2022.06.07爸爸为什么这么生气？ 一位父亲敢于探索他的愤怒。

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WHY IS DAD SO MAD?
A father dares to explore his rage.

By Daniel Engber
child's black marker drawing of angry face with dark short hair over red silhouette of father raising small child in air on teal background
Pablo Delcan and Río Delcan La Rocca
JUNE 7, 2022, 7 AM ET
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For dads, 2015 was a clarifying year. A glorifying year. Fatherly.com—a website described in The New York Times as a father-focused mashup of Vice and BuzzFeed—came online in April with a plan to serve men at the most “blindly inquisitive and acquisitive moment of their lives.” Celebrities were getting in on daddy culture, too. Ashton Kutcher pushed his audience of millions to agitate for diaper-changing stations in men’s rooms. Jimmy Fallon came out with a best-selling, father-forward picture book, Your Baby’s First Word Will Be DADA. And a klatch of daddy bloggers was trying to cajole the nation’s leading online retailer into making its parent-discount program more inclusive for men. By year’s end, Amazon Mom had become Amazon Family.

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But 2015’s most telling fatherhood trend was the one that captured dads’ confusion. In the spring, just before the launch of Fatherly, a Clemson University student’s viral essay introduced the world to the phrase and image of the dad bod: “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out,” as she put it. Soon dad bod was the subject of hundreds of newspaper stories, including five in The Washington Post alone. But as the phrase’s popularity increased, so did debates about its meaning. Was the dad bod hard or soft? Was it imposing or forgiving? Was it just a state of mind, or was it—as Men’s Health suggested—a dangerous reality? (“Face it: The dad bod is just a precursor to dead bod,” the magazine’s editor proclaimed.)

In its partial lack of definition, the dad bod could stand in for dads’ self-image on the whole. Everybody knew that dads used to earn a living; that they used to love their children from afar; and that when the need arose, they used to be the ones who doled out punishment. But what were dads supposed to do today? “In former times, the definition of a man was you went to work every day, you worked with your muscles, you brought home a paycheck, and that was about it,” the clinical psychologist Thomas J. Harbin would explain to Fatherly a few years later. “What it is to be a man now is in flux, and I think that’s unsettling to a lot of men.” Indeed, modern dads were left to flounder in a half-developed masculinity: Their roles were changing, but their roles hadn’t fully changed.

Raising Raffi: The First Five YearsKEITH GESSEN,VIKING
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A Pew Research Center survey, carried out the autumn after dad-bod fever, found that men cared just as much about their parental identity as moms did about theirs (57 percent described it as being “extremely important,” versus 58 percent of women). But all of that caring served as fuel for newfound insecurity: Most of the moms surveyed—51 percent—said they did “a very good job” of raising their children; among the dads, just 39 percent said the same.

How to Build a Life: The things that make fathers happiest

Fatherly tried to help with this conundrum. The lack of clear-cut standards for successful masculinity, Harbin said, “causes a lot of dissatisfaction that gets expressed as anger.” Men who defined themselves as modern fathers, more nurturing than their own dads had been, could be flummoxed by that rage. An early series on the site, called “Why I Yelled,” interviewed a different father for each installment about a time he’d lost his temper. Many columns ended with the man’s regrets. “I instantly felt like the world’s biggest asshole and just about started crying,” one father said. “Here I am losing my shit when my little girl is just having some anxiety issues about starting first grade.” Another dad, whose son had hit him in the shoulder with a baseball, said he’d yelled “because sometimes it needs to happen,” then ended up apologizing. The injury wasn’t that bad, he admitted. “Honestly, I was being a bit of a pussy.”


Fatherly had promised from the start to expand its readers’ minds and maybe turn them into “super-dads.” One of the site’s first-ever featured super-dads—an al‑Qaeda-fighting former Navy SEAL—offered his advice: “To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, who you are will speak more loudly to your children than anything you say.” But as a tip for dads, this shirked the hardest question. Who are they, really? Nurturers, enforcers, role models? Or are they somehow all of those at once?

