LONG BEFORE CATHY BECAME PREGNANT with our first child, she’d thought about what kind of parent she wanted to be. Her own mother was creative, fun, demonstrative and endlessly understanding; Cathy always felt she could tell her mom anything, and wanted her own kids to feel the same about her. In a considered way, she’d thought through some of the day-to-day issues—how to discipline, how much screen time—and how she wanted to handle them.
I’d never really given much thought to becoming a father, or even how having kids might change me. Nothing like that ever came up in conversation with other men, either. There was the occasional mention of which sports we’d play with our kids if we ever had them, but there were no meaningful discussions about fatherhood, nothing like the talks we had about current events and our own careers.
While Cathy was pregnant, my attempts to educate myself were largely focused on her: how to help her through her pregnancy and the birth of our child. In my own father’s time, men sat in the waiting room with cigars. My generation was the first to try to shrink that distance, by being present for labour and delivery, but there was little information on what to do afterwards. The child-care books I read, and I read several, had only a few lines specifically targeting fathers; as I recall, they concerned the effects children have on a father’s sex life and relationship with his wife. If there was anything specific about a father’s relationship and interaction with his children, it must have been extremely brief because I don’t remember it. The childbirth classes we attended above a submarine sandwich shop were all about getting ready for labour and delivery, not for the profound changes to our lives afterwards. I learned how to help Cathy breathe through contractions and how I could support her during labour (though I held the cardboard cross-section of a woman’s abdomen upside down for most of the demonstrations and fumbled the one quick lesson on swaddling a newborn). By the time Cathy’s due date was upon us, I was mostly prepared to be a better husband while she gave birth. Not a father.
Then a day passed, and another, and another, with no sign of the baby’s arrival. We’d settled on his name long before, after narrowing our short list down to the one both our families had in common: my Irish great-grandfather was Alexander, and so was Cathy’s Scottish great-grandfather. I wanted him to share my first name, John, but to use his middle name, as I always have, and Cathy agreed to the request. Our John Alexander Newman displayed a stubborn streak even before he was born. The overnight bag for Cathy’s hospital delivery sat in our bedroom for two full weeks after her due date. His increasing size made it hard for her to breathe, and her stomach became so distended that she could rest a bowl of cereal on it with no fear of a spill. Finally Cathy’s doctor ordered her to the hospital so delivery could be induced.
Much of what we had practised in our birthing classes turned out to be useless, as Cathy’s labour went from zero to full throttle in a matter of minutes. There would be no gentle guidance and reassurance from me as her labour pains gradually intensified—they were extreme from the get-go and I was pretty much helpless to soothe her. She was surrounded by a mishmash of wires and probes, and Alex’s vital signs were being continually monitored. It didn’t feel like the birth we had prepared for. It felt like a crisis.
I eventually figured out that Cathy’s contractions could be predicted by a spike on one of the monitors, so I would tell her another one was coming and hold her hand as each new wave of pain pounded her. We tried lumbering slowly down the hallway of the maternity ward between contractions, but that didn’t help. After seventeen impossibly long hours, Cathy had barely dilated four centimetres, and was beyond exhausted.
And then Alex’s vital signs faltered. The medical staff rushed us into a surgical suite for an emergency caesarean section. Cathy was given an epidural for the pain and I was allowed to stay by her head to try to calm her; a white sheet was strung up so neither of us could see the quick work the medical team was performing on the lower half of her body. I held her shoulders, kissed her forehead and fought down my own panic so I’d sound convincing when I assured her everything was going to be okay. I kept checking the doctor’s eyes, still visible above her surgical mask, trying to look for any sign of concern, but she appeared very calm and focused.
As the doctor made the initial incision Cathy quietly said, just loud enough for me to hear, “Ow ow ow! Am I supposed to be feeling pain?” I said, much more loudly and forcefully, “She’s feeling that!” The doctor barked at the anaesthetist, “Do you think we can get this done without pain?” I felt I’d finally added some value to the proceedings.
