RG Magazine senior writer John Burchall reflects on what it means to be a father.

*** For many of us Father's Day will come and go in a blur of breakfasts, brunches and picnics. If we are lucky enough we will receive a card with some carefully chosen words courtesy of Hallmark.

Around this time of year I always find myself in a contemplative sort of mood as I think about my relationship with my own father, the late former ZFB-TV journalist Colwyn (Bill) Burchall. Consciously or unconsciously -- I can never decide which -- I also use this time to measure myself against the parenting standard he set for me. While I am fairly new to this game -- my daughters Zindzi and Zenani are four and two years respectively -- I am convinced that the position of the father in the Bermudian family is under assault.

There is no easily identifiable enemy because the assault is not being launched from one particular place. Instead it is a change in the social script and the societal norms and expectations that has relegated the father to the margin.

I was beset by uncertainty that afternoon when my wife Ivy and I found out that we were pregnant. Nagging doubts clouded my mind and muted my response.

Here I was receiving what I thought would be the best news of my life and the best I could do was smile weakly.

A joy tinged with ambivalence was stirring deep within me. The significance and substance of these feelings would only hit me much later. We came home from the hospital and agreed to withhold any major announcement until we were sure that the baby was developing as it should.

Nonetheless, the weight of our child's existence presented itself almost immediately. Ivy lost weight and became ill. She lost her appetite and zest for everyday activities. She became a permanent fixture on our couch with her trusty bucket somewhere close by just in case she needed to throw up (this she did with some frequency). She lost her appetite and although the doctor told her that she needed to eat, she couldn't. And while I knew I was supposed to support her, I did not know how.

Yet we were pregnant. I was supposed to be happy. But I was at a loss to do anything to help my wife. If I tried to talk to her I seemed to get on her nerves. If I kept quiet I was accused of ignoring her and being insensitive.

During the months four through six, the sickness stopped, but Ivy had been transformed from the petite number I met and married while we were at University in Canada a few years earlier. Her frame had now expanded to nurture our growing child. It is not the expansion that was off-putting.

Rather it was my reaction to her that caused me some conflict.

I found myself attracted to her in ways that I hadn't been before. But I had to contain my feelings because I did not want to pester her and add another difficulty to the many problems she was already experiencing. While the sickness had subsided, it dawned on me how central my wife was to this entire experience. It was she who people called and asked about. At the doctor's office the nurses and staff were preoccupied with her needs and how the baby was progressing inside her. It made those visits absolute hell for me.

I had been relegated to the status of a spectator, my cherished place as my wife's number one had evaporated into the mist. The long march from the centre to the periphery of my family circle had begun. It was a confusing period because I had been brought up to believe that the father and the mother were supposed to be the primary caregivers.

I had accepted that we were equal partners. Yet the reality of my life told a different story. Society treated my wife as the primary parent. She became the chief child-raiser, family manager and decision maker for the family. She became the sole authority on what was right and proper for our family. It seemed like I, the other parent did not exist. As the months went on and the period of the delivery approached, a persistent anxiety had replaced my ambivalence.

I felt displaced by this whole experience. I felt lost and abandoned. I may have been biologically necessary to the creation of my family but that was all. I was now superfluous. So I put on my game face. I kept up appearances and hid my shame and tried to distance myself from the loneliness I felt inside.

I told myself that this was no way for a father to be to feel. But the feelings persisted. Zindzi Kangwagye was born on September 27, 1994 after 36-hours of labour. I remember feeling faint and uncomfortable in the birthing room. There was no happiness. There was no elation or euphoria. I was now a father.

In my dreams it was not supposed to be like this. Zindzi's first few months of life were a perpetual state of diaper changes, feedings and lots of crying.

Nonetheless the pattern of the pregnancy, with my wife's place firmly at the centre, continued. I was Zindzi's father in name only. Everything I tried to do was always wrong. I could not hold her properly because I did not support her head correctly. I could not bathe her because I could not do that right either. I could not feed her because I was not the one with the breasts. So I was reduced to the role of a passive observer of my own family. I became the person who fetched things, ran errands and sat around until I was told what to do next. I was merely helping out instead of sharing equally in the chores and decisions that affected my family.

When our second daughter Zenani was born on October 16, 1996 the entire process just repeated itself. For many of us fatherhood has become a confusing array of demands that are not always congruent. We feel inept and plainly inadequate in the face of them. At the same time we lack the vocabulary to express our feelings and a language to transmit the significance of our pain.

Yet the reality of our position on the periphery does have savage effects on our collective self-esteem as men and as parents.

Anyway who would we tell? Our wives or girlfriends? Clearly not. They have their own legitimate issues. Many women have been let down by men in the past because these men refused to take responsibility for the children they helped to create. It is the women who experience the trauma of birth, the accelerated weight gain, the sleepless nights and the engorged breasts. It is the women who experience the double demands of career and family. Surely our male pain could never be placed on par with that? Still, it is women in our society who are allowed to express their difficulties with their pregnancies and child rearing. There are scientific names like post-partum depression and maternal overload which makes these experiences acceptable and normal. But what vehicles do men have to express the weight of our experiences? The answer to that question strikes me as especially significant.

