DADI.org

by Mona Charen

Lying on the fertility specialist's examining table, her legs in stirrups while her husband's sperm was injected through a tube directly into her uterus, writer Anne taylor Fleming began to wonder whether her feminist heroines had betrayed her. At age thirty-five, she was a successful journalist. But she spent most of her days on the Los Angeles freeways, ferrying sperm to the clinic that had become the repository of her fondest dreams and fiercest desires. The nights she spent in tears.

Motherhood, which she had firmly, even jauntily, rejected as a young married feminist in the early 1970s, cruelly mocked her in the mid- and late-1980s by becoming the overwhelming obsession and elusive goal of her life. In her heedless, revolutionary youth, the dia-phragm was, as she wrote in her bitter memoir of infertility, Motherhood Deferred, "not only a fixed part of my body, but a fixed part of my mind." Hadn't Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, and the rest freed women from motherhood? Yet later, when youth was past and the deep bass strings of her nature began to tremble with baby lust, she could not conceive. Years of sex without procreation gave way to years of attempts at procreation without sex. Finally she gave up, having recognized, belatedly, the mysterious, compelling, and irreversible ways our biology is tied up with our destiny, in ways we cannot always foresee.

Feminism has been at war with human nature from the beginning, and nowhere more so than in its fierce campaign against motherhood. Babies and children, feminists rightly perceive, are what make women's lives dramatically, unalterably different from men's. For the past three decades, feminist scholars and writers have attempted to prove that our roles as parents, like our roles in the workplace, are interchangeable with men's.

Biology, however, has persistently behaved like an impolite relative who will not leave a family event. For example, a Harvard Medical School study reported in 1997 that women undergoing infertility treatments had levels of depression comparable to patients with AIDS and cancer. Alas, it isn't social conditioning that makes women grieve this way. It is written into our DNA.

And when the burning urge to become a mother is fulfilled, other natural and deeply ingrained traits in women assert themselves. Fierce protectiveness, utter unselfishness, and surprising patience surface in all but the most pathological women. The gravitational urge to be close to one's children is something few men experience, but few mothers deny. Millions of modern women scan books like What to Expect When You're Expecting, and accept the notion that because they are pregnant, they will experience a "nesting urge" around the eighth or ninth month of pregnancy.

Nonetheless, many of the same women who accept biological differences between the sexes when they're pregnant still swallow the feminist myth that once the baby is born, there aren't--or shouldn't be--any innate differences between the roles of mother and father. Despite the downright primitive state to which women are reduced in the year following the birth of a baby-nursing and nurturing and caring for the infant-women persist in believing that men are adequate maternal substitutes. To acknowledge that motherhood is different from fatherhood is profoundly threatening to the modern, egalitarian style of parenting. Dad is just as good at giving a bottle, wiping away tears, and changing a diaper as Mom is at picking up a briefcase and going out the door to the office. Right?

Not really. Just as very few men experience infertility in the shattering way women do, it should come as no surprise that when men and women do become parents, they differ in their reactions and approach to parenthood.

A father's unique contribution to child rearing as a man is tampered with only at great risk. David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America, observed that when a mother and father are watching a child at play on a jungle gym, the mother will likely be the one to say "Be careful!" and the father to say, "See if you can get to the top." Fathers challenge; mothers coddle. Of course fathers hug, console kids after a spill, and apply Band-aids-just as mothers do. But they are simply inferior to women in the nurturing role. They will change a diaper--but usually long after the point a mother would have noticed that it's wet or dirty. They cannot tell the difference between a baby's hunger and the need to burp. They will dress a toddler for summer in January. They have a preternatural ability to sleep through the sounds of midnight wailing (though they may be more alert to the awakening of an older child). Fathers are less likely than mothers to notice loose shoelaces, sharp objects within reach, and worrisome fevers.