What happened next is murky in my mind so many years later. Only flashes of images survive, but what I felt—fear, helplessness—was indelibly imprinted. Alex didn’t cry, didn’t make a sound after he was born. A team of nurses rushed him, umbilical cord trailing, over to another table. He was terrifyingly blue; something was clearly very wrong. Almost simultaneously, the doctor who was sewing up Cathy’s incision yelled, “She’s hemorrhaging, put her out.” A mask was briskly placed over Cathy’s nose and mouth, she lost consciousness immediately, and a male nurse grabbed me by the arm and hustled me out of the room. Every instinct told me to resist, but I was still rational enough to know that I wanted everyone in that room one hundred percent focused on saving my wife and our baby, not quieting a frantic husband.
I don’t remember being led into another small room, where it was, or how long it took to get there. I just remember being alone, sitting silent and stoically for the most part, but then, when what seemed like too much time had passed and still no one had come, realizing that Cathy and our baby might be dying. Oh God. Had they already died? A strange blast of sound came out of my mouth, horror made audible.
My wife is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met who doesn’t know it. She’s funny, genuine, playful, and she just radiates kindness. Every guy in the newsroom where we met had wanted to ask her out, even though she was dating someone else. I only worked up the courage because I heard a cameraman announce that he didn’t care, he was going to ask if she’d go on a date with him. That same evening, well past midnight, I just happened to drop into the newsroom, knowing Cathy was working an overnight shift, to ask her to go to a play with me. I was elated and slightly shocked when she agreed. Three years on, I still didn’t quite believe my luck, and the idea that I might have lost her—or our baby—was impossible to bear.
I don’t know how much longer I stayed in that room with the door closed, I just remember being afraid to leave because then I’d be forced to confront what had happened. After awhile—another hour?—I made myself go out into the hallway but I just stood there, frozen and disoriented, until a nurse came over and asked whether I was lost. I told her something terrible had happened while my wife was giving birth. She asked if someone had come to talk to me yet. My heart ached. I didn’t want to hear what she would say next.
But what she said was, “Oh my God! We forgot about you. Do you want to see your baby?”
“They’re alive?”
“Yes, your wife is fine but she’s still asleep. You won’t be able to see her for a few hours. Your baby is over here in an incubator.”
She led me to Alex, who was sealed inside a clear plastic box, wailing. He had my strange toes, my mouth, and he looked cold, vulnerable and utterly alone. His first hours in the world hadn’t been spent wrapped snugly in a soft blanket, with parents holding him close and kissing his impossibly smooth forehead. He was naked in the incubator, sensors attached to several places on his body to monitor his vital signs. There was a piece of paper taped to the side of the incubator with his Apgar score, which I knew from our classes was a measure of his robustness at birth. On a scale of one to ten, my son was a two.
The need I felt to hold him, to claim him, to calm him, was overwhelming, but there was a cold barrier between us. I asked the nurse if I could at least put my hands into the green rubber gloves attached to one of the incubator walls, so I could try to soothe him. She agreed, and I reached in, taking care not to disturb the web of wires around him, and gently rested my hand on his stomach, hoping that awareness of another human presence would comfort him. I started humming a lullaby I had sung to him before he was born, then I sang it loudly to try to block out the noise of the room and penetrate the plastic walls surrounding my child. He seemed to recognize the tune, and my voice, and stopped crying. He was listening, waiting for more. I felt I was the only person in the world at that moment able to comfort him, so I sang and he quickly settled into sleep, which comforted me. It was the first time that I felt I was truly a father. As I carefully withdrew my hands from the rubber gloves, I made a silent pledge to Alex: I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.
Once Cathy and Alex were well enough to be released from the hospital, I wanted to play an active role as a parent, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about it. Cathy’s mother and then mine took turns helping us out, and they were instant experts while I was clumsy. The diapers never seemed as tight when I fastened them and the burping was never as effective, either. I acquiesced to their expertise and watched from the sidelines, feeling sheepish. Incompetent.