The role of today's father For me fatherhood became an exercise in humility as the ideas I had about my role in my family were jettisoned and replaced by a fear that I increasingly irrelevant. If I ceased to exist it seemed as though my wife would carry on with the businesses of our family without missing a beat. Everything, including Mother Nature Herself it appeared was in on the conspiracy to keep me at arm's length.

My children were conceived and born from my wife's body. As a consequence she had and still feels an intimacy with our children that began at conception.

For all my good intentions, there is nothing I could do to share in this experience. I was excluded because of my gender. During the pregnancy and the birth of our children, I was just a bystander. Once the children came into the world their needs are so pervasive and unrelenting that those first months were a blur of perpetual fatigue and frustration.

I wanted to share in the warmth of this experience but circumstances and biology conspired to thwart my wishes. While breastfeeding is important and necessary, it represents a merging and a rekindling of mother and child. These are moments of fusion and togetherness. But not for me. I was excluded from that magical inner circle by a cruel conspiracy of Mother Nature that I was powerless to change. I became this peripheral and forlorn figure, despite my desire to be the kind of father who is a full participant in every facet of his family's life. But I was floundering in a sea of ineptness. I was ashamed of being a man. I felt as if I had been set up to fail. It seemed as if all the lip service we pay to the importance of a father in a child's life was one big lie.

Despite the official line, I believe that the importance that Bermudian society attaches to the role of the father in a child's life has diminished.

Our social commentators and politicians wax eloquent about the importance and significance of fatherhood but the reality is somewhat irreconcilable with their glib pronouncements. The old model used to be that the father was the head of the family and the main bread-winner. But that role has been overridden -- not by the women's movement I hasten to add -- but by the requirements of Bermuda's overheated economy. Mothers and fathers have to work outside the home to make ends meet. What this has meant in reality, is that the model of manhood that we inherited from our grandfathers and fathers no longer can be used to navigate the new terrain. There are fewer things that remain socially defined within the father's role. As a consequence fatherhood itself has diminished. For us fathers it comes down to mathematics. The old script commended us to be the provider, the moral authority, and the head of the family.

Today all of those functions are no longer seen as the exclusive preserve of the male parent and rightly so. Fathers are no longer necessary for the economic survival of their families. Social assistance and charity are capable of providing for a child's material needs. While the male role has shrunk, the opposite has occurred for women whose roles have expanded and grown. The net effect of this is to negate the space and the function of the father. So what is does all of this mean for us fathers? First of all we must refuse the characterisation of ourselves as irrelevant.

The simple facts are that children from homes where the father and mother are present generally do better than those where the father is absent. The blame for the assault on fatherhood can be placed squarely on a view of the family that does not give proper deference to the male role in the child rearing enterprise.

While it is true that some women, of necessity, have had to be all things to their children because they have been let down by the men in their lives, it does not follow that the concept of fatherhood itself should be abandoned or seen as less important. I would instead suggest that the definition of what it means to be a father needs to be reworked and not replaced by some gender-neutral term like parent.

The reason for this is that fathers have a role in a family that only they can and should play. While mothers and social agencies can step in and perform these functions with varying degrees of success, I believe that none of these entities can or should replace the father in a child's life. While it is currently fashionable in certain circles for some women to believe that they can be all things to their children and perform all of the tasks that were once exclusively seen as the man's job, this should always been seen as a less than ideal state of affairs.

A father has a tremendously important role to play. Gone are the days where the father was some sort of benevolent patriarch. Instead I believe the father is one who serves his family. A good father is one who places his family first in all that he does and secondly, he has an unswerving commitment to his partner and their relationship. As a consequence, the man is the one who protects his family against harm and danger. It is he who provides for his family's material needs. It is he who instructs his children about right and wrong and guides them toward adulthood. It is the father's role to be an example of constancy and steadfastness in the service of his family's needs.

The father is one who meets his obligations and honours his commitments to his family through his work inside and outside the home on behalf of his family.

In return, it is his family that bestows meaning and relevance upon a man's life and his accomplishments. The family, far from being an impediment, becomes the necessary and sufficient condition for his own mental and physical well being. Family duties and responsibilities become the vehicle through which a man becomes a whole and well adjusted person. This is not to say that any of the foregoing is exclusively the preserve of the male parent. Women can and out of necessity do all of these functions and have been doing so since the beginning of time. However, when male and female children grow up without any significant example of a male who protects, cares, provides and guides their life, they grow into adulthood missing out on a key relationship. This is especially true for boys.

Society pays a heavy price when boys are raised without a father or another suitable and significant male figure. The world's prisons and the vast majority of the crime directed at women, children and society is done by males. The link between fatherless boys and criminality is a well studied area of social studies. As a result, Bermudian society can ill-afford to take fatherhood lightly. Fathers need to be supported because the male parent, by his example shows a boy how to be a man and helps a girl to start off her journey to adulthood secure in her understanding of what men are about. One of the ways that we can begin to halt the tide of crime and violence in Bermuda, is by embracing fatherhood as a distinctive male role within a family that has value. This will not solve all our problems overnight. However it would put on the correct path. The alternative leads to consequences too horrible to contemplate.

Proud father: John Burchall with his two daughters Zindzi (left) and Zenani.

Cooling out: John Burchall relaxes with daughters daughters Zenani (at left) and Zindzi.