road trips. It was late at night, pitch dark but for the headlights from oncoming traffic. The bus reeked of sweat, socks, and the turkey club sandwiches we’d dispatched after our game, and several of us were huddled in the back listening to the team captain’s version of the Bloody Mary story. If you chanted her name, he said, while staring into a mirror, she would appear. And if her eyes were red, you were sure to die. As we sat there laughing but inwardly horrified that we might glimpse red taillights in our rearview mirrors later that night, my coach called back to us, and my friend Scott left to speak with him. Scott’s girlfriend was pregnant, and they planned to keep the child. Our coach, whom I’ll call Coach Taylor, had just learned the news, and he wanted to share something of his own experience at his eldest’s birth. When Scott returned to the back of the bus, he repeated what Coach Taylor had said, that holding your own flesh and blood in your hands was the most powerful thing you would ever feel. A hush fell over us then. We knew we’d brushed against a sacred truth and that none of us, including Scott, were anywhere near ready to face its full weight. I forgot all about Bloody Mary and sat enveloped in awe of my coach for knowing something of this mystery, and of Scott, who would soon know it for himself. The men in my life rarely speak of these things at night, and never in the daytime. And the sad truth is that not one of the fathers in my family—not my father or either of my grandfathers or my four uncles— shared anything with me about how they felt holding their newborns [End Page 120] or how they went about...