I was better at other things. A few weeks into his life, Alex’s appetite couldn’t be completely satisfied by Cathy, so while she rested, I’d settle into the only comfortable chair in our living room and give Alex his only bottle of the day, to try to supercharge his sleep into the six-hour range. It usually worked. We were both exhausted—him from simply existing, me from long hours in network news—and when the bottle was finally empty, he’d instantly fall asleep on my chest. I’d slouch down in the chair to create a more level surface for him, then watch his small body rise and fall gently with my breathing, while his own breathing slowed and he relaxed into a deep, secure sleep. I never wanted those moments to end. My boy with his perfect, smooth skin pressed against the coarse hairs of my chest, needing nothing more than the sound of his father’s heartbeat to feel entirely at peace.
On nights like these, cupping Alex’s tiny head in my hand, the urge to protect him was strong, almost a hunger. I’m not a particularly combative guy. I’ve been in one brawl in my life (university, drunk, a friend’s honour—the usual stupidity), but I knew I would not hesitate to take on anyone who threatened him. I would do everything in my power to keep him from harm. For me, and I suspect many other fathers, this isn’t just macho bravado. The drive to provide protection is in our DNA. It’s how we’re built.
But some of us think we’re also here for projection. To map a future for our kids. I’ll admit it, I indulged in this myself, though my plans for Alex didn’t focus on specific achievements. It was never, “He’s going to be a doctor.” My dreams revolved around the kind of childhood I wanted for my son and the sort of man I hoped he’d become: confident, worldly, popular—everything I’d longed to be, but wasn’t, as a child.
Even at six months of age, though, it was clear that Alex was not the passive type who’d meekly submit to being moulded. Already tightly coiled, he tended to greet the day with his fists clenched. Desperate to crawl and intensely curious, he was quick to laugh and to brood. Or to put it another way, he was already showing signs of being very much his own person.
But that didn’t stop me from imposing expectations on him. I hoped that he’d be athletic. I hadn’t played team sports growing up, so I’d missed out on the camaraderie, and never learned how to put the team’s interest ahead of my own while still physically pushing myself to compete. For boys, playing on a team creates social currency, a fact I became keenly aware of in high school, where I was sometimes called a “fag” because my own interests—politics, history, theatre—weren’t sufficiently physical. I resolved to enroll Alex in soccer and baseball and whatever else he was interested in, at the earliest opportunity. He didn’t have to be a pro athlete. The idea was just to set him up to succeed socially.
I also wanted to show him the world so he’d feel comfortable in other cultures. I hadn’t ventured outside North America until my mid-twenties, when my newsroom sent me to the UK to cover a conference on apartheid. I hadn’t felt confident or geared up to make the most of the opportunity; I’d felt overwhelmed and uncertain. Well, that wasn’t going to happen to Alex. I’d take him places and show him things, so he’d grow up feeling like a citizen of the world.
Another thing: my kid wasn’t going to feel isolated. Growing up, I’d been shy, with never more than a handful of friends. In high school, things got worse. I was ostracized. I didn’t want Alex to experience that depth of loneliness, or anything even close to it. No, he’d be surrounded by friends, a “crew.”
And on it went. Of course, this list was a perfect reflection of my own regrets and longings. I didn’t want Alex to follow in my footsteps—I wanted him to avoid my missteps. Where I had struggled he would excel; he would have all the things I’d missed out on.
I had a list of expectations for myself, too. Aside from being a good provider and good role model, I would be the sort of father I wished my own father had been: physically affectionate, emotionally connected, a family man. Present, in every way.
My father never worked anywhere but Bell, eventually rising to a senior sales role. He worked hard and travelled a lot when I was a child, but by the time I was a teenager, his work was mostly nine-to-five. He was not absent, in other words, but I never felt I got enough of his attention. Our traditional greeting when I was growing up was a handshake, not a hug. To be fair, my dad was typical of his generation: my friends’ fathers weren’t showering them with affection or worrying about their emotional needs, either. That wasn’t how my dad had been raised. He had an accomplished father, a lawyer with a formal manner, and a politically involved mother with mayoral ambitions, who didn’t want him to do anything improper or stand out in a negative way. No wonder he was self-contained.
