Last week Anna N of Jezebel says

Michael Lewis has just released Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, in which he admits to not loving his children immediately, but this bad father to Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace isn’t getting nearly the flak she did.

Lewis says in an interview with NPR that “you do get to a place, or I have certainly, where I feel completely naturally in love with my children.” But he also says that with his first child, “Before I felt the beginnings of real attachment it was probably six months and before I felt and manifested feelings that my wife recognized with approval, it was two years, maybe longer.” He compares the sleep deprivation of his daughter’s infancy to techniques used to torture terrorists, and says “the conditions she created in our house were like Guantanamo.” He also sees the work-sharing arrangement of modern fatherhood as somewhat unfair, because men are expected to help out at home while women can opt out of work. As a 21st century father, he says, “you are left with all the responsibility your father had — the business end of the household — plus you have all this other stuff.”

She said it here.

I think its possible to conflate Lewis’s literary persona with his actual one. He could be as consistently superficial as he appears while still also “accidentally” consistently disgorging high-quality insights, as he has since at least the publication of Liar’s Poker in 1989 but its unlikely.

This is not a complement.

It’s one thing to write as not-quite-innocent-but-definitely-naive outsider, as he did in Liar’s, just as it was one thing for him to write in his pretty marvelous “for the sake of the argument let’s pretend it’s true and see what shakes out” outsider style while covering the Republican candidates during the 1999 primary campaign. Essayists have mined that vein with great success since Mark Twain. But at home, in a heterosexual relationship, with a partner, with children there is no “outside.” There’s already enough fictional perspective that more such fiction… let alone more of the same... isn’t terrifically helpful.

Clue #1: Almost all the stuff pop culture tends to associate with “maternal instinct” isn’t an instinct.

Clue #2: Almost all the stuff “maternal instinct” isn’t even “maternal.”

Clue #3: It’s not that there are no instincts at all, maternal or otherwise, it’s just that in humans they tend to be pretty broad, general, and almost unrecognizably reflexive.

Clue #4: An awful lot of the rest of it, including what would otherwise seem like barking anomalies, have large social components.

Clue #5: What doulas, midwives, nursing specialists, peers, grandparents, ob/gyns, just-so stories, Dr. Spock and the Drs. Sears, ministers, teachers, movies, play acting, toys, teachers, books, and of course advertising teach mothers, and fathers, about how to respond to our pretty broad, general and almost unrecognizably reflexive instincts is social.

Clue #6: Yes, men who spend any time with a “4th trimester” infant (Vikki Iovine’s wonderful term for the pellucid first twelve weeks or so after birth that are… pretty much never represented, in any form, in popular culture) find themselves wondering how they could ever learn to relate to such a quivering, inexplicable, uncommunicative homunculus they feel completely unprepared for… even if he or she is their second or later child. Yes, men who spend any time in the stultifying, numbing, sleep-deprived half-ness of life with a “4th trimester” infant will long for… and may seek… ways to get out of it.

Clue #7: So do women.

Clue #8: However much they piss and moan both tend to stay and do what needs to be done.

Clue #9: When the infant’s personality begins to emerge — first, around three months when you can be… pretty sure that was a smile and not “just gas” — and for sure around six months when the don’t just react to you but start to really interact with you then surprise! Not only men discover “the beginnings of real attachment” beginning to emerge from the prior sensations of duty, loyalty, and fascination but so do women! In other words what Lewis backhandedly brags about as if he or his genderisms were all ironic and special are… pretty much par for the course.

Clue #10: And that other bit, that “...before I felt and manifested feelings that my wife recognized with approval, it was two years, maybe longer.” Yeah, and who elected her arbiter of feelings, or recognizer thereof, and what exactly makes her approval more than one more person’s vote on a planet with a population of 6,785,290,143 (as of 23:45 GMT (EST+5) Jun 08, 2009)? Besides all the various social expectation setters mentioned in Clue #5, above? And, now, Michael Lewis himself who, like way too many men, women, and experts before him (but not, significantly, Mark Twain) who’s main claims to fame involve passing along the same old stereotypes and social expectations.

I don’t know if I need to do a disclaimer but just in case, please don’t mistake anything I’ve said in this post for a pronouncement about women’s direct experience with their own infants. It is instead a disquisition on the influences on men, personified in this case by Michael Lewis, that lead them to believe they’re missing the essential je ne sais quoi required to be an unmediated caregiver for the children in their lives — whether as primary caregiver, co-caregiver, or backup caregiver.