A father’s superpower, it emerged, would be self-knowledge. Dr. Spock once reassured mothers with his famous mantra: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” Now Fatherly does the same for dads. “Don’t sweat what you don’t know,” the site’s editors wrote in Fatherhood, their omnibus of dad advice, published last year, “because if you know yourself, you know fatherhood.”

In 2015, the journalist and novelist Keith Gessen had a son. His memoir of early parenthood, Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, starts off as so many dad books do—with a nod to parenting’s great transition, and dads’ uncertain duties. “I was part of the first generation of men who, for various reasons, were spending more time with their kids than previous generations,” Gessen writes in the introduction. “That seemed notable to me.”

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But his book proceeds as so many dad books don’t: with a father’s careful, piercing introspection, and a deep analysis of anger. “You’re a bad dada and I’m never going to listen to you again!” his 3-year-old son says to him in one scene, after getting yelled at during bedtime. “I felt he was right,” Gessen says. “I was not a good dada. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

From the July/August 2010 issue: Are fathers necessary?

I didn’t know, I don’t know, I still don’t know—these are the modern dad’s refrains, and the subject of the book. “You don’t know anything about yourself until your baby gets older,” Gessen writes. Parenting is self-discovery. On that principle, Raising Raffi and Fatherly agree. But in Gessen’s case, self-discovery can be a brutal process, revealed not just through intense engagement in the work of child-rearing but also, more particularly, through the bouts of rage that a child may inspire. “You don’t know anything about yourself until the day your adorable little boy looks you in the eye, notices that your face is right up close to him, and punches you in the nose.”

Gessen writes about his temperamental, trying son with a depth that can only come from years of loving observation. But his son is watching, too. Again and again, Raffi tests his father’s temper—pinching, kicking, scratching, throwing—and then provides his own assessments. “Dada’s not nice,” he says. And: “Dada, I love you even when you do something bad to me.” And: “Dada, superheroes never get mad.” When Raffi gets a sticker chart, at one point, to encourage good behavior, he insists on making another for his parents. Theirs has fields for getting dressed, for eating dinner, and for “not hitting” him. (Those are Raffi’s words, not Gessen’s.)


If knowledge comes, in part, through Raffi’s provocations, Gessen pays them close attention. “I would find myself yelling or hissing or reprimanding,” he observes, like a clinician making rounds. Elsewhere he says he keeps a diary of incidents in which he’s lost control. In one, he finds his tempest veer from simple yelling into slapping Raffi’s wrist; in another, a push turns into an unintentional rap on the head. “These were the low points,” he says. “But scarier to me were the times when Raffi drove me so out of my mind with anger that I would imagine hitting him for real.”

Gessen’s tendency to lose control reappears throughout the book. In a chapter on whether Raffi should be raised bilingual, the father’s fury folds into a question of identity. Gessen himself was born in Russia, and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 6. Teaching Raffi to speak Russian would tie him to his past, but also to “a culture and a history,” as Gessen puts it, “that most of us, for various reasons, had wanted to escape.” He wonders whether he could or would ever bring Raffi on a trip to “Putin’s Russia,” the aggressive fatherland, to help him learn the language.

Naturally, that country’s language is the one Gessen uses when he’s blowing up. “I turned out to be more of a yeller in Russian than I was in English,” he writes.

I found I had a register in Russian that I don’t in English, wherein I made my voice deep and threatening and told Raffi that if he didn’t right away choose which shirt he was going to wear that morning, I was going to choose it for him.
That self-splitting has some benefits. Whenever Gessen fumes at Raffi somewhere near their home in Brooklyn, he knows he’ll have some privacy. “At least I did it in Russian,” he writes, in reference to a bout of yelling in the park.

