Welcome to Portraits of Fatherhood: We’re telling the story of today’s dads.
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There is no better place to witness the changing roles of men and women in the larger culture than through the lens of parenthood. But rather than speculate on what and how contemporary fathers do what they do, we’d like to bring you portraits of the dads themselves. In their own words. Would you like to be interviewed for this feature? See the end of the post for details.
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NAME Matthew Cavanna
AGE 36
HOMETOWN / WHERE DO YOU LIVE NOW? Oakland, CA
ON THE WEB www.livingbridges.net
NUMBER OF CHILDREN One
WORK Self employed Holistic Health practitioner/Counselor
RELATIONSHIP STATUS Married
HOW DO YOU COMBINE WORK AND FAMILY? How have you, or you and your partner (if you’re partnered), arranged your life/schedule to provide the daily care for your kid(s)?
This is an ongoing and evolving process in our household. Both my wife and I are self-employed/independent contractors which gives us a lot of flexibility around hours but also means that work can encroach on our home life and the boundaries are not always clear. We both have erratic schedules and often work weekends so it feels like a lot to juggle at this point but we are doing a pretty good job. We are lucky to have some childcare two days a week and grandma comes by once a week at least and we try to do our “work” in those windows. We have also been making efforts to reach out to our larger community for support and, luckily, our daughter is a real joy to be around and we have some friends that watch her on occasional evenings for date nights. My wife and I tag team on morning and evening routines on work days and we try to leave two days a week for just hanging out as a family and doing household chores together like laundry, shopping, gardening, cleaning… Both my wife and I have movement/dance backgrounds and we try to make the chores fun and playful and take lots of dance breaks. I’m sure as our daughter gets older or we have another child we will need to tighten up our schedule but for now we are enjoying this precious time with our baby and trying to stay flexible.
WHAT IS YOUR WORST AND BEST PARENTING MOMENT?
I would say that my worst and best parenting moments are tied up together and it pretty much sums up what a crucible parenthood has been for me. When my daughter was a few months old, my wife and I got in a very difficult argument and went to a pretty dark place. Both of us were incredibly triggered and maxed out and honestly, I was really naïve about how much work parenting was going to be and I had been subtly expecting my wife to do a lot more than was fair or sustainable. In retrospect it was one of those moments where I was operating from my male privilege and ignorance and not able to really receive my wife’s feedback about my behavior as anything other than her “anger issues.” (I’m sure no women have ever had that experience before….) My wife ended up storming out of our apartment to “take a walk” and I was left holding our crying baby who was almost hysterical at that point and was not calming down.
I had prided myself on being a conscious father and in many ways I knew I was doing better than my father had, but in those minutes after my wife left and I wasn’t sure when (or if) she was coming back, I felt as low and as afraid as I ever have in my life. I wasn’t sure my marriage was going to survive and my mind started to question if I had perhaps made a huge and permanent mistake. I was holding my daughter and she couldn’t calm down and her cries went right into my bones it felt like. I wanted to be the one hysterically crying, or leaving. The whole immensity of this undertaking, the challenges of marriage and parenthood landed on me with a crushing weight.
I held my daughter and walked back and forth gently bouncing her and telling her it was all going to be ok (which is a hard thing to say if you are having trouble believing it yourself, you know?). I put on some music and she kept on crying hysterically and arching her body away from me and I fought my resentments towards her and my wife and the impulses I felt to move away from her and put her down and zone out on my phone. On some level I knew that I had to be the big one in this situation and as I held her I just tried to be strong for her. But at some point, I just couldn’t hold it together any more and I started to silently cry myself. I didn’t let go of her, I just held her and let the tears fall. It felt like some sort of armor that was around my body melted and I was exposed and felt more scared and vulnerable than I had ever felt before. On the heels of that melting though, a kind of soft strength that I hadn’t known was there was revealed and I felt as though it was holding both my daughter and I.
I don’t know how else to describe it but as a kind of Grace. I melted but didn’t collapse… I felt stronger and more solid from the inside. My daughter stopped sobbing once I started crying and soon she fell asleep against my chest and started breathing peacefully and I was filled with immense feelings of humility and gratitude and love for whatever had allowed that to happen.
My wife came home later and we were able to soften with each other and keep moving forward in our marriage and I did my best to own up to where I had been blind and she was able to understand my feelings better as well. I couldn’t really describe what had happened to her, it was my own precious experience and it taught me so much about the importance of faith and hope and staying with things that are challenging and being willing to be vulnerable. In a way I was born as Father more deeply that night.
To this day, I consider that evening my best “parenting” moment and I can see that it was an initiation into Fatherhood that happened between my daughter, myself and some grace that surrounded us. It wasn’t for show and no one was there to see it or take it from me which was important.
So for me, so far, my worst and best parenting moments were intimately entwined.
We’re looking for a few good dads.
IF you’d like to be interviewed for this feature, please write to Lisa Duggan at: [email protected]
Please write “Portraits of Fatherhood” in the subject line.