Our interactions weren’t marked by harshness, but distance. Sometimes he took me to hockey games, which I enjoyed, but I don’t remember any conversations about what was going on in my life, and I didn’t feel he was particularly proud of me. I was a disaster as an athlete and he couldn’t hide his disappointment when, as a young boy, I came off the ice at the hockey rink short of breath. I had asthma, which was exacerbated by the cold air at outdoor rinks, and I couldn’t last more than a few minutes. But that wasn’t all: I was a poor skater and I wasn’t an aggressive player. After each game or practice, we barely exchanged a word as I unlaced my skates, and then we’d walk home, usually in silence. I knew I’d let him down, and that his disappointment was about something bigger than hockey. Somehow I’d failed as a son.
My mother, who held a series of administrative jobs, was more demonstrative but also often frustrated by my lack of physical and emotional toughness. I was too sensitive, not competitive enough, though the flip side of this failing was that I was a good kid, eager to please. The worst thing I did on purpose was steal some carrots from a neighbour’s garden, at the urging of a friend. But my parents tended to zero in on the one thing I’d done wrong in any situation, and consequently, I felt I was a disappointment to them. Quite possibly they were just ambitious for me, and hoped I’d go far. But what child is aware of his parents’ motives?
I grew up in Montreal and then Mississauga, outside Toronto, in a solidly middle-class home with parents who worked to live rather than lived to work. They seemed content with our suburban existence—the streets filled with bike-riding kids, summers at the lake—but to me it seemed like big things were happening elsewhere in the world and we weren’t part of them. I felt my family embraced the predictability and comfort of the familiar, the conventional, and didn’t really “get” me. I was creative, nerdy, the kind of kid who wore glasses and got excited about elections and watched the news. My dad occasionally watched, too, but for me, network news became a religion, one I knew enough to conceal at school. I would have graduated from a mere outlier to a pariah.
Then, when I was fourteen, a jolting change: my parents divorced. My dad moved out and eventually found a welcoming new wife with children of her own, resurfacing for awkward get-togethers with me and my younger sisters, Kelly and Debbie. Years later, he told me he felt his job as a father had been to get us to the point of self-sufficiency as quickly as possible, but at the time all I felt was abandoned. Shattered, my mom retreated emotionally, to a point where she seemed unreachable. I didn’t want to burden her with my own sadness and confusion. On some level I’d known my parents weren’t happy together, but their marriage had at least given me a sense of safety and security. That evaporated completely when they split up.
I was miserable. I did fine at school but didn’t feel I belonged, there or anywhere else, and my instinct was not to reach out but to pull back. Sometimes the need was so overwhelming that I’d go sit in the broom closet at school, the one place that felt safe because I could shut out the world. But I could never hide for long. Post-divorce, money was very tight at home, so I’d started working after school. I had to step up, not add to my mother’s distress.
Over time, my fascination with news and politics helped me focus more on the outside world, where my own problems were irrelevant. Current events provided a lifeline, one that helped pull me up from depression. The more engaged I became with issues and ideas, the more energized I felt. But being well informed wasn’t a bridge to other kids—socially it was the kiss of death, so I downplayed it. I didn’t want to be seen as a dweeb or a know-it-all. I wanted to be liked. I started going out for the school plays, and discovered I enjoyed performing. And I liked the attention.
I had the yearnings of an extrovert but was still very much an introvert, as became clear when I ran for president of the student council in grade eleven. I lost, as anyone who’d seen me eating lunch alone in the cafeteria every day could have predicted. Losing didn’t feel good. At all. But by putting myself out there, I’d learned that adopting a confident persona actually made me feel a little more confident, inside. Acting “as if,” I could build myself up.
After that very public defeat I basically withdrew from school life and shifted my focus to the local McDonald’s, where I was a shift manager. The lime green uniform of the day was not particularly helpful in terms of improving my social status, but nevertheless, I thrived in the environment. The kids I worked with came from all over, not just my high school, so they had no preconceived notions about me. I finally found the acceptance I had been craving; I was invited to parties, started going to clubs, learned to relax. I accelerated my studies to graduate ahead of my class, then spent eight months as a full-time McDonald’s manager, saving for university and my first car. In the summer of 1978 the regional manager pulled me aside and offered a more senior management position, and the opportunity to attend “Hamburger U” for training in Ohio. He promised me a real future at the company, but I politely declined.