As a father, I’m concerned less about the sound of yelling than its spirit—what the yelling means, where the yelling might end up.
It must be nice to have a secret channel for your angry self, hidden even from your wife. To Raffi, though, Gessen’s Russian rages seem duplicitous. “Dada,” he says astutely at one point, “if people understood Russian, they would say, ‘That guy is not nice.’ ” Then Raffi calls his dad a liar, for claiming that he won’t get mad, and for always getting mad again anyway. “This was true,” Gessen says. “I did promise that, and then I always broke that promise.”




The memoir ends as Fatherly suggests, with Dada at last confronting his identity. One day at the playground, Gessen spots a kind and patient man over by the jungle gym, whose daughter is in the process of losing her mind. “The entire time I thought that the father was doing a remarkable job of staying calm, of not yelling, of not asserting his authority,” Gessen says. “I envied his patience. But I could not do what he was doing—and, I suddenly realized … I would not want to. It wasn’t in me to do.”

When my daughter was born (not long after Gessen’s son), and for most of the next three years, I marveled at the fact that she didn’t make me angry. How could she make me angry? The idea was just absurd. I’d never felt so beset and (I’ll admit it) bored by daily life—and yet I’d also never felt so placid. The baby needed almost everything that I could give, and she seemed to need it all the time. But nothing was her fault.

In those early, foggy days of fatherhood, I pitched a podcast to my editor. It would be called When Will I Get Angry at My Daughter?, and it would explore the cognitive and moral development of infants and toddlers, as well as the philosophy of moral agency and culpable ignorance. In other words, I was scared of yelling at my daughter, and I tried to quarantine that fear inside a shell of wonder and abstraction. But the anger would be coming just the same, as it does for every parent at some time. My parents had been mad at me, sometimes spanking mad. Their parents had been mad at them. I knew that fathers, in particular, could be very angry, and that angry fathers, in particular, could be very scary. And I didn’t like to think that one day soon I’d lose my temper, too.


Read: What makes men fathers

“Yelling turns out to be a pretty gendered issue,” reports an article in Fatherly’s official “Guide to Anger Management.” If testosterone can help you throw a baseball harder, a child psychiatrist says, then it can also make you “hurl your voice” with greater volume and velocity, which is “extra scary” for a kid. “It’s not that moms don’t yell, it’s that fathers yell with more force.”

As a father, though, I’m concerned less about the sound of yelling than its spirit—what the yelling means, where the yelling might end up. Some fathers are afraid of being angry. Others are afraid of being stony. We’re all afraid of causing pain to our children or, much worse, giving them a lasting wound. Michael Chabon, in his memoir Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, laments his “latent dickitude” around the house. The book describes one time when Chabon’s 14-year-old daughter had just gotten a new haircut and looked to him for approval. His mind was somewhere else and he failed to muster a response. “For a moment her eyes went wide with fear and doubt,” he writes, before turning the narration on himself: “What a dick!”

The harm that he’s inflicted can’t be more than subtle disappointment. (I fail tests like these several times a week.) But Chabon’s fretting is unhinged. “She had a crack in her now, fine as a hair but like all cracks irreversible,” he writes.

I was shocked by my own thoughtlessness, and ashamed of it, but the thing I felt most of all was horror. Horror is the only fit response when you are confronted by the full extent of your power to break another human being.
It’s unhinged, but relatable—parenthood unhinges people. I’m sure that every mom and dad has known the fear of messing up their kid. That tension isn’t gendered. But a father’s fear of power—his sense that he might cause some catastrophic damage—may have its own distinctive vibration, one that tweaks the limbic nerve. (Perhaps he worries that, however hard he tries, he’ll never match a mother’s skill at patching wounds.) “I felt this possibility inside me. I was capable of doing it,” Gessen writes of hitting Raffi, really hitting him. This fantasy of transformation, from dad bod to the Hulk, elevates the stakes.


