Montaigne’s advice for new dads

I know very well that I have it pretty easy compared to what Olga has to do. I just cook, clean, and change lots of diapers. I’m loosing plenty of sleep though, which I have always handled very badly. Luckily Ol is a pro at all-nighters thanks to grad school and our domestic sanity is somewhat preserved. But overall for me, the experience of early fatherhood has been like going to the coolest, most amazing concert you can imagine, but getting stoned to just shy of incapacity right before in the parking lot. Day to day, I perform a lot of moral and support services, but in the broader sense feel somewhat superfluous. And while Motherhood is sublime, fatherhood is just complicated. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of thoughts on the subject for, roughly, the rest of my life. But I’ll start with one of the first places I turned to for advice.

The day before Mila was born was a cold and drizzly Saturday. We were waiting around the house, pretty certain something was up but not yet ready to go to the hospital, and I spent much of the day in Olya’s gliding rocker reading while she napped. I read some Chekhov stories, and some essays by Michel de Montaigne, one in particular that caught my eye was “Of the Affection of Fathers for their Children.”

Montaigne has a reputation as a particularly sympathetic figure not only to literal generations of readers, but to his contemporaries who regarded him as an accomplished statesman in a time of terrific religious and civic strife.

As the founder of the essay-genre, his personal jottings are loopy, honest, often funny, and usually insightful. On fatherhood, he begins by making plain his sternest his thoughts on children. “I cannot entertain that passion which makes people hug infants that are hardly born yet, having neither movement in the soul nor recognizable shape to the body by which they can make themselves lovable,” he writes. “And I have not willingly suffered them to be brought up near me.”

The foundation of the adult-child relationship clearly must be of stronger stuff:

“A true and well-regulated affection should be born and increase with the knowledge children give us of themselves; and then, if they are worthy of it, the natural propensity going along with reason, we should cherish them with a truly paternal love; and we should likewise pass judgment on them if they are otherwise, always submitting to reason, notwithstanding the force of nature. It is very often the reverse; and more commonly we feel more excited over the stamping, the games, and the infantile tricks of our children than we do later over their grown-up actions, as if we had loved them for our pastime, ‘like monkeys, not like men.’ “

Indeed, those were different times. There was probably an element of psychological self-preservation in all this, as for most of human history childbirth and childhood were incredibly dangerous times. Montaigne and his wife had five daughters, only one of whom survived past infancy.

And it is worth remembering that for about the same amount of time marriage and families were not actually about love and affection in any real way, but about property, kinship networks, and clan survival. Montaigne spends a lot of time considering how to handle inheritances and preserving your family’s good name.

The greatest reward that comes with reading Montaigne is seeing through the customs and the particular times into the mind of a person. His digressions and anecdotes are of his time and his place, but it is in the wandering that you discover what is great and eternal about being human. As when he wanders away from that initial severity.

He betrays himself at times as a soft touch as the essay progresses: in his position on corporal punishment (“I have seen no other effect of whips except to make souls more cowardly or more maliciously obstinate.”) and about being a miser (“A father prostrated by years and infirmities, deprived by his weakness and lack of health of the common society of men, wrongs himself and his family by uselessly brooding over a great heap of riches.”)

And he knows full well the limits of keeping too severe an attitude. He quotes the Marshal de Monluc, who lost a son and was full of regrets. “He had lost, he said, by that habit of paternal gravity and stiffness, the comfort of appreciating his son and knowing him well, and also of declaring to him the extreme affection that he bore him and the high opinion he had of his virtue.” Montaigne concludes “this lament was well taken and reasonable.”

As a new parent I’ve done my best to avoid anything but the most technical parenting advice from books, though I eagerly court advice from friends and well-wishers. I laughed to myself this afternoon while burping her – which I do dozens of times a day – when I realized that all this little creature does is yell, grunt, and stare at me, and I’m completely mad about her. We haven’t even gotten to the stamping, the games, and the infantile tricks yet.