Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

Of course, none of these policies need discourage families from deciding to keep a parent at home, regardless of the financial sacrifices. For some families, that may mean doing without certain material comforts. For others, it may mean home schooling or a move to a community where the cost of living is lower. For some families, it may be the father who stays at home — although for most families it will still be the mother who serves as the primary caregiver.

Whatever the case may be, such decisions should be honored. If there’s one thing that social conservatives have been right about, it’s that our modern culture sometimes fails to fully appreciate the extraordinary emotional and financial contributions — the sacrifices and just plain hard work — of the stay-at-home mom. Where social conservatives have been wrong is in insisting that this traditional role is innate — the best or only model of motherhood. I want my daughters to have a choice as to what’s best for them and their families. Whether they will have such choices will depend not just on their own efforts and attitudes. As Michelle has taught me, it will also depend on men — and American society — respecting and accommodating the choices they make.

“HI, DADDY.”

“Hey, sweetie-pie.”

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m home early to look after the girls while Michelle goes to the hairdresser. I gather up Malia in a hug and notice a blond girl in our kitchen, peering at me through a pair of oversized glasses.

“Who’s this?” I ask, setting Malia back on the floor.

“This is Sam. She’s over for a playdate.”

“Hi, Sam.” I offer Sam my hand, and she considers it for a moment before shaking it loosely. Malia rolls her eyes.

“Listen, Daddy…you don’t shake hands with kids.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” Malia says. “Not even teenagers shake hands. You may not have noticed, but this is the twenty-first century.” Malia looks at Sam, who represses a smirk.

“So what do you do in the twenty-first century?”

“You just say ‘hey.’ Sometimes you wave. That’s pretty much it.”

“I see. I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”

Malia smiles. “That’s okay, Daddy. You didn’t know, because you’re used to shaking hands with grown-ups.”

“That’s true. Where’s your sister?”

“She’s upstairs.”

I walk upstairs to find Sasha standing in her underwear and a pink top. She pulls me down for a hug and then tells me she can’t find any shorts. I check in the closet and find a pair of blue shorts sitting right on top of her chest of drawers.

“What are these?”

Sasha frowns but reluctantly takes the shorts from me and pulls them on. After a few minutes, she climbs into my lap.

“These shorts aren’t comfortable, Daddy.”

We go back into Sasha’s closet, open the drawer again, and find another pair of shorts, also blue. “How about these?” I ask.

Sasha frowns again. Standing there, she looks like a three-foot version of her mother. Malia and Sam walk in to observe the stand-off.

“Sasha doesn’t like either of those shorts,” Malia explains.

I turn to Sasha and ask her why. She looks up at me warily, taking my measure.

“Pink and blue don’t go together,” she says finally.

Malia and Sam giggle. I try to look as stern as Michelle might look in such circumstances and tell Sasha to put on the shorts. She does what I say, but I realize she’s just indulging me.

When it comes to my daughters, no one is buying my tough-guy routine.

Like many men today, I grew up without a father in the house. My mother and father divorced when I was only two years old, and for most of my life I knew him only through the letters he sent and the stories my mother and grandparents told. There were men in my life — a stepfather with whom we lived for four years, and my grandfather, who along with my grandmother helped raise me the rest of the time — and both were good men who treated me with affection. But my relationships with them were necessarily partial, incomplete. In the case of my stepfather, this was a result of limited duration and his natural reserve. And as close as I was to my grandfather, he was both too old and too troubled to provide me with much direction.

It was women, then, who provided the ballast in my life — my grandmother, whose dogged practicality kept the family afloat, and my mother, whose love and clarity of spirit kept my sister’s and my world centered. Because of them I never wanted for anything important. From them I would absorb the values that guide me to this day.

Still, as I got older I came to recognize how hard it had been for my mother and grandmother to raise us without a strong male presence in the house. I felt as well the mark that a father’s absence can leave on a child. I determined that my father’s irresponsibility toward his children, my stepfather’s remoteness, and my grandfather’s failures would all become object lessons for me, and that my own children would have a father they could count on.

In the most basic sense, I’ve succeeded. My marriage is intact and my family is provided for. I attend parent-teacher conferences and dance recitals, and my daughters bask in my adoration. And yet, of all the areas of my life, it is in my capacities as a husband and father that I entertain the most doubt.

I realize I’m not alone in this; at some level I’m just going through the same conflicting emotions that other fathers experience as they navigate an economy in flux and changing social norms. Even as it becomes less and less attainable, the image of the 1950s father — supporting his family with a nine-to-five job, sitting down for the dinner that his wife prepares every night, coaching Little League, and handling power tools — hovers over the culture no less powerfully than the image of the stay-at-home mom. For many men today, the inability to be their family’s sole breadwinner is a source of frustration and even shame; one doesn’t have to be an economic determinist to believe that high unemployment and low wages contribute to the lack of parental involvement and low marriage rates among African American men.

For working men, no less than for working women, the terms of employment have changed. Whether a high-paid professional or a worker on the assembly line, fathers are expected to put in longer hours on the job than they did in the past. And these more demanding work schedules are occurring precisely at the time when fathers are expected — and in many cases want — to be more actively involved in the lives of their children than their own fathers may have been in theirs.

But if the gap between the idea of parenthood in my head and the compromised reality that I live isn’t unique, that doesn’t relieve my sense that I’m not always giving my family all that I could. Last Father’s Day, I was invited to speak to the members of Salem Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. I didn’t have a prepared text, but I took as my theme “what it takes to be a full-grown man.” I suggested that it was time that men in general and black men in particular put away their excuses for not being there for their families. I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant more than bearing a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t have fathers in the house we have to redouble our efforts to break the cycle; and that if we want to pass on high expectations to our children, we have to have higher expectations for ourselves.

Thinking back on what I said, I ask myself sometimes how well I’m living up to my own exhortations. After all, unlike many of the men to whom I was speaking that day, I don’t have to take on two jobs or the night shift in a valiant attempt to put food on the table. I could find a job that allowed me to be home every night. Or I could find a job that paid more money, a job in which long hours might at least be justified by some measurable benefit to my family — the ability of Michelle to cut back her hours, say, or a fat trust fund for the kids.