Discipline used to be the dad’s domain—his solid ground, the site of male authority at home. Now it’s just the opposite: a quicksand of confusing implications, where the angry dad exerts control but also loses it. Gessen’s book maps out this terrain. In a scene outside a restaurant, where Raffi has spilled his water and thrown his hot dog on the floor, Gessen ends up shaking his son upside down, to make the boy stop hitting him. Raffi cries and whines and then dissolves into fearful, desperate peals of laughter. “I was angry—and he was scared,” Gessen writes. Surely the converse was also true.

Memoirs of fatherhood are rarely so honest or so blunt. Chabon gestures at the same horrible potential—father as destroyer—but sublimates it in theatrics. Other dad books hide behind an image of bumbling befuddlement, as if a modern father couldn’t break his kids if he wanted to. Even Fatherly, today’s proponent of “Father, know thyself,” turned out to be an accidental billboard for toxic masculinity. When the site debuted with counsel from the former Navy SEAL, that dad was Eric Greitens. Greitens, who went on to serve as governor of Missouri, has been accused by his former hairdresser of sexual assault, and by his ex-wife of physical abuse. In a sworn affidavit, the latter told a judge that he’d hit their 3-year-old son and yanked the boy around by the hair. (Greitens has denied all of these allegations, and was not formally charged with assault; the article about him is no longer on Fatherly.)


I don’t mean to say that every dad has darkness in his soul, but rather that the darkness now hangs above us all, shading a father’s quest for self-discovery with dread. My daughter was born into an atmosphere of male aggression. I bottle-fed her through Election Night in 2016. The Harvey Weinstein story broke around the time she turned 1. At her second-birthday party, the kids ate cupcakes while the parents whispered about Christine Blasey Ford’s congressional testimony. By the time she turned 3, Bill Cosby—“America’s Dad,” and the author of an early book on what it means to be a modern father—was appealing his conviction on three counts of aggravated indecent assault. (His conviction was overturned last year.)

“If you know yourself, you know fatherhood,” Fatherly’s advice book says. But for me, and perhaps for Gessen and the other fathers of our micro-generation, this promise comes off as a threat. We were told, not so long ago, that dads had reached the cusp of something new—that they could start “embracing what they’ve become,” as Fatherly suggested in 2015, without “giving up on who they are.” It feels as though evidence against this claim has been mounting ever since. What if I don’t want to know the ways my identity will be inflicted on my children?

Near the end of Raising Raffi, Gessen offers up a route around this snare of anger and self-doubt. A father’s journey with his child, he observes, involves “pass[ing] through a terrible struggle” for independence and connection, which ends only when he’s no longer needed. This is the “tragedy of parenthood,” he says: To know yourself as a father is to understand the limits of your role. “You succeed when you make yourself irrelevant, when you erase yourself. Parents who fail to do that have failed.”


So embrace what you’ve become. But then you have to learn to let it go.

This article appears in the July/August 2022 print edition with the headline “Why Is Dad So Mad?”





书籍
爸爸为什么这么生气？
一位父亲敢于探索他的愤怒。

作者：Daniel Engber
儿童用黑色记号笔画的愤怒的脸，深色短发，在茶色背景上父亲在空中抚养小孩的红色剪影。
帕布罗-德尔坎和里奥-德尔坎-拉罗卡
2022年6月7日，美国东部时间上午7点
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对于爸爸们来说，2015年是一个澄清的一年。一个光荣的一年。Fatherly.com--一个被《纽约时报》描述为Vice和BuzzFeed混合的以父亲为中心的网站--于4月上线，计划在男人 "一生中最盲目的好奇和获取的时刻 "为他们服务。名人也参与到父亲文化中来。阿什顿-库彻(Ashton Kutcher)推动他的数百万观众鼓动在男厕所设立换尿布站。吉米-法伦(Jimmy Fallon)推出了一本畅销的、面向父亲的图画书《你宝宝的第一个词是DADA》。一群父亲博客试图劝说全国领先的在线零售商使其父母折扣计划对男性更加包容。到年底，亚马逊妈妈已经成为亚马逊家庭。

