Papa Was A Rodeo

At Aaron's recommendation, I read Home Game, a short book on fatherhood by Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball. It's a very quick read, the kind of book that will shorten a longish bus ride or a mild bout of insomnia. It's funny and wise, and Lewis makes us for being a parent with more financial resources than you by being self-effacing and admitting mistakes. He's probably not quite as oafish a parent as he makes himself out to be. There is one paragraph, however, that glitters with gold flakes of truth and which I would happily tattoo on my back if only it were about 500 words shorter:

At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and -- let us be frank -- got fleeced. The agreement he signed foisted all sorts of new parental responsibilities on him and gave him nothing of what he might have expected in return. Not the greater love of his wife, who was now encouraged to view him as an unreliable employee. Not the special love from his child, who, no matter how many times he fed and changed and wiped and walked her, would always prefer her mother in a pinch. Not the admiration of the body politic, who pushed him into signing the deal. Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight. Men just look away in shame. And so the American father now finds himself in roughly the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain. The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH...YOU...POOR...BASTARD.

I would hope that I could nod appreciatively towards the sentiment above without much in the way of hedges or caveats, without explaining that I really do love my wife and kids, and am often glad to pitch in the minority share of parenting, and so on and so on. Most of Home Game is not so much the above as it is sort of the normal anecdotes of fatherhood, the kind you hear in those occasions when you get to hang around with other parents and actually talk instead of having to be the Wimperative Dad ( "Caleb, do you think you want a hot dog or would you eat a grilled cheese sandwich?"). The book's humor makes it worthwhile, and the mother of Lewis' children happens to be Tabitha Soren, who you will remember from your days watching MTV as a randy teenager.