 | 32 As a 1930s wife, I am |
 | 77 As a 1930s husband, I am |
I have to say, I'm a little surprised. Folks who know me in real life know that I pull off a credible pre-feminist housewife routine, though with a heavy layer of snark on the side. I can my own pickles and put up local produce. I throw dinner parties with the nice china (although lately we've been too lazy to dig out the dinner table so we've been having them on the living room couch). I care about other people's emotions more than my own, I craft, and I like there to be flowers on the table.
It's been a long standing joke about Kate and my relationship that I really, really want to be the butch one, but I fail miserably at it. The best example was our previous roommate calling me the butch one while I sat, legs neatly crossed, doing needlepoint with something in the oven, while Kate sat at the other end of the room, legs splayed, hand down her pants. All it was missing was the beer, folks.
But the thing is, with the baby on the way, I'm sensing something happening. It's not that I'm getting butcher, it's that I'm starting to feel like...a father. I didn't believe this would happen before--I was firmly convinced that my experience was going to be of mothering, just one that didn't include the experience of birth. But I'm not feeling nurturing; I'm feeling protective. I'm not feeling like caring; I'm feeling like providing. (Which is singularly ironic, given that I make about $25K less a year than the wife.) I wonder how much of this package of emotions comes with not being the one carrying the kid around: I can't care for or nurture Willa right now. What I can do is feed Kate, run lotion on her belly, pick out her clothes, make her lunch. When Willa is kicking her in the bladder at bedtime, I can lean my head on her stomach and sing REM songs until she falls asleep, or kicks me in the nose. What I can do now is protect and care for my family, which our culture assigns as a task to fathers.
Maybe some of it is watching the process of growing a kid at a distance, being second to feel the kicks, being the one next to the one going through it. I wonder what is structural, what is cultural, and what is personal in all of this. (And to what extent I feel like a father because I overidentify with a certain fictional character.)
So, readers: do you feel like a father?
(And feel free to share your scores on the tests above. A friend of mine got a -9 on the wife test, which I thought was a little awesome.)