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但2015年最能说明问题的父爱趋势是抓住了爸爸们的困惑。春天，就在Fatherly推出之前，一位克莱姆森大学学生的病毒性文章向世界介绍了 "爸爸的身体 "这个词和形象。她说："在啤酒肚和健身之间有一个很好的平衡"。很快，"爸爸的身体 "成为数百份报纸报道的主题，其中仅《华盛顿邮报》就有五篇。但是，随着这个短语的流行，关于其含义的争论也在增加。爸爸的身体是硬还是软？它是威严的还是宽容的？它只是一种心理状态，还是像《男性健康》杂志所说的那样是一种危险的现实？("面对它。该杂志的编辑宣称："面对它：父亲的身体只是死亡身体的前兆。）

在其部分缺乏定义的情况下，"爸爸的身体 "可以代表爸爸们的整体自我形象。大家都知道，爸爸们过去是为了谋生；他们过去是为了从远处爱他们的孩子；当需要的时候，他们过去是施以惩罚的人。但是今天的爸爸们应该做什么呢？"几年后，临床心理学家托马斯-J-哈尔滨（Thomas J. Harbin）向《父亲》杂志解释说："在以前，男人的定义是你每天去工作，用你的肌肉工作，你把工资带回家，仅此而已。"现在做一个男人是什么是在变化的，我认为这让很多男人感到不安。" 的确，现代的爸爸们只能在半发展的男性气质中挣扎。他们的角色正在改变，但他们的角色还没有完全改变。

抚养拉菲。头五年》KEITH GESSEN，维京人
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皮尤研究中心在 "爸爸热 "之后的秋天进行的一项调查发现，男性对其父母身份的关心程度不亚于母亲对其身份的关心程度（57%的人将其描述为 "极其重要"，而女性为58%）。但所有这些关心都成为新发现的不安全感的燃料。大多数被调查的母亲--51%--说她们在抚养孩子方面做得 "非常好"；而在父亲中，只有39%的人这样说。

如何建立一种生活。让父亲们最幸福的事情

Fatherly试图帮助解决这个难题。哈尔滨说，缺乏明确的成功男性标准，"导致了很多不满，这些不满被表达为愤怒"。那些把自己定义为现代父亲，比他们自己的父亲更有教养的男人，可能会被这种愤怒所迷惑。该网站的一个早期系列，名为 "我为什么大喊大叫"，每期采访一位不同的父亲，讲述他发脾气的经历。许多专栏都以该男子的悔意结束。"一位父亲说："我立刻觉得自己是世界上最大的混蛋，并开始哭泣。"当我的小女儿刚开始上一年级时有一些焦虑问题，我却在这里发脾气。" 另一位父亲，他的儿子用棒球打中了他的肩膀，他说他大喊大叫，"因为有时需要这样做"，然后最后道歉了。他承认，伤势并没有那么严重。"老实说，我当时有点胆怯。"


Fatherly从一开始就承诺要扩展其读者的思想，也许会把他们变成 "超级爸爸"。该网站有史以来第一次出现的超级爸爸之一--一位打击基地组织的前海豹突击队员--提出了他的建议。"引用拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生的话说，"你是谁将比你说的任何话都更响亮地告诉你的孩子。但作为对父亲的建议，这回避了最难的问题。他们到底是谁？养育者、执行者、榜样？还是说他们在某种程度上同时具备了这些？

一个父亲的超级能力是自我认识。斯波克博士曾经用他著名的口头禅向母亲们保证："相信自己。你知道的比你认为的要多"。现在，Fatherly也为爸爸们做了同样的事情。"该网站的编辑们在去年出版的《父亲》中写道："不要为你不知道的事情担心，""因为如果你了解自己，你就了解父亲的身份。