I wanted to break free of everything I knew and reinvent myself as someone who belonged in the big world I saw every night on the news.
My “male” skillset was, at this point, limited. I’d come of age in a female-dominated home—even our two dogs were female—without a male role model actively coaching me through adolescence. I knew how to work hard without complaining about it, but I had no game with women, couldn’t hammer a nail in straight and had no sport to call my own. Only the white 1975 Ford Mustang I’d bought with my fast-food earnings gave me any street cred.
University is where I really started learning how to be a man. Most of my roommates had attended all-boys schools, so the environment was high testosterone. Studying their behaviour, I started to understand what it means to be one of the guys. They never targeted me, though I was different in some important ways; they accepted me, protected me when necessary, and built me up. We hung out, worked out, called each other out during raging intellectual debates and usually could be found, at the end of a party, wrestling, drunk, in black T-shirts. I discovered a lifelong passion for weightlifting; I learned the value of loyalty, mental toughness and giving my all in any competition. I had always wanted a brother, and now I had many, and they remain my brothers to this day. I dated two women during those years but I wasn’t a great boyfriend. I was more interested in hanging with my friends. On my occasional visits home, I found myself anxious to get back to what I thought of as my real life. I was, for the first time, happy.
I began university interested in law (my parents’ first choice, because it seemed safe), entrepreneurship and journalism. But after I helped start a campus radio station and taught myself the basics of broadcasting, editing and reporting, there was only one thing I wanted to do with my life. TV news was the goal. Television was how I’d become interested in news in the first place, drawn in by the power and immediacy of the visuals. But this was the early 1980s, and journalism schools tended to have underwhelming programs for would-be TV reporters. The emphasis, post-Watergate, was still on print journalism. I decided to major in political science, figuring that would help me understand and report what was going on in the world, then apply to radio and TV stations after graduation. My mother fretted that I wasn’t competitive enough to be a journalist, and she was right that I didn’t have the supreme self-confidence that usually fuels a killer instinct. But I did have the hunger that fuels real drive. I really, really wanted this. To me, reporters had the most interesting job in the world, right on the front lines of history (I may have been just a little idealistic—I didn’t foresee that one day I’d find myself on a morning show, feigning interest in sweater-folding techniques).
I was still a news junkie, more hard-core than ever, and one day I sent what amounted to a fan letter to a TV reporter at Global News in Toronto, which somehow wound up in the hands of their PR department, which turned it into a rah-rah item that was picked up by a newspaper, which emboldened me to ask whether I could shadow a Global reporter for a day, which led to my first job in journalism, after I got my degree: editorial assistant at Global. My salary was $9,000 a year—peanuts, even in 1981—and the job involved making good coffee and running around the newsroom handing out Xeroxes of wire copy. There were eight of us doing that, and I quickly realized that nobody who mattered could tell any of us apart. So for the first week, I wore a name tag, which was unspeakably geeky but also meant I got asked to do more things because people knew my name.
After a few months, an aspiring cameraman and I asked to borrow a camera during our time off, and eventually one of our stories—we covered a contest where people competed to write a novel in twenty-four hours—made it to air. About eight months later I was hired as a sports reporter. I was on my way.
I didn’t know much about sports, and reporting scores didn’t interest me. But I’d been told by more than one mentor that the best news writers come out of sports reporting; to describe each game well, they have to find new ways to write about the emotions, the characters, the drama. I found I liked covering the backstories: blood-doping scandals, the machinations behind trades, things like that. Plus, I had the kind of access to professional athletes and team locker rooms that my father and friends could only dream of. In their eyes, that made me a little special, which was something I’d always wanted to be.
