Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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circumstances to become a dad. Ironically, almost every response pointed to standards that the men themselves had not met when they had their first child. Andre Green is a good case in point. He counsels that men should become fathers “when they are older and married. Just wait till they get older and married.” Monte, a white twenty-one-year-old with three children already says one should be twenty-five and established before thinking about children. “You know, some people like to go to college, so that’s four years. Finish them four years of college, and then look for a job, take a job, and get some money out of that job. Then if you have a kid you’ll be able to take care of that kid.” William, white and twenty-seven, is the father of an eleven-year-old. “We were fourteen, fifteen years old,” William says, referring to the period when he and his child’s mother conceived. “You don’t have a kid that young. I believe if you’re going to have a kid, wait until at least you’re twenty-three, twenty-four years old. Because then you’re done with high school; you can go to college; you can do what you want. And then you can get yourself situated and have the kid, you know what I’m saying?”
Most men at least pay lip service to the norm that the ideal age to begin having children is in one’s late twenties or early thirties (though one put it as high as thirty-seven), because by that time one is done with school, established in the workforce, and settled down. Not until this stage, fathers claim, are men prepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood. A few even say that one should be married first, and should wait until several years after the wedding (past the “jittery years” of marriage, according to one who had some experience in that department).
Hill, a thirty-year-old black father with a four-year-old child, tells us, “I would say thirty because, at least for men, between thirteen and thirty years of age the world is like a playground—you don’t really know what you want to do, you just want to see how much you can do, how much you can get away with.” Thomas is a white father of a nine- and six-year-old and is currently in a halfway house finishing out a prison sentence. He is one of ten siblings, each of whom have the same mother but different fathers, and has been to jail five times in his twenty-eight years. At first Thomas refuses to give a precise age, saying only that it’s when “you’re ready to settle down.” He continues, “You’ll just get tired of partying, and even if you don’t party you want to slow your life down a little bit. Instead of going out to dinner you just want to sit home and watch the news. You know, just settle. Actually, right now would be the ideal time for me to become a father. I’m twenty-eight. Yeah, right now would probably be good, ’cause I’m done with the fast life.”
EMBRACING FATHERHOOD
The portrait of low-income fathers that emerges from these responses is striking—many clearly have a thirst for fatherhood, though they might not discover it until their partner delivers the news that she has conceived. Despite the fact that most are in very tough circumstances and believe strongly that situations like theirs aren’t the kind to bring a child into, a large majority still respond positively to the pregnancy. How do they resolve the dissonance between their desire for fatherhood and strong cultural norms—norms that they themselves seem to espouse—about the proper conditions for having children?
On the one hand, these men often show surprising optimism about the future. Yet at the same time, their narratives reveal deep uncertainty about the probability that their circumstances are going to get better with time. When one’s future is so uncertain, it can be hard to muster the self-restraint required to put off having a child. Sure, he may not be in the best situation right now, but given the nature of life at the bottom rung of the ladder, when will that be? And how long would the good times last anyway? Byron Jones, from the last chapter, articulated this point when we asked him his thoughts on the ideal time to become a father. He replied, “When you are financially able to take care of the children. And that’s when, nowadays? I have no idea, because, when is it? I mean, shoot, for the average guy stable employment don’t last long. You might work this week and be out the next week, you know?”
Another dynamic helps resolve the tension men might otherwise feel over having children in these circumstances. Recall that most pregnancies are either semiplanned or happened because the men were “just not thinking about” contraception at the time. Were they simply assuming that their partners were “taking care of it” in some way? For some, this is clearly the case. Kanye is a twenty-eight-year-old African American father of at least two children and is currently receiving General Assistance. He had his first child in high school when he was sixteen and the child’s mother was fifteen. “A guy grows up thinking if he is intimate with a female, she is supposed to be on birth control.”
Yet most men admit they had no reason to assume that their girlfriends were taking precautions, and they still failed to initiate a conversation with their partner about the possibility of pregnancy. Consider the case of Jones, a white twenty-year-old working two part-time jobs, and his former girlfriend Jessie. One evening before their now one-year-old daughter was conceived, Jones and Jessie had been walking together down the aisles at Wal-Mart, browsing through racks of baby clothes and accessories. Jessie had taken the opportunity to almost casually inform Jones that she had stopped taking her birth control pills nearly two months earlier. Although he was surprised, Jones took the news in stride and told us later that he didn’t think it was “really any big thing. Like I wasn’t saying, ‘Uh-oh, better get back on the pill.’ And we totally knew the consequences, I mean, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t need sex education; I know how it works.” Jones summed up their outlook this way, “We were fully aware, but I guess you could say we weren’t really worried about it.”
From these and many other accounts, it seems that low-income couples often practice a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to birth control. From parallel conversations with mothers in these neighborhoods, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas learned that a woman often stops taking birth control because she wants kids and lacks sufficient incentive to wait.15 A man may want a child badly too, at least eventually. But each wants a child for his or her own purposes—the desire often has little to do with their relationship with each other. And neither party usually seriously discusses their desires openly until a pregnancy occurs—he prefers instead to let her take control over whether or not birth control is used. He typically continues to relinquish control once the pregnancy is confirmed, as he almost always places responsibility for the next set of decisions on her.
Men rarely counsel their partners to have an abortion—this usually occurs only when a woman is very young or still in school. While most fathers we spoke with believe abortion is wrong, even those who are strongly morally opposed are typically careful to say that because she is the one bearing the child and giving birth, the woman has the ultimate say. While this sounds quite progressive, there is often another logic in play. Because she is the one who chooses to stop using birth control and then decides whether to bring the pregnancy to term, she also bears the ultimate responsibility for those choices; the buck stops with her. By stumbling into fatherhood without explicitly planning to do so, men’s sense of responsibility for bringing a child into the world in even wildly imperfect circumstances is significantly diminished. He can always say, “Well, I didn’t set out to become a father, it just happened. She wasn’t taking birth control, and when she got pregnant it was really her decision to have the baby.”
WHAT HAPPINESS MEANS
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