2015年，记者兼小说家凯斯-格森有了一个儿子。他的早期亲子关系回忆录《养育拉菲》。前五年》，正如许多父亲书籍所做的那样，以对育儿的巨大转变和父亲的不确定职责的点头为开端。"盖森在序言中写道："我是第一代男人中的一员，由于各种原因，他们比前几代人花更多时间在孩子身上。"这在我看来是值得注意的。"

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但他的书的进展是许多爸爸书所没有的：以一个父亲的谨慎，刺耳的反省，和对愤怒的深刻分析。在一个场景中，他3岁的儿子在睡前被骂后对他说："你是个坏爸爸，我再也不听你的了！"。"我觉得他是对的，"盖森说。"我不是一个好爸爸。但我不知道还能做什么。"

摘自2010年7/8月号。父亲有必要吗？

我不知道，我不知道，我还是不知道--这些是现代父亲的反驳，也是本书的主题。"盖森写道："在你的孩子长大之前，你对自己一无所知。养育孩子就是自我发现。在这一原则上，《抚养拉菲》和《父亲》是一致的。但在盖森的案例中，自我发现可能是一个残酷的过程，不仅通过激烈地参与养育孩子的工作来揭示，而且更特别的是，通过孩子可能激发的怒火。"你对自己一无所知，直到有一天你那可爱的小男孩看着你的眼睛，注意到你的脸离他很近，并对你的鼻子打了一拳。"

盖森以一种只有在多年的爱的观察中才能产生的深度来写他那脾气暴躁、努力的儿子。但他的儿子也在观察。拉菲一次又一次地测试他父亲的脾气--捏、踢、抓、扔，然后提供他自己的评估。他说："爸爸不是好人"。还有。"爸爸，即使你对我做坏事，我也爱你。还有。"爸爸，超级英雄从不生气"。当拉菲得到一个贴纸表，以鼓励良好的行为时，他坚持要为他的父母再做一个。他们的贴纸上有穿衣服、吃晚饭和 "不打人 "的字样。(这些都是拉菲的话，不是盖森的。）


如果说知识部分来自于拉菲的挑衅，那么盖森就会密切关注这些挑衅。他说："我会发现自己在大喊大叫、声嘶力竭或训斥，"他观察到，就像一个临床医生在查房。在其他地方，他说他把自己失去控制的事件写成了日记。在一个事件中，他发现自己的暴怒从简单的吼叫变成了拍打拉菲的手腕；在另一个事件中，一次推搡变成了无意中拍打头部的行为。他说："这些都是低潮期，"他说。"但对我来说，更可怕的是拉菲因愤怒而使我失去理智的时候，我会想象着真的打他。"

盖森的失控倾向在书中再次出现。在关于拉菲是否应该被培养成双语的一章中，父亲的愤怒折叠成一个身份问题。教拉菲说俄语将使他与他的过去联系在一起，但也与 "一种文化和历史 "联系在一起，正如格森所说，"我们大多数人出于各种原因，都想逃离"。他想知道他是否能或是否会带拉菲去 "普京的俄罗斯"--那个咄咄逼人的祖国--旅行，以帮助他学习语言。

自然，那个国家的语言是盖森在炸毁时使用的语言。"他写道："事实证明，我在俄语中比在英语中更喜欢大喊大叫。

我发现我在俄语中有一种英语中没有的语调，在那里我让自己的声音变得低沉而具有威胁性，并告诉拉菲，如果他不马上选择他那天早上要穿的衬衫，我就会为他选择。
这种自我分裂有一些好处。每当盖森在他们位于布鲁克林的家附近的某个地方向拉菲发火时，他知道自己会有一些隐私。他写道："至少我是用俄语做的。"他提到了在公园里的一阵大喊大叫。