A year or so later, I was promoted to the news division—the big time. I’d worked hard to get there, but didn’t feel like a real journalist yet. TV news is all about competition. You’re always racing against the clock to get a story, knowing that two or three people at other stations are on the same path and if you make the wrong judgement call, one of them is going to beat you—and the loss will, of course, be public. I was plenty ambitious and didn’t want to be beaten, but I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of bulldozing over people to get a story. Nor did I even know how to do that.
One of my first assignments was to get a photo of a local guy who’d just been killed in an oil-rig disaster off the coast of Newfoundland. This was pre-internet, so the idea was to go to the dead man’s father’s home, in Toronto, and ask for a picture we could use in our broadcast. I drove over with a cameraman, feeling like a vulture—a guilty, inept one. I was twenty-three years old. I had no idea what to say to a grieving father. The cameraman shrugged, suggesting, “Just be polite.” I knocked on the door and when the guy answered, I said, “I’m really sorry for your loss. Look, you don’t have to give me a photo but it’s my job to ask if you’re willing to.” I went back to the car empty-handed. While I was sitting there, trying to figure out how to explain to my boss that I’d failed my first test, a newspaper reporter pulled up, charged up to the door and announced, “I need a photo.” He sounded like a real journalist: confident and direct, peremptory even. When the dad resisted, the reporter coolly dressed him down, saying he had a moral obligation to fork over a picture of his dead child. The grieving father wound up yelling at him and slamming the door in his face—and, after the reporter peeled off, coming out to my car and handing me a photo of his son. That gave me hope: maybe there was more than one way to succeed in this line of work.
Already, I’d figured out that success in TV news depends on a lot of variables you can’t control. Luck. Timing. How people feel about your haircut. The only thing you really can control is how well you prepare, so I over-prepared as a matter of course. To this day I never approach a story or an interview unprepared.
Parenthood was another story. Almost from the start I felt I was winging it, or scrambling to catch up. For me, the first years of fatherhood were a blur of baby toys, packing boxes and new jobs. By the time Alex turned three, we’d lived in four different homes—in Ottawa, then Halifax, then Ottawa again, then Edmonton, where Erica was born in December 1989. We always moved for the same reason: a better job, one with more visibility and opportunity. I was now the sole breadwinner. We had no family money, no savings to speak of, nothing to fall back on. It was up to me, and responsibility for my family’s economic well-being fuelled my drive to succeed like nothing else ever had or could.
Cathy had intended to return to her job as a TV reporter once Alex was a year old, but as the time drew near, she realized she wanted to stay home full-time to look after him. She felt a little defensive about her decision; her mother, who took real pride in her own job, seemed disappointed. But I wholeheartedly agreed that this was the best solution for our family and especially for our son, so long as Cathy didn’t feel pressured into it. Feminism had supplied a handy framework for analyzing the trade-offs mothers make, whether they return to the work force or stay home full-time with kids, and both of us understood that she was making a significant sacrifice. No matter how much she genuinely wanted to stay home with Alex, she was still giving up her own career aspirations and professional identity, at least temporarily. And if she decided she wanted to return to broadcasting, there was no guarantee of future employment.
I’d have to assume a heavier financial burden, but that meant I was taking something on, not giving anything up. And frankly, it didn’t seem like that big a deal, since working long and hard had always been part of my plan. Having a reason beyond my own advancement just added a bit of nobility to the proceedings, and gave me an even stronger sense of purpose. According to conventional wisdom, I was the direct beneficiary of Cathy’s sacrifice since now I had carte blanche to put my career first, ahead of everything else. I felt a little guilty about what looked a whole lot like inequity, not least because I would never have been willing to do what my wife did. My sense of myself as a man was intrinsically connected to working; my sense of myself as a father depended more than anything else on providing for and protecting my family. It just didn’t occur to me that by splitting our roles along these traditional lines, I was also making a sacrifice.
I don’t think that would have occurred to most men of my generation. The public discourse about work/life balance in the 1980s and 1990s was led by and focused almost exclusively on mothers, and if there was much discussion about the trade-offs fathers had to make, I didn’t hear about it. The assumption seemed to be that “having it all” was easy for men, because women were there to pick up the slack on the home front.
