Rand Richard Cooper has a nice piece in Sunday's NYT "Modern Love"column on being an older father. He was 46 when his wife, nine years his junior, became pregnant with their first child. Many questions popped into his head:
The belated father faces a daunting gamble. Will a baby indeed keep you young, open up some replenishing new vitality? Or will it do just the opposite? Will I have the energy to be an older father? The patience? The knees? In the unsentimental terms of evolutionary psychology, would becoming a father prolong my peak and delay my plummet — or, as a middle-aged man playing a young man’s game, was I merely setting myself up for an even bigger fall?
He is especially attuned to the physical side of things. And, in what must have been his worst nightmare, his body conspires against him almost as soon as the baby is born:
...Our very first day home from the hospital, fetching Molly a glass of juice in the kitchen, I bent over to take an ice tray from the freezer, when, wham! Someone kicked a dagger-toed boot into my lower back. I went down, ice trays flying. These were the same back spasms that felled me on the basketball court a year ago. I couldn’t get up, couldn’t even sit up. The pain was too intense.
“Not now,” I thought. Not when Molly still had her stitches in, and needed to be resting with our baby. Not when I intended to wait on the two of them, hand and foot. I wanted to be the do-everything guy, and now I was going to be the do-nothing guy, bedbound for the next three days: an invalid, whose wife would have to bring him his medicine and carry his urine to the toilet in a bucket.
Lying there, I writhed in a misery that verged on despair. For 72 hours life had been serving up sweet joy and exaltation, but right now all I could think about was my failure as a father. I recalled years of boyhood sports fun with my own father — epic battles of one-on-one basketball, marathon tennis matches on hot summer days, followed by a race to the beach and a leap into the water.
I had a similar experience. Though not as "belated" a father as Cooper (I was 34 at the time), my injury came as Maureen was pregnant with Aidan. I ripped my patella tendon in a volleyball game, landing me on crutches for six weeks during her sixth and seventh months. I hobbled about after that for her eighth month. Instead of my helping her, big daddy style, she had to take care of me. It was terribly frustrating.
But the physicality of things is not nearly the most important aspect of fatherhood. From a Confucian perspective, what matters is not the bodily challenge of sports, but the ethical lessons of life. There is no physical limit to fatherhood. As long as one can be engaged in the moral education of children, teaching them to recognize and live up to their personal responsibilities and duties, then one can successfully perform the role of father. It can be done from a wheelchair as well as on a basketball court.
So, for all of his frustration and embarrassment, Cooper needn't worry about what he calls "late-onset fatherhood." He may, through his personal experience and maturity (assuming he has attained a certain ethical maturity) be better prepared than other, younger new fathers for the real challenges of raising a child. Older might be better, though he still has to fulfill his own responsibilities and duties. That is what really matters.
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