作为一个父亲，我关心的不是吼叫的声音，而是它的精神--吼叫意味着什么，吼叫的结果可能是什么。
有一个秘密的渠道来表达你的愤怒，甚至对你的妻子隐瞒，这一定很好。不过，对拉菲来说，格森的俄罗斯式怒吼似乎是两面派的。"达达，"他在一个点上敏锐地说道，"如果人们理解俄语，他们会说，'那个人不好'。 "然后拉菲称他的父亲是个骗子，因为他声称自己不会发火，而且无论如何都会再次发火。"这是真的，"格森说。"我确实承诺过，然后我总是打破这个承诺。"




回忆录的结尾正如《父亲》所言，达达终于面对了自己的身份。有一天在操场上，格森发现一个善良而有耐心的人在丛林健身房那边，他的女儿正在失去理智的过程中。"整个过程中，我认为这位父亲在保持冷静、不大喊大叫、不宣扬自己的权威方面做得很出色，"盖森说。"我很羡慕他的耐心。但我不能像他那样做--而且，我突然意识到......我也不想这样做。这不是我想做的。"

当我的女儿出生时（在盖森的儿子出生后不久），以及在接下来的三年中，我对她没有让我生气这一事实感到惊叹。她怎么可能让我生气？这个想法实在是太荒谬了。我从未对日常生活感到如此困扰和（我承认）厌烦，但我也从未感到如此平和。孩子几乎需要我所能给予的一切，而且她似乎一直都需要这些。但没有什么是她的错。

在做父亲的那些早期的、迷迷糊糊的日子里，我向我的编辑推荐了一个播客。它将被称为 "我什么时候会对我的女儿生气？"它将探讨婴儿和幼儿的认知和道德发展，以及道德机构和可责备的无知的哲学。换句话说，我害怕对我女儿大喊大叫，我试图把这种恐惧隔离在一个神奇和抽象的外壳里。但愤怒还是会到来，就像每个父母在某些时候一样。我的父母曾经对我发过火，有时是打屁股发火。他们的父母也曾对他们发过火。我知道，特别是父亲，可能非常生气，特别是生气的父亲，可能非常可怕。我不愿意想到有一天我也会发脾气。


阅读。是什么让男人成为父亲

"大喊大叫原来是一个相当性别化的问题，"Fatherly的官方 "愤怒管理指南 "中的一篇文章报道。一位儿童精神科医生说，如果睾丸激素可以帮助你更用力地投掷棒球，那么它也可以让你以更大的音量和速度 "吼叫"，这对孩子来说是 "特别可怕 "的。"不是妈妈不喊，而是父亲喊得更有力度。"

不过，作为一个父亲，我关心的不是吼叫的声音，而是它的精神--吼叫意味着什么，吼叫的结果可能是什么。有些父亲害怕生气。另一些人则害怕变得呆板。我们都害怕给我们的孩子带来痛苦，或者更糟糕的是，给他们带来持久的伤害。迈克尔-查本（Michael Chabon）在其回忆录《Pops: 在他的回忆录《碎片中的父爱》中，他感叹自己在家里的 "潜意识中的混蛋行为"。书中描述了有一次，查本14岁的女儿刚刚剪了一个新发型，并向他寻求批准。他心不在焉，没能做出回应。他写道："有那么一瞬间，她的眼睛因为恐惧和怀疑而睁得大大的，"然后把叙述转向自己。"真是个混蛋！"

他所造成的伤害不可能超过微妙的失望。(我每周都会有几次这样的测试失败。)但查本的焦急是不正常的。"他写道："她现在有一条裂缝，细如发丝，但像所有的裂缝一样不可逆转。

