----6. Worksheet: Earl's Experience

 

“I’d never been down this road of having a child with a disability,” Earl recalled of those early years one day as we sat in the lounge room of his beige two-story home in Arizona, situated amid Scottsdale’s suburban stucco sprawl. “We can’t play baseball with our kids, go bowling, you know, do typical things. I found myself completely isolated. I couldn’t find other dads with a child with a disability, someone else I could share with and could model myself after. I was going through everything new,” he said. “What happened?” I asked. He was silent for a moment. Finally, he nodded, and said, “It took years before I was able to identify how I felt about Zachary and how he felt about me. We would roll around and wres- tle on the floor in the evening when I was home, and he’d just giggle and laugh. He couldn’t crawl or walk. He would roll to get to me, and it was just like, God, how do you not be touched by that?”

 

Earl confessed that his personal history of gendered experiences had ill-prepared him for fatherhood. Impoverished ideas about manhood and how fathers are supposed to act and what they’re supposed to do had done little to develop his ethical capacity for intimacy and care.19 Men are supposed to be dominant and avoid emotional vulnerability, and women are supposed to be empathetic and avoid dominance. Prescriptive gen- der stereotypes vary across groups and can change over time. For the men like Earl that I came to know, fears over being judged as emotionally vulnerable or weak often posed the greatest obstacles to being the fa- thers their children needed them to be. Over time though, as Earl became more involved in Zachary’s life and his own marriage, giving and receiving emotional support, his life slowly dropped out of sync with the gender role expectations that had set him adrift from confronting the challenges his family needed him to. He began to embody a better version of himself.

 

In devoting themselves to caregiving—whether full time or in conjunc- tion with paid work like Earl, and especially when caregiving is intensive, as is for parents of children with severe cognitive disabilities—moments of intimacy and developing habits of care, new ways of attending and re- sponding to things, help fathers thrive in their roles as caregivers. This can involve a substantial reorientation of one’s values, for example, placing a premium on integrity, care, honesty, and cooperation over control, domi- nance, and competitiveness, or sometimes it might be a matter of learning how to live out the values that one already intuits as deeply meaningful.

 

Talking about how mainstream media representations of fatherhood are entrenched in certain kinds of ideas about masculinity that are anti- thetical to dependence and vulnerability, Earl said, “It’s like whatever is on the TV is what masculinity and success are,” he said. “But success is relationships with people. It’s reaching your potential in life and helping others reach theirs.” He came to see that by helping others grow we often become more responsive to our own needs to grow. “Zachary doesn’t need me more than another dad. He just needs me in different ways. We have to allow ourselves to grow into meeting those needs and being there for our children.” Caregiving can be difficult and unglamorous. However, the meanings that arise through the emotional intimacy parents establish with their children can help them meet the challenges of sustaining it. In this small story, we see how fathers’ identities as caregivers emerge and solidify through such moments of steadfast presence within the moment- to-moment experience of intimacy.

After You Read: Reflection Prompts

Answer any two of the following:

• What changes in Earl’s understanding of fatherhood and masculinity stood out to you most? Why?
• Earl describes a shift from dominance and control to values like intimacy and responsiveness. What helped bring about that shift?
• Jackson talks about "habits of care" and a "reorientation of values." How do these ideas connect with what we've learned from Aulino’s work in Thailand?
• Do you think Earl's transformation would be possible without embodied, physical moments (like rolling on the floor with Zachary)? Why or why not?
• How does this story complicate common media images of successful men or fathers?

🧠  Discussion Prompt

Earl says, “Success is relationships with people.” What do you think success looks like in the context of care?

Can care be a measure of achievement?