We were now expected to be more involved in childrearing, but the bar was still pretty low. A dad who changed diapers and folded laundry was generally hailed as a hero; a dad who did not generally elicited eye-rolling, not outrage. But the idea that some light housework, a little quality time with the kids and a ten- or eleven-hour day at the office constituted “having it all” was dreamt up by someone who a) didn’t like children all that much, and viewed spending time with them as a form of drudgery, and/or b) viewed work as a non-stop carnival of ego gratification.
It would be more accurate to say that most men had more than women in some respects, but less in others—though the deficit was less tangible and therefore harder to detect. I didn’t detect it, anyway, as a young father because I didn’t really understand that parenting, like work, could be a source of self-actualization. Even the women who were urging men to step up and help more with child care were pushing that agenda primarily in the interests of gender equality and, oh yeah, meeting children’s needs—not our own needs. Stepping up was framed in terms of fairness, duty and responsibility, not personal happiness.
A man was expected to care deeply about his family, of course, but work was where you tested, proved and improved yourself. No wonder no one I knew considered taking paternity leave, even in those rare instances when it was offered.
As it turned out, however, proving myself at work didn’t necessarily mean I could support my family all that well. In TV news, the money is substantial only at the very top, and very few people ever get there. I worked hard and climbed the ladder very quickly, but up-and-comers weren’t paid the same way they were in law, medicine or banking, and there was always a long line of people who would have been delighted to take my job for half the pay. We lived modestly but even so, Alex often wound up helping Cathy sort through the change jar at the end of the month, counting up the coins to see if there were enough to buy groceries. I didn’t go into journalism hoping to get rich, and I always loved the work, though I didn’t always love my job. I figured we’d be okay in the long run if I continued to move up.
Moving up was not, however, conducive to hands-on parenting. I couldn’t figure out how to say no when the boss called—and knowing that Cathy was taking care of everything on the home front made it that much easier to say yes. Driving to work on the weekends, seeing dads playing with their kids in the park, I did question my priorities. Racing off to the airport, leaving Cathy to hold the fort with two little kids in yet another new city where we didn’t know anyone, I wondered about my choices and what the consequences might be. Once, returning home from a particularly lengthy trip when Erica was a toddler, I got an inkling: I walked in the door and she took one look at me and started screaming. She clearly didn’t remember who I was. That made me feel horrible, but the next time I was asked to cover a big story, I didn’t say no. How could I? Looking out the window of the airplane, I reminded myself I wasn’t just doing this for my career. I was doing it for my family.
Still, I suspected that the small, unremarkable, everyday moments I was missing might matter more in the long run. That’s when emotional trust develops. For proof, I didn’t need to look further than my own home. For the first years of my kids’ lives, they were often alone with Cathy, and their us-against-the-world experiences in new cities, trying to find the best parks and figure out which drugstore stayed open late, knit them close. Heading home to them after a trip felt like returning to a cozy nest where I was completely comfortable but also slightly out of synch. I didn’t know which cereals Alex and Erica liked or when their favourite TV program was on or how to motivate them to do something they really didn’t want to do. Cathy was the one they ran to when they’d scraped a knee or their pride had been injured in some way. I delighted in our children and they must have felt that, but I didn’t understand them the way Cathy did. We just didn’t have the same kind of connection.
At least, I consoled myself, I was always physically affectionate, hugging and kissing my kids, telling them over and over how much I loved them. And when I was home, I didn’t bury myself in the newspaper or lie on the couch watching baseball. I played with them, ate dinner with them, danced around the living room to bad pop music with them. The more we needed money and the more successful I was at work, though, the less I did any of those things because the less I was home.
And so, without ever making a conscious and definitive renunciation, as Cathy had when she quit her job, I did give something up: my aspirations of being a hands-on, involved parent. I couldn’t figure out how to be both the man I wanted to be and the father I wanted to be, but I was still hopeful it was possible to be both. Someday. When I’d really proved myself as a journalist and had more time.