Notes on Tending

The family and I got COVID after two and half years of hiding out. My brain is foggy and only capable of working within the domain of memory. I cannot give the spell post planned for this week its full attention, so I will delve into what I have been pondering while spoon feeding Juniper her ice cream and watching cartoons.

One of the great sorrows of my life was my inability to tend to my mother as she was dying. The more the cancer took her the less I was able to be present. Yes, dear reader, my death work wasn’t born in courage and strength of rising to the challenge of one’s lifetime, like my sister did. She is the strong one here folks. Me, I was a fearful coward. I was a typical man in America, just like my father who was hardly there when things got tough. He always had something he had to attend to with his business. I was no different with my mother. I always had a class I had to teach, a paper I had to write, or something to attend to in another city, far away. Convenient, isnt it?

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This trial of not showing up for my mom during her last days has been one of my hardest. I always believed that when the chips were down that I could be depended on. Yet, here I faltered, here I failed. The echoes of that failure in my life were wide. They ripped open chasms in my faith in my self and my ability to be a good partner. Honestly, Lily has been an absolute saint in how patient she has been with me as we have taken each step in our relationship very slow. I needed to rebuild my trust that I was that person who could be depended on. I think I have done that as a partner to Lily. She has certainly been the rock of a partner I always hoped I would have. I only hope I have returned the favor.

Having a child was the largest test in building back faith in myself. I have tended to Lily as she has gone through trials. I have tended to Winston, our sweet Cavalier King Charles, as he has experienced health scares and the typical puppy growing pains. Yet, nothing compares to the tending a child requires. I don’t think I ever truly knew what tending meant until Juniper was born. In tending, I mean that in the classical sense, because in Latin, to tend means “to stretch, extend, make tense; aim, direct; direct oneself, hold a course.”1 You see what I shrunk from in the past is what most men shrink from: the willingness to stretch, extend, and suffer in the care for another being’s life at the expense of their own dreams and plans. This is precisely what my mother did repeatedly in raising me. She put herself on the stretching rack of being a single mom to give us a chance. So, in her honor, I have placed myself on the stretching rack for my daughter and partner.

So, as I take a pause on the spell work essay series this week, I honor how I have spiraled back to this opportunity to tend while the whole family with COVID. Yes, we are putting a pause on my dreams and plans for writing a three part series on fiber art spell work. We are not plowing through this moment, like I did with my mom’s cancer. I will not busy myself as Juniper groans from her fever. I will not hide in the basement while flows of snot escape her nostrils. (Gross, but also super metal, no?) No, I will devote myself to my partner and my child with the zeal I wish I would have devoted to my mother, with the zeal I wish my dad have devoted himself to me. I will pause my own plans and dreams and stretch myself and suffer for their wellbeing, because its important to me to be the person they can depend on. I will carry Juniper as I feel lightheaded. I will spoon feed her ice cream, even as I struggle with a sore throat. I will do all these things and more because with each act of loving care I am reclaiming my own ability to be the person I want to be. I am earning Juniper’s trust, and with that, my ability to trust myself as someone who can be depended on.

The fact that we have the power to re-write our own history is one of the great powers of being a human. We are the magi of our own futures and can face down some of our greatest failures. We can place ourselves in the alchemical fires of major life transitions like fatherhood and redefine what our life means and how we will approach it. I can not only say “f, off, christian, capitalist, patriarchy,” but also define what it means to be a father as staunchly in opposition to the ideals of that system as I can. Because when the chips are all laid on the table, wasn’t my response to my mother’s illness not just what a typical male would do but how our dominant christian capitalist patriarchal society responds to such illness? Yes, if we have learned anything from this pestilence (COVID) at our doorsteps now, its that we are unwilling to stop the grinding gears of our system to address the suffering of anyone.

Such a logical inference of moving from my own personal trouble navigating how to tend to my family to a public issue with our wider culture is a characteristic move for a sociologist like myself. I live by the axiom, first expressed by C. Wright Mills in his explanation of the sociological imagination, that their is a structural basis for the individual problems we face that makes them broader public issues.

