Neal Pollack's Alternadad

Neal Pollack's Alternadad is reviewed by Michael Agger in Slate. Some of the issues the book deals with are similar to what we are going through.

Pollack embarks into parent-land from a different starting point than those two. Like many men of his generation and class, he marries a woman with similar ambitions. Regina is an artist and teacher. They both partook of the extended American adolescence, and their "artsy-fartsy" life together is fun, filled with concerts and road trips. Their marriage has an ungendered, unscripted equality. They do what they want. Slowly, Regina leads Neal down the road to reproduction. Unlike a lot of dad writing, Pollack describes a critical stage: the hazy confusion of the "should we get pregnant?" time and the gray period once the seed is sown. Women's lives change at conception (and even before), but men have a nine-month grace period when they awake to the old-fashioned bread-winning commitment they still feel. Pollack describes this economic awakening through conversations with Regina. Note how he captures the drastic mindset of the newly pregnant—and note too that they're not talking about whether to buy a Bugaboo

What's fallen away from marriage for artist-intellectual-professional types are the traditional genders and gender roles. But, as new moms have been observing for years, the arrival of a child has a nasty way of reinstating the old dynamic. Pollack, who feels the need to make money and provide a safe place to live, is among the first to relate the re-emergence of breadwinner angst among men. (Although he fights this pressure by smoking pot and forming a rock band.) Regina is divided by wanting space for her artistic ambitions and her feelings of being a "bad mother." Parenthood, which looks from the outside like a step into maturity, is actually a descent into a new set of insecurities. Including renewed tension with your parents, who are often willing to overlook a funky wedding ceremony but want to see you step in with tradition and/or religion when a grandchild appears. An infamous chapter in Alternadad details the three-way gunfight among Neal, Regina, and Neal's Jewish parents over whether Eli should be circumcised.

some feedback from my aunt Geeta,

reading Pollack on altenadad reminded me of the articles on mothering i was
telling you about. In African communities i believe they have a category
called 'othermothers' - these women take over the chore-work of mothering,
sometimes paid most times just as gestures of exchange and neighbourliness.
These are semi permanent arrangements. In the alternadads it was not clear
to me what this entity actually does. The article on fatherhood that we
read in class talked about a new category of "androgynous fathers' -
interesting because it in a way reifies the same stereotype of nurture
being women's work and men who do it are necessarily androgynous. Why not
androgynous mothers too? Anyway the 2 interesting thing pointed out in that
article (which i will mail to you) are that the idea of a hands on dad is a
very upper middle class phenomenon - so class is a factor, and 2. in time
(within a few years of the birth) the role of father as bread-winner
becomes an issue with not only the men but the women too. It seems these
ideas are hard wired and we want conformity to these patterns. My students
on the whole agreed that despite new age talk - neither women nor men are
there yet.