In Children’s literature (2023), Alejandro Zambra recalls that, after becoming a father for the first time, many acquaintances asked him why he wanted to have a child. “After the jokes, I answer or try to answer. I am incapable of articulating an exclusively rational discourse, but to just get out of the way, with economic cynicism, would be to collaborate with that void of knowledge that we have all felt and suffered and that disheartens and stuns,” writes the Chilean. There are many books that have emerged after the birth of the first child: from Sergio Fanjul to Manuel Jabois, the perplexity before fatherhood (that “I am listening to my son grow” that Francisco Umbral wrote in Mortal and pink) is the starting point for dozens of works published by men every year. And that relationship — imagined or projected — of the father with the newborn child or the compilation of details about the first years of parenting are part of the universal themes of literature. “Saying that there are too many books about motherhood or fatherhood is like saying that there are too many books about love, about death or about war,” confirms Zambra himself, who continues: “Every new mother and every new father discovers issues that were always there, and speaking like the brand new discoverers of gunpowder seems naive or shameful, but that is precisely why it is necessary to do so. And challenging and attractive.”
The conversation about fatherhood is more alive than ever among those who have had children, but it is not the most common among men who have not yet had children or who will not. If the social pressure on motherhood is often unbearable for women around 30 years of age, there does not seem to be such scrutiny for men. In groups of friends or among colleagues who maintain a professional relationship, one of the “underground conversations” that the writer Begoña Gómez Urzaiz talks about in the final part of her book almost never takes place. The abandoners (2022). This conversation would be the way in which women share, almost at all times and in any space, their concerns about motherhood: “Sometimes I think,” Gómez writes, “that all women of childbearing age, and by childbearing age I mean the childbearing age in the West among the somewhat educated middle classes, which is very short and goes from 34 to 42 years, we spend a decade maintaining the underground conversation. Even when we are not talking about it, we are really talking about it. Do you want to have a child? Do you want to have it now? Do you want to have another child?”
“The conversations I’ve had with women of all kinds suggest to me that the conversation exists. Even Charli XCX is in on it!” says Gomez. In I think about it all the time The artist sings: “Maybe one day I will / if I don’t run out of time / will it make me miss all my freedom?” That’s all there is to it, according to the writer: doubt and the awareness that the time to procreate is not infinite. “Charli is only 31 years old, she has more than a decade and a half of underground and explicit conversation left. She will still have hundreds of dialogues on the subject with friends, strangers and journalists. When you are over 40, the conversation becomes less open, much more concrete and realistic. However, this is not a common conversation in exclusively male environments and it is that, among men, it always seems that the usual thing is to think that the decision about children is up to the couple or that ‘it is never too late’,” she criticizes.
According to the study of the National Institute of Statistics on Men who intend to have children in the next 3 years19% of men said that “having children had always been part of their life plan”, while more than half (55%) included their desire in the ambiguous expression “I want to be a father”. Perhaps they do think about fatherhood, but they don’t talk much about it. “There is a huge communication gap, and a lot of knowledge is wasted due to a closed, old and simplistic conception of masculinity. We are too accustomed to paralysing, normative, supposedly practical, imperative and dogmatic discourses”, believes Zambra.
In male forums (in Spain, Forocoches is the best example), these discourses oscillate between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the natalists (so closely related to the extreme right) call on men to have children in order to “defend their legacy”; on the other, there is a whole current that defends that fatherhood means giving up the adventure, as if having one or several children were the daily defeat that ends up turning you into a normie (the most stale topic is allied with the most contemporary consumerism). In any case, although certain doubts and fears are perceived, the discussion never escapes these poles that have more to do with the presumed responsibility or irresponsibility of the potential father than with parenting itself. “Fatherhood used to be automatic, men became fathers because they wanted to, present or absent, good, bad or mediocre. Now things have changed, but perhaps not so much. I think it is important to remember that we are talking about micro-worlds, and in all communities the group of people who have thought about fatherhood, who have decided whether or not they want to have children, is tiny. It seems numerous, but it is tiny,” recalls the Chilean writer.
Various changes and commitments
One possibility that all this shared silence points to is that men do not need to worry too much about whether or not to become fathers, because if they do become fathers, they can decide how to approach it—also on a literary level, in the case of many writers. In this area, men have a much greater level of autonomy than women, who are socially pushed into caring. Furthermore, as Gómez points out: “If you are a man, having or not having children does not fundamentally alter your identity, it does not radically modify how the world perceives you.”
In 2016, Eurostat published While 95% of Spanish women with children were involved in their “care and education” on a daily basis, this was the case for only 68% of men. So, while motherhood is presented as a single practice and commitment, fatherhood still offers many possibilities; even the possibility of not giving it too much importance (or not devoting too much time to it). Over the years, these differences are softened, although the social perception of fathers and mothers and their obligations hardly changes, from the details (those testimonies of teachers who prefer to call only mothers because fathers hardly know what problems or situations they are talking to them about) to the representation of each figure in pop culture (the father who takes care of his child is often heroic and the mother who does not, monstrous).
Zambra is optimistic and hopeful and has “the pleasant feeling of an imminent conversation that is much broader and more generous.” This conversation should encompass not only fatherhood, but also the more conventional idea of family and give all men the opportunity to, in the writer’s words, “take some very long detours before deciding whether to become fathers or not and to take time to discuss from the roots of traditional ideas.”
Gómez is not so hopeful, and believes that biological differences also have an influence (“pregnant people are very aware that there is a decline, that social time is no longer linked to bodily time, because almost no one is thinking about having children when they are at their peak of fertility”) or serve as an alibi (“I don’t want to fall into bad comedy stereotypes, but there are men who seem to go through the world thinking that this possibility is always open, as if they were an old rocker with highlights”). Although she is aware that almost no man wants to be an old rocker with highlights, the writer concludes: “If you don’t live surrounded by constant signs, internal and external, that remind you that with each passing day you are a little less fertile, even if it is happening to you too, it is logical that the subject does not consume you in the same way.”
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