If I look objectively at that scared kid confronting the death of his mom at 28 years old, I see that I am not the only person who has shrunk from those challenges. Lily reminds me of this all the time, “You did the best you could with what you had. You were a kid.” Yes, she is right. I cut myself the slack I deserve. This isn’t about shaming myself. Its about stressing the broader role the patriarchy played in shaping my response to such a situation. Yes, I am just one in a litany of men that shrunk from such a challenge, the most recent products of a patriarchal culture that doesn’t offer them the tools they need to tend in the thicket of life and death. Yes, this is not just my own issue but the structural issue that affects men in the west.

Too often men are expected to provide and not tend. Ah, yes. The typical archetypical male of the nuclear family for the last 60 years. The man who showed his dedication to his family by spending an inordinate amount of time outside the home earning money to buy things for his family. This is the archetypical garbage that left me without a father, having what would pass for one of the finest constructions of such an archetype ever rendered into flesh. Yes, there was suffering, but it wasn’t the communal suffering of a family moving as one. It was the suffering of a lone economic actor that said he worked “scared everyday.” In the end, my father didn’t even provide that, playing games with child support payments, making mountains out of any request for financial help, and breaking promises of economic help.

Why share all this while I am dragging my knuckles on the ground sick with COVID? It’s elementary, my dear reader. I have been butting up against the patriarchy everyday of my life since I came to the cognizance of what was. It was patriarchy that is responsible for the lion share of my deep suffering in life. It was patriarchy that I feared as I became a husband and a father. I feared that the patriarchy would warp me into some being that I didn’t recognize and that I would pass on the same suffering I experienced at its hands to the next generation. It’s the patriarchy I am fighting as I will myself to have the energy to tend to my sick daughter during the worst pestilence we have seen in my lifetime. Here is the root of the matter, I share all this to reveal the praxis of my lifelong fight against the patriarchy.

Praxis is “an ongoing process of action-reflection that aims to bring our conduct into alignment with our intentions. When we switch off that “auto-pilot” which seems to run so much of our lives and act with conscious awareness, we have the ability to make the world a better place.”3 Everyday, I wake up with the intention on working through the spiraling loop of action and reflection that will open up space for a broader expression of being a man and father, not so hemmed in by patriarchal nonsense. I work through that praxis, because it matters. It matters for Juniper. It matters for Lily. It matters for all the generations to come. In a world where we have so little control over the structures that govern our lives, we still have the ability to wrestle with the structures through our own personal praxis; to have our lifeways be deep challenges to the ways that structures constrain us.

Reframing fatherhood around tending is a deep challenge to patriarchy. You know how inconvenient it is for other fathers trying to check out on their kids and partner when you show up in the world as a tender and not a provider? It causes cracks in the veneer of what folks consider is possible. You show by example that its not ok to work long hours all week and then check out to the golf course on the weekend. You show by example that it is appropriate for fathers to have as much skin in the game in raising children as mothers. You show by example what being an equal partner in tending to children and a home is. These are the things that piss me off when I see them today.

Look, I got no time for dudes who want to embody that ole provider bullshit. Get that garbage outta here, hoss. We aren’t gonna be dad buds. We aren’t gonna go golfing with cigars hanging out our mouths while we talk about stocks. I wouldn’t even fertilize a golf course with my own ashes let alone set foot on a golf course. We aren’t gonna get brewskis at a neighborhood bar while we watch the sportsball contest. Shoot, HOSS, I haven’t gone to a bar willingly in a decade. I got nothing but hate for you. We are moving forward toward a more egalitarian future, not one mired in patriarchal nonsense. We got to let that olde way burn, burn, burn away. I burned all the bridges and left you for dead.

So as I sit on the couch with Juniper and Lily watching our 407th consecutive hour of Bobba while we have COVID, I am content. I am content, because I have engaged in the daily praxis I needed to be the challenge to patriarchy that I wanted to be. I am invested in the suffering of tending, and I am not bailing out as I once would. My heart is happy at being on the stretching rack of fatherhood for I am rewriting the past where I fell short and letting my own life be a challenge to the system I so desperately hate. So, yes, dear reader, taking care of your family with COVID can have a deep significance. It can be the opportunity you have been looking for to turn it all around and be the wrench gumming up the works of the otherwise smoothly operating, oppressive machine.

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