These disabilities on the part of fathers are shrugged off by wives because a) they love their husbands; and b) they understand that fathers perform functions that mothers don't. Psychologists who study infants have found that babies seem to expect more play from their fathers and more cuddling from their mothers as early as six weeks of age. A father's play is a key part of a child's development. It helps to stretch the child's abilities as well as instill self-control. But a mother's hovering presence is critical as well. Fathers sometimes scare little ones by being a bit too realistic in their growling--who hasn't seen a toddler dissolve in tears when Dad was just pretending? A minute on Mommy's shoulder and all is well. There is also research to suggest that the best mothers are the most reassuring and comforting--not the most stimulating. In his book, Blankenhorn recounts a mother's story about the theft of her daughter's bicycle: "My daughter was about seven," the woman says. "We had just bought her a brand new bike. My daughter went outside and the bike was gone. Meanwhile a little boy down the street also said his bike was taken. My husband goes in his van right to where the kids [thieves] were and knocked them off the bikes and they ran. I mean everybody, the whole neighborhood, knew what my husband had done...I would have said, 'Well maybe we can get you a new one later on....'"

Even in the age of cyberspace, the natural strength of fathers is required from time to time. Fathers act as the protectors of their families. Who goes downstairs when there's a noise at 2:00 a.m.? And despite the pervasiveness of two-income families, it's fathers who can work without interruption throughout the nine months of pregnancy and the demanding years of a child's infancy to ensure that the family's basic needs are met.

There is a quality, too, that fathers bring to their role that seems to be necessary for the rearing of well-adjusted, well-rounded people. A child-support check does not suffice. And, one suspects, Alan Alda models do not suffice either. Single mothers are less effective parents not just because one must do the work of two, but because children need a father's influence and example.

Fathers have more natural authority than mothers. They are taller, stronger, and louder than women. They are emotionally tougher. And at some very basic level, kids, especially boys, figure out that even very mild fathers are more threatening than mothers. There are moments in the rearing of a child when healthy fear is a necessary thing. A feminist friend of mine confided her shock upon first hearing herself say to an unruly child, "Wait till your father gets home!"

Because fathers are less naturally forgiving than mothers, less blinded to their children's faults, they play a key role in character development. Children fear to disappoint either of their parents, of course. But which one do they think is more likely to be disappointed in them? Certainly there are individual variations: Some mothers are more censorious and unappeasable than some fathers. But in general, it is fathers who tend to set the standards for their children-mothers who offer understanding and forgiveness.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, who made her three sons her first priority when they were young, recalls that when her children reached the ages of ten and eleven, they began to seek more from their father and need less from her. "In every culture throughout written history," she notes, "there is role distinction between men and women. Ubiquity tells us something about its utility."

Fathers teach sons what it means to be a man and daughters what it means to be loved by a man. Boys raised without fathers are so unsure of their masculinity that they become far more prone to express it through violence than sons of intact families. Seventy percent of inmates at juvenile detention homes are fatherless boys. Daughters raised by mothers alone, and thus starved for male attention, are far more likely to become promiscuous teenagers and single moms themselves than are girls who grow up with steady fathers.

Men's shoulders are for hoisting toddlers on. Women's shoulders are for crying on. It has always been so. It will always be so. A mother's love is the cocoon of childhood. A father's love offers children the equipment to leave home.

For the past quarter century we've been steeped in morality tales about the damage that overbearing and overly strict fathers have done. The locus of pathology, we've been instructed, is to be found in the secret heart of the "typical" two-parent family, where abuse, beatings, and incest are said to lurk. For the next quarter century, we may be tutored on the opposite problem--the moral decay that undermines a society in which fathers cease to perform their civilizing role in large numbers. The most recent and comprehensive data on divorce and single parent families show that fatherless families produce children with lower IQs, higher suicide rates, more abortions, more illegitimate births, poorer school performance, more trouble with the law, more drugs, more violence, and more mental illness than intact families.

It is quite amazing that something as basic to women's nature as motherhood has been so successfully distorted while fatherhood has been so misunderstood. What infertility should have taught Anne Taylor Fleming is that some facts in life are givens. Culture is important. But it didn't create the mothering urge, and it cannot silence it.

Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.

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