Read Part One
I first became a father in 1977, with the birth of our son, Kahlil. Back then, in the late ‘70s, it was still a bit unusual for the father to be present in the delivery room — and it was also a bit unusual for the father to be serving as an “advocate” for the mother during the birth, standing by and making sure that her needs and desires were being met by the nurses and doctors (who had a million other things on their minds, seemingly).
 Kahlil had been conceived while Clarissa and I were still unmarried. In fact, he’d been conceived during a painful separation, when Clarissa and I were living separately after living together for about two years. Clarissa lived, at the time, about half a block away in a small apartment with her friend, Sandy. Sandy was still a teenager, as was Clarissa, and was recently divorced and the mother of one-year-old Marion, a lovely little girl.
During that painful separation, Clarissa regularly entertained visits from a couple of other young men besides myself — young men who, like me, found her attractive and fascinating — and I was well aware of these other male visitors mainly because Clarissa, always the born storyteller, liked to tell me about their visits. So when Clarissa announced one day that she was pregnant, I was quite honestly uncertain whether I was one responsible for the pregnancy.
Clarissa assured me earnestly that I was the father.
We jointly decided to share the new child — and then later, following a revealing and heartfelt family story told to us by my aunt Loretta, we decided to get married and make our new child “legitimate.”
We also decided to get married because ... well ... because we loved one another and wanted to live together until death do us part. The marriage was by officiated by the local Episcopal minister, Father Dale Sarles, in the Teenage Club recreation room where Clarissa and I had first met five years earlier. The ceremony was simple, and wondrous.
Kahlil was born two weeks later. Clarissa was twenty years old; I was twenty-four.
Holding my newborn son, there in the delivery room on that January afternoon, I felt the thrill of entering a new, as-yet-unexplored world. This tiny boy in my arms was so utterly helpless, so full of promise and potential — and for some reason, the universe had put Clarissa and I in charge of his new life. We had been given a tremendous gift, as I was just beginning to realize that afternoon.
We’d also been handed a weighty responsibility and, as I stood there holding our still-unnamed little boy, I felt that responsibility settle upon me like a huge, invisible yoke.
There were stressful times during our 32-year marriage when Clarissa and I had to admit: we were staying together for the sake of the kids. We both came from parents who had remained married to the same partners all their lives — come hell or high water — and I think we both felt a divorced family, with the mother living in one house and the father living somewhere else, would be detrimental to our children. And certain statistics bear out that belief: according to some studies, children of divorced parents are far more prone to divorcing themselves than the children of couples who remain married.
And there seem to be many other disadvantages as well for the children, as I will mention later.
But in America, the concept of “staying together for the children” is becoming more and more “old fashioned.” In fact, marriage itself seems to be less and less popular — even though the American birth rate (and thus the rate at which men are becoming “fathers” in at least the biological sense) has remained remarkably steady over the past couple of decades, at 2.1 children per mother — just about the exact rate needed to maintain a steady population.
That’s also presumably 2.1 children per father. But the meaning of the word “father” is perhaps not as clear as it once was. For example, there was a time when your “father” was the man who was married to your mother.
That is no longer the case.
According to statistics from the National Center for Health, about 50 percent of American marriages will end in divorce. Various studies on the U.S. divorce rate show significant differences when a comparison is made between first, second and third marriages in America.
- Divorce rate in America after first marriage is from 41-50 percent
- US divorce rate after second marriage is from 60 – 67 percent
- After three marriages the U.S. divorce rate is from 73 – 74 percent
But the divorce rate is only part of the 2009 Father’s Day story. The fact is, many people are choosing not to get married in the first place, even when they decide to have children. The number of cohabiting unmarried partners increased tenfold between 1960 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and researchers Bumpass and Lu found that about 40 percent of first births by unmarried women are born to cohabiting partners. (That of course means that 60 percent of unmarried mothers are living separately from their partners.)
40 percent of the new babies born in 2007 were delivered by unmarried women, according to the National Center for Health. Perhaps even more astonishing, among women in their early 20s — the age group that has the largest number of babies — unmarried women accounted for a full 60 percent of new births.
Viewing all those figures as a whole, we get a interesting (though only partial) picture of modern fatherhood in America. It appears that more than 60 percent of new fathers are not married to the mother of their child. And a father who is, in fact, married to his partner has only about a 50 percent chance of remaining married to her.
When you look at those two numbers together, it appears that less than half of all the little boys in America have fathers who are married to and living together with their mothers. Obviously, the word "father" doesn't mean what it meant 57 years ago, when I was born.
I remember a silly little song recorded by, among others, Eddy Arnold and Frank Sinatra:
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you brother
You can’t have one without the other
America seems intent on proving otherwise, if we assume the word "love" in this context means "making love." Fatherhood has become a short-term project for many men nowadays — perhaps even for most men. And the long-term results of short-term fatherhood promise to be unsettling, especially for our nation’s children.
According to the National Fatherhood Initiative website, children who live absent their biological fathers are, on average, two to three times more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience educational, health, emotional and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse, and to engage in criminal behavior than their peers who live with their married, biological parents.
And while researchers have known for some time that girls raised in a female-headed household are much more likely to become unwed teen mothers, a parallel pattern for unmarried teenage fathers has been documented in a major new study by Dr. William Marsigilio of Oberlin College. In a survey of more than 5,500 young American men, Dr. Marsigilio found that teen boys from one-parent households are almost twice as likely to father a child out of wedlock as teen boys from two-parent families.
As we approach Fathers Day 2009, what do these numbers mean about the state of American fatherhood? If “love and marriage” no longer go together, what does that say about “love and fatherhood?”
Read Part Three... |