The Spirit and the Letter
Part Two: All You Need is Love
I have, for the most part, come to terms with the fact that I will need to fight for my rights as a father to four of the seven children in my life. It gets better. [It occurs to me that this is quite the clumsy way to lay out the events of the last eleven long months; but this is how it is.] That new and wonderful and beautiful and contemptuous child of mine? If you ask the state of Ohio—and I challenge any of you to name a greater seer than the administration of the buckeye state—I don’t have a new daughter. In the state that spawned Gloria Steinem, if a woman gives birth while married, her husband is automatically listed as “father” on the birth certificate—even if he had no part in the conception. I discovered this because I conceived a child with a married woman, and, for consistency of disclosure, I was married as well.
By the letter, I am father to one child. By the spirit, as I see it, I have at least five, but as I am coming to understand the spirit behind my inquiry here, I see seven. I don’t care about the numbers, and, while I can’t in earnest say that my pride doesn’t salt the wound, I don’t mean to reduce these many people to statistics of my grandeur. I simply want the chance to be as fully a father as I can to these kids, all of them. Realistically, there should be no lingering issue with Elizabeth’s paternity once all the forms are signed and hands are shaken, but if the function the law should hope to serve won out, it shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place.
“I thought you said ’seven’.” I did. There are two boys who don’t factor into that mess of law and statute, but who nonetheless are a part of this life I’m building. I can’t and won’t replace the father they have, still, and that brings up a curiosity: why not? If, in the case of the “big kids” (thus named as they are 12, 11, 9, and 7, compared to 2 and 1, the ages of the little boys), biology should not impede, why should it hold me back from whatever sublime abstraction fatherhood aspires to? This might point to one of the biggest hurdles for closing the distance between the ideal and the system: demarcation. What is the difference between a man loving and providing for a child he calls his own; a man loving and providing for a child he calls his own, who also conceived the child; and a man loving and providing for a child with respect to whom he takes no special title or station?
This question corners us behind our cherished social institutions, the edges of which might not always sit flush against one another. It would be asking a Herculean task of any one or two humans to provide all the guiding interaction for any child, so the only reasonable alternative is to expect that, in addition to the birth parent or parents, there would be other adults providing for the needs of a child. In some now infamous words, “It takes a village” to raise a child. There are, in almost any case, several adults involved in the development of a child into an adult. What truly separates those considered parents from those considered, well, something else?
If you say biology, you’re already behind. Many children are adopted for a variety of reasons, and the adopters and adoptees often form as close a familial relationship as if they had been linked genetically. If you say this definition is a legal one, again, this doesn’t work, as the law does not compel the definition of a right or relationship but rather is intended to codify the legal attributes of such. Following a strictly legal definition quickly finds us in a paradox. Where, then, do we draw the line?
Do we need to step back and actually decide whether it is productive to make this distinction at all? Should we simply accept that there are several people who will help shape a child, and leave it at that? That would seem problematic at least from a logistical view: for instance, how would such a group come to any decision about how best to meet the needs of that child? Do they form a council, present cases, and take a vote? That sounds absurd; but so does presuming the need for the demarcation of this group into “parents” and “others” solely because of the increased efficiency with which the needs of a child might be executed. That is, should we call someone “Dad” so that there is a single male who can sign consent forms and attend parent/teacher conferences?
I don’t think that works, and, honestly, I’m not sure what does. It might be that we should just take care of kids independent of whatever we might be called, and leave it to them to decide whether they consider us “Mom” or “Dad”. That certainly sounds nobler or more enlightened; but what about those years of early childhood during which a child can’t make such assertions? Any presumptive attempts to manage these rights prior to toddlerhood, say, would certainly become a tangled morass of legislation and bureaucracy.
Intuitively, at least, there seems to be justification or need of some amount of differentiation between people and their roles. It’s hard, when pressed to consciously choose the model of that differentiation, to reason my way through it. This has become a point of slight tension between Danielle and me. I don’t have answers, but at least I have useful questions; and I expect to spend most of the rest of my life looking for answers, discerning the spirit in spite of the letter.
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