I return today to the question/s of what happens to fathers just around the time of the birth of their children. It's a question that keeps coming up for me, partially, I believe because who fathers are, how they're going to feel and present themselves in the lives of their children, is hugely influenced by how they're coming into fathering at this early stage of their fatherhood experience. Certainly, early perinatal experiences are not the only factors that set the stage for fathering, but they are, I believe, among the more important and yet more ignored ones.

In a recently published manual The Importance of Fathers in the Healthy Development of Children the Department for Health and Human Services points out that the significance of paternal nurturing behavior starts in infancy because "fathers exercise a critical role in providing their children with a mental map of how to respond to difficult situations." (21) The authors continue to point out that fathers should "hug and kiss their children often and comfort them when they are sad or scared." (21)

These are important insights, of course. But one wonders how one can go about fostering them in fathers? The ability and willingness to hug and kiss, it seems, is already an outcome of a more fundamental sense of connectedness between a father and his infant-child. I'm thinking that we are looking for and trying to formulate a kind of organic connectedness between father and child. It's an organic connectedness that is non-organic in its organicness. This is another way of saying it's mystical, in large part, rather than material, which it is to a lesser degree. This is another way of saying men do not get pregnant. Something else happens to them, something that's radically different from pregnancy and yet parallels it in many ways: men get lost in nothing.

While it is in part necessary to get lost in this way, it is our task also to find men in that nothingness. For if we don't find them, they might lose themselves in ways that will forever bar them from becoming effective fathers in the way the above manual envisions.

What might it mean to say that men necessarily need to get lost in nothing in preparation for the birth of their child? To me, getting lost in nothing, can mean that we learn in a fundamental and life-changing way to embrace the unknown of fatherhood. When we enter fatherhood, we're entering uncharted territory. The nothing of this experience, its uncharted nature, is both its character and its point of orientation. Entering the nothing of fatherhood is an ad-venture. Something that's coming towards us, yet remains unknown. Men necessarily need to enter this mystical ad-venture because in it and through it they can find themselves as fathers, i.e., as men willing to continually risk the unknown as it presents itself to them in their children. This is where we can come back, with ease, to the statements from the Manual. A father's ability to nurture, i.e., his ability to hug and kiss his children and comfort them when they're sad or scared comes from his fundamental ability to face, endure and steer through the unknown. A father, then, who has confronted the unknown himself, can, through his nurturing, teach his children about enduring the unknown. However, this ability is not simply a trait of male behavior. It is a trait that's gained and concretized while a man is "expecting".

What might it mean to say we need to find men as they're attempting to make their way through the nothingness of fatherhood? Entering this nothing is a scary experience. This does not stop once a man has entered it. Rather there are lots of ghosts and demons to encounter, steep cliffs and overhangs to climb, deserts and frosty regions to cross. In order to face the unknown, men need to be "hugged and kissed" and "comforted when they're scared or sad" by men who have already faced the unknown and nothing of fatherhood. Fathers need to be nurtured to make it through fatherhood. This nurturing cannot begin early enough. I believe it begins early in a male's live while he is still deeply immersed in boyhood.

A father's ability to nurture does not come out of nothing, it is learned and handed down to him by men who have been fathers before him, men who, themselves, have been nurtured through that nothing--in order to face and endure the nothing as the unknown.