我为自己的不经意感到震惊，并为之感到羞愧，但我感受最深的是恐怖。当你面对自己破坏另一个人的全部力量时，恐怖是唯一合适的反应。
这是不正常的，但也是可亲的--父母的身份让人不正常。我相信每个爸爸妈妈都知道害怕把他们的孩子搞得一团糟。这种紧张关系没有性别之分。但是，父亲对权力的恐惧--他觉得自己可能会造成一些灾难性的损害--可能会有自己独特的振动，这种振动会刺激边缘神经。(也许他担心的是，无论他如何努力，他都无法与母亲修补伤口的技能相提并论。） "我感觉到我内心的这种可能性。我有能力做到这一点，"盖森写道，他打了拉菲，真的打了他。这种从父亲到绿巨人的转变幻想，提升了赌注。


纪律曾经是父亲的领域--他的坚实基础，是家庭中男性权威的场所。现在却恰恰相反：这是一个充满困惑的流沙，愤怒的父亲在这里行使控制权，但也失去了控制权。盖森在书中描绘了这种地形。在餐厅外的一个场景中，拉菲打翻了水，把热狗扔在地上，盖森最后把他的儿子倒过来摇晃，以使这个男孩停止打他。拉菲又哭又闹，然后陷入恐惧的、绝望的笑声中。"盖森写道："我很生气，他很害怕。当然，反过来也是如此。

关于父亲的回忆录很少如此诚实或直率。查本对同样可怕的潜力做出了姿态--父亲是破坏者--但却用戏剧性的手法将其升华。其他的父亲书籍则隐藏在笨拙的形象背后，仿佛一个现代的父亲即使想打垮他的孩子也不行。即使是当今 "父亲，了解你自己 "的倡导者Fatherly，也被证明是一个意外的有毒男性的广告牌。当该网站以前海豹突击队的建议首次亮相时，这位父亲是埃里克-格雷滕斯。后来担任密苏里州州长的格雷腾斯被他的前理发师指控为性侵犯，并被他的前妻指控为身体虐待。在一份宣誓证词中，后者告诉法官，他打了他们3岁的儿子，并拽着男孩的头发到处跑。 (Greitens否认了所有这些指控，也没有被正式指控殴打；关于他的文章已经不在Fatherly上了。)


我并不是说每个父亲的灵魂深处都有黑暗，而是说现在的黑暗笼罩在我们所有人头上，给父亲对自我发现的追求蒙上了一层恐惧的阴影。我的女儿出生在一个充满男性攻击性的氛围中。我用瓶子喂她度过了2016年的选举之夜。在她的第二个生日派对上，孩子们吃着小蛋糕，而父母则低声谈论着克里斯蒂娜-布拉西-福特的国会证词。在她3岁的时候，比尔-考斯比--"美国的爸爸"，以及一本关于现代父亲意味着什么的早期书籍的作者--正在对他被定罪的三项严重猥亵罪提出上诉。(他的定罪去年被推翻了）。

"如果你了解自己，你就了解父亲的身份，"Fatherly的建议书中说。但对我来说，也许对格森和我们这一代人中的其他父亲来说，这个承诺是一种威胁。不久前，我们被告知，爸爸们已经到达了新事物的边缘--他们可以开始 "拥抱他们所成为的一切"，正如Fatherly在2015年所建议的那样，而不会 "放弃他们是谁"。从那时起，感觉好像反对这种说法的证据一直在增加。如果我不想知道我的身份将以何种方式加诸在我的孩子身上，那该怎么办？

在《抚养拉菲》的结尾，盖森提供了一条绕过这种愤怒和自我怀疑的陷阱的路线。他观察到，父亲与孩子的旅程包括 "经历一场可怕的斗争"，以获得独立和联系，而这一斗争只有在不再需要他时才会结束。这就是 "为人父母的悲剧"，他说。作为一个父亲，了解自己就是了解自己角色的极限。"当你让自己变得无关紧要，当你抹去自己时，你就成功了。没有做到这一点的父母是失败的。"


因此，拥抱你已经成为的东西。但随后你必须学会放手。

这篇文章出现在2022年7/8月的印刷版上，标题是 "为什么爸爸这么生气？"