New One

I never cease to be disabused of the intelligence of celebrities. They have lives prior to becoming celebrities, and some of them never forget what it was like being unknown. But the moment some of them become celebrities, everything they experience thereafter is something that they themselves just discovered. This is never more true than when they have kids. Women get pregnant and give birth and it's all they talk about - until it dawns on them that every woman who's listening has been there, too. And men become fathers and all they can talk about is their bewilderment and amazement - and their feeling of utter uselessness.

Mike Birbiglia has been around a few years. I saw him in Trainwreck (2015) playing - you guessed it - an insufferable dad. He reminds me of Dana Carvey doing one of his impressions. I mean, he's like a Dana Carvey who can't do impressions. He's now on Broadway doing his one-man show, "New One." Seeing him doing the rounds of the talk shows and listening to him talk about the subject of his show made me wonder why he didn't learn anything from playing an insufferable dad in Trainwreck.

He isn't the first man to become a dad. So he's probably also not the first man to wonder at being a dad. What puzzles me is that, after expressing what amounts to an extreme ambivalence about fatherhood, he encourages men who haven't become fathers to go through with it, too. I get the feeling that it isn't because he wants us to experience all of the glories of the position. He also wants us to feel his pain.

At one point in the show, after having "agreed" to the conception of a child, gone through his wife's 75-month pregnancy (his own estimation), and having begun to understand what it's like to be “evicted from your own life sponsored by you,” he finds himself sidelined when the baby is born, as all men (except for the doctor) are, saying “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I guess I’ll just write an email to everyone I’ve ever met. Which is really the chief responsibility of the dad. The mother births a double bowling ball out of her vagina and then the dad just knocks out an email.” Most men stoically accept the division of labor (pun) involved in child-bearing. What else can they do? Go onstage and whinge about it? There are worlds that are forever closed off to men. But "womb-envy" is something better sublimated than openly expressed. Yes, Victor Frankenstein engendered human life all on his own and look where it got him (not to mention his poor creation).

The birth over, Mike's home life settles into its routine. But he gets into some trouble when he talks onstage about how his wife breastfeeds their child at the kitchen table while he washes the dishes. His wife had to remind him that he never did the dishes. They argue, and when he's alone he thinks (and repeats in his show) “I get why dads leave.” Oh, so that's why they leave? I thought it was some other reason. In most cases, I've found, fathers leave BECAUSE THEY CAN.

My father was always there, a rock. But a quiet, emotionally distant rock. Of course, I've found out since he died that he was that way only with my brother and me. To my sisters he was much more approachable, which makes perfect Freudian sense. I sometimes wish he had been a bit more of a presence in my life. But after listening to Mike Birbiglia's querulous prattle on the subject of being a father, I changed my mind. Thank you, daddy (I never called him "dad"), for being a functioning father in silence.

But I am childless. I live with a woman who once cried because she couldn't give me a child. Years before I met her, after her fifth - and final - pregnancy, which resulted in a C-section because her womb was shared by her daughter and an ovarian cyst the size of a 1-liter Coke bottle, the doctor put her under and performed a radical hysterectomy. The baby's father was the father of her two big brothers (a third boy died in infancy). When the daughter was 3, he seized the opportunity to bugger off - leaving the woman (they weren't married) alone to raise his three children, along with an older daughter from another relationship. When I entered her life 11 years ago and I came to live on my island, I brought her along with three of her children. Two of them have since grown up and moved out. I was their surrogate father, providing for them in a fashion their "real" father could never have managed. As the saying goes, I put a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and food on the table.

Now tell me, Mike Birbiglia, what is a father?