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expressing love makes them honorary women. One would think it makes them fathers.
    Of the two of us, Deedie was more protective of our son, more conservative, more worried that he was going to, for instance, poke his eyes out with that thing. Whereas I was more likely to show my son—just to pick an example at random—how to put spray cheese on the dog’s head. Was it the experience of having carried Zach in her womb for nine months that made her more cautious than I? Was the fecklessness of my fatherhood the direct consequence of not having had the physical experience of labor? I have my doubts about this, although it’s also true that I don’t think I ever worried about anyone poking his eyes out with that thing when I was a dad, and I never cautioned Zach, upon finding him cross-eyed, that they might stick that way.
    On the whole, I think, I was more liberal when it came to encouraging Zach to take risks, or to do something out of the sheer goofiness of it. I pause here to remember Jerry Garcia’s actual advice to his daughters, and I quote: “Hey! You guys should do more drugs!”
    But any sweeping insights about what fathers do, as opposed to mothers, seems to me fundamentally bound not only by issues of gender, but by issues of class as well. I don’t think it’d be too radical to suggest that mothers and fathers of the American upper middle classmay well have more in common with each other than any father from this group does with a blue-collar dad. But even this observation may be suspect. I know plenty of blue-collar dads who are all about the spray cheese.
    It doesn’t take too long to see that any particular father’s or mother’s parenting strategy is a complex set of behaviors resulting not only from gender and class but from the individual web of history and character, and—above all—the agreements, spoken and unspoken, at the center of their relationship with their partner.
    Sue Shellenbarger, writing in the Wall Street Journal , says that father figures “tend to challenge crying or whining children to use words to express themselves. Men are more likely to startle their offspring, making faces or sneaking up on them to play.” And while “the average behavioral differences between large samples of moms and dads are small, in statistical terms,” fathers spend about 6 percent more time in play with their children than mothers do.
    I have found this to be sort of true, both in the hetero parents I know as well as the same-sex ones. In some ways, it’s only common sense—even among families with two moms, or two dads, there’s usually one parent who’s more rambunctious than the other.
    That said, goofiness—a kind of joyful foolishness—still feels to me like one of the more dependably gendered character traits that I know. There are plenty of funny women in my life; it was Deedie’s levity of spirit that surely attracted me to her in the first place. But it is only with a man that I could imagine hanging a giant stuffed rabbit from a tree with a noose and taping a sign to it that read, HERE IS A LETTUCE-RUSTLIN’ CARROT-THIEVIN’ NO GOOD SON OF A BITCH , as I did on one memorable occasion with the cartoonist Timothy Kreider. This occurred at the end of a very long day, one that had in fact begun with our taking a giant stuffed dog, attaching a cinder block on a rope to its leg, and throwing it off a bridge. Afterward, in our fake mobster voices, we allowed as how “Mr. Whiskers sleeps with the fishes.”
    I don’t do stuff like that anymore, although there are plenty of times my boys wish that I would. Is this because hanging stuffed animals from trees is an inherently masculine activity? Or is it because thatwas a long time ago, when I had considerably more time on my hands? Have I grown less ridiculous over time because womanhood feels less absurd to me than manhood? Or is it that, now that I’m in my fifties, the whole wide world just seems a lot less funny?
    When I was