The Domestic Male

My wife has been reading a book to our daughters called The Lighthouse Family: The Storm by Cynthia Rylant. It is about a cat, who has chosen to tend a desolate lighthouse for the sake of wayward sailors threatened by storm-induced shipwreck. If the lighthouse’s beacon were to go out, surely many a ship would be wrecked on the jagged rocks below. But, after four long years of doing so, she begins to long for the companionship of others and- towns being far from her post- this loneliness begins to wear on her. Yet, she is a dutiful cat and remains at her self-imposed exile long enough to rescue still one more unfortunate sailor, a sea-faring dog who crashes ashore. After he comes to and realizes that she has rescued him, he tells her he is surprised to find someone he thinks to be like himself- a lover of the solitary life. For, he reasons, why else would she be living along this forsaken coast all alone? However, a moving line comes as cat responses to dog: “I am not sure I love the solitary life…I simply live it.” The two eventually take in a group of orphaned mice and, I am guessing, live as a family happily ever.

The lesson of the story is simple, but powerful: One may not love the sacrifice necessary to do the right thing, but one must live it- and good things, like gaining a family, come from doing so.

          I find a similar lesson in the book I have been reading to my children at bedtime, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. In it, the lovable hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, is as the cat in her lighthouse- except he finds himself on an adventure, not longing for the companionship of others, but yearning to go back in peace to his home at Bag End. Still, he persists in fulfilling his role as “the burglar” for the group of dwarves he has joined and continues in spite of himself all the way to the Lonely Mountain. It is there his vocation is fulfilled in the defeat of the dragon and the regaining of the dwarves’ gold. In the end, Bilbo has quite a tale to tell his fellow hobbits in the Shire because he chose to live his unexpected journey despite the calls of his heart to prematurely return home.

         For some reason Rylant’s and Tolkien’s tales have spoken to me lately as Catholic father. Call it a “mid-life crisis,” call it “seeing grass greener on the other side of the fence,” call it what you will, but it is the idea that the demands imposed on and freely accepted by me as a family-man, often seem to go against another desire within me to go out and leave a mark in the outside world of history.

  What do I mean by “leave a mark”? It is something like what Meriweather Lewis felt like he was not doing by his 32nd birthday. As he was on his what-would-be famous expedition across the American West, he lamented the fact that at the same age, Alexander the Great had already conquered the world. Meanwhile here was Lewis himself- in his own eyes- plodding along through prairies, mountains, and woods doing nothing noteworthy.

I am convinced other men who have chosen family life feel similarly at one point or other in their lives. There is a deep-seated urge in them to look out into the world and see in it oceans to be sailed, forested to be pioneered, politics to be debated, widows and orphans to be rescued, things to be fixed, battles to be fought, wood to be chopped. But, having chosen to have a family himself, the man must largely say farewell to these desires within him (or at least substantially limit the time given over to them) and leave them to those who have chosen “the better part.” Meanwhile, he must remain in his lighthouse, ignoring the calls of imagination to go back to town; he must continue on his dwarvish adventure, ignoring the desire for a return to his cozy hobbit hole. He must continue along the path of drudgery he has chosen.

By no means do I wish to steal the word ‘drudgery’ from common vocabulary describing a mother’s duties in the home. For I will be the first to admit, it is commonly considered specific to the work of the faithful and loyal housewife as she cleans clothes, tidies house, cooks meals, and raises saints. All of that is drudgery no doubt, but there are more competent and experienced females out there who have written about that.

What I am addressing here is the drudgery specific to the domesticated male: of sorting through and paying exorbitant medical bills for his children’s ear infections, strep tests, and broken bones; of coming home from work and having to mow the lawn in a quick and efficient way while dodging his two-year old son who is entirely too slow at getting out of the way with his own toy mower; of laying on the floor playing toys with his children, all the while slavishly having to obey the rules his toddlers have arbitrarily set in place; of trying to keep his children occupied for an extra hour or two by games, wrestling, or coloring, thereby stifling the temptation to turn on the television and let the kids “veg-out”; of postponing one’s own shower after a long sweaty day at work so that his kids can take a bath and get ready for bed; of instituting and executing like clockwork a bedtime routine of prayer, reading, and story-telling to lift his children’s minds to wholesome and heavenly things before they close their eyes for the night; and then of waking up in the morning to go to work again.

Obviously such drudgery is at times taken on by the mother as well (though I can only imagine what the yard would look like if I was to let my wife take over the landscaping). However, the accent of the interior struggle seems to be placed differently when a father does these things as opposed to a mother doing them. For domesticity does not comes as naturally to him as it does to his wife. His worldview is almost factory-set to be looking outward- making money, making laws, making things, making adventures. It takes much effort for a man’s wife to reign him in towards a different vision that looks inward- of being present, of being nurturing, of being aware, of being loving.  Indeed, being these things is demanded of him by the choice he has made in becoming a family man. Despite himself he must be them- better yet, like the cat at the lighthouse or the hobbit on his journey, he must live them.

In some fashion he must see in the smallness of his own domestic church at home, a world wider and deeper than the world he leaves behind at his work. For this is at the heart of his vocation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote: “Christianity preaches the unending worth of the apparently worthless and the unending worthlessness of what is apparently so valuable.” What is worthwhile for the family-man to do appears to his restless male heart a fruitless venture; but, a subversion of values must be undertaken by the common man who wants to be the uncommon Catholic father. He must straddle a narrow horse by maintaining his outward look and care of the goings on of “the real world” while also going out of his way to stoke the flame of charity (no doubt sparked by his wife) that is meant to light up his own home.

  Perhaps, no fuller illustration of his vocation is to be found than in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii. The pope writes: “[God’s will is] that the father be truly a father, and the mother truly a mother; through their devout love and unwearing care, the home, though it suffer the want and hardship of this valley of tears, may become for the children in its own way a foretaste of that paradise of delights in which the Creator placed the first men of our race.”

Of course, if it is the duty of father to create a foretaste of that garden our first parents left behind, drudgery will be his lot. Tilling ground, planting seeds, cultivating plants, harvesting fruit- “by the sweat of your brow…” he was once told. All of it is hard work. But it is work aimed at so joyous a thing, for he is trying to populate that future garden where every tear will be wiped away. I, for one, have done my part in giving my kids a foretaste of that celestial realm- I have exposed them to a world in our home where many tears are shed when I demand such unreasonable things from them like finishing their dinner or helping clean the house. All they have to do is think of the opposite of what they are currently doing (i.e. crying), I tell them, and that is what paradise is like. It's a very Augustinian idea I think, that in the absence of one thing, its opposite is put into clearer relief. Anyways, I feel like making them cry is all in my duty to them as their father- I am simply giving them a foretaste of heaven.

In the end, the husband and father is to ask himself: Did I choose the path of being a domesticated family-man because I loved it or do I love the path of being a domesticated family-man because I have chosen? It might not matter if some days he answers in the former, other days by the latter. What does matter is if he stays faithful to it by living it.

And now, as I leave the kids in the living room to watch T.V. for a bit, I got to go out. There’s a lot of firewood out there to be chopped. Winter is right around the corner.