As a Swedish man, I should have been the perfect modern dad. My failure was shameful | Gunnar Ardeli

September 2024 · 10 minute read
OpinionParents and parenting This article is more than 3 months old

As a Swedish man, I should have been the perfect modern dad. My failure was shameful

This article is more than 3 months old

I had a beautiful family and all the state support we needed. So why was I using a long-distance ski race as an excuse to let them down?

As a child, I had stood at the finish line many times and seen my father’s distant, wild look as he crossed the line of the Vasaloppet – a famous annual 90km cross-country ski race through the forests of northern Sweden – his face coated in ice, snot and spit. He never noticed us, no matter how much we screamed and waved.

When my father died, I felt it was time for me to follow in his tracks and start training for the big race. I’m not sure it was a decision really, more of an overwhelming urge. A masculine calling.

It was not long after our third child was born when I got the idea. My wife was still on maternity leave and we had moved to south-west France. I had been invited to a literary festival and our plan was to spend most of the autumn there, caring for our baby together and improvising a kind of home schooling for our two older children.

In theory, it was perfect. We would have several hours a day to write and get away from Sweden’s dark November drizzle. The local newspaper even featured a picture of us, the whole family, being welcomed by the mayor of Cognac in a ceremony at the town hall.

But as the weeks passed, our two understimulated daughters were constantly at each other’s throats and the strangely intense listlessness that seems to come with a baby – changing nappies, irregular sleep and strolling with the pram along the banks of the Charente – began to weigh on us. Our flat was small and, it turned out, thin-walled. Before long we were constantly telling off the older kids for waking the baby.

When I look back on the photograph accompanying the local newspaper article it shows my wife looking content, blissfully unaware that she is about to suffer from burnout. My smile is rigid, my face on the verge of cracking. It is the image of a man longing to escape.

Fathers in the Nordic countries are unique, spending probably more time with their children in their early years than almost anywhere in the world. In Sweden, fathers were first entitled to parental leave in 1974. After sluggish uptake in the first two decades, today a clear majority of all men and women in Sweden believe that parental leave should be split equally between both parents.

Sweden’s family-friendly policies are among the best in the world, but only a small proportion of parents actually divide their available leave time at home equally. Fathers take about a third of the total parental benefits and the lion’s share of that is claimed by the university-educated middle class.

All of my friends – at least, those born in the early 1980s who have become fathers – have taken parental leave for at least six months, and usually nine, with each child.

We returned to Sweden shortly before the first winter snow. Our finances were strained, but I bought myself an excellent pair of skis and a ski rack for the car without giving it a second thought.

I started making regular trips up north. The air was cold and clear in the silent spruce forests. I felt invigorated, completely at one with myself, my body, my masculinity, my emotions and the loss of my father. Amid solitude and motion my grief found an easy outlet.

I wanted to be out on the ski trails training all the time. Vasaloppet is the biggest cross-country ski race in the world and a national institution in Sweden. After a while my wife suggested I ease off and postpone my ambition. Did it really make sense when we had just had a baby? Could I not be at home more instead?

I tried to be an accommodating, considerate and egalitarian man – but only so that I could still notch up my miles on the ski tracks. Dropping out was unthinkable.

I grew up with an absent father: he never cooked and was rarely home with us. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, my own ambition was to be a modern Swedish father, emotionally present and committed to equality. I have taken parental leave, even if nowhere near as much time as my wife, with each of my three children.

But those of us who become dads having had absent fathers ourselves often struggle with the question of how to be present as a man. There are darker questions too: what’s going on inside a man who leaves his family? We want to explore the places we dreamed of as kids but were never able to access. What was Dad doing that was more important to him than us?

Literature too is full of absent fathers who left long ago and never returned. Present fathers in literature are rare, perhaps reflecting a reality of our time. My father would go running six days a week and in the winter he would be skiing. After my parents’ divorce we barely met for years.

But something is changing. If our culture now expects parental equality, the emotionally present father has, somewhat reluctantly, entered contemporary literature.

Illustration by Janne Iivonen

Fatherhood plays a central role in Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. Presumably that’s why this book resonates with thousands of men who would otherwise seldom open one. Knausgård battles with his self-loathing as he wanders around with the pushchair and joins in banal activities such as baby rhythm classes. His narrator self is uncomfortable in what is traditionally considered the female caring role. Knausgård relates how his masculinity and testosterone levels are declining. He is afraid of being feminised.

The Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novel The Family Clause describes the claustrophobia of fatherhood, the desire to be perfect and present combined with the urge to escape. The book’s original Swedish title, Pappaklausulen, translates literally to “The Dad Clause” and refers to the renegotiation of the unwritten contract defining what it means to be a father.

The protagonist contends with life as a young dad and son of an absent, selfish father, caught between generations. When the book was released Khemiri told an interviewer about his thoughts when he was on parental leave: “I have to get out, I feel suffocated, the only way I can be me is if I leave my family. I’ve always been intrigued by what happens when someone just disappears. Presence can turn someone invisible, but absence can cast an enduring shadow.”

Our recurring rows became increasingly bitter. My wife would yell that I could ski any year I wanted – just not this one. I accused her of being stubborn, unfair and controlling. Couldn’t she just back down? Sometimes I tried to be accommodating, conciliatory, suggesting a certain number of weekly ski miles that would suit us both, even with the baby. On other occasions I pulled away, sullen and grumpy, hoping she would see that it would be worse if I stayed home. But nothing worked. She refused to accept my skiing and I couldn’t give it up.

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Until, during a quarrel one night, I found myself sobbing on the floor like a character in a Ruben Östlund film. In a desperate attempt to banish my need for escape I promised to abandon Vasaloppet. She had me cornered, I felt. And in my self-pity I couldn’t even empathise with her exhaustion or her need for me to do my share.

On an intellectual level I understood that I was being an idiot. I wanted to be a good father and a good man, but deep down I was terrified of being trapped – and that angered me. Could she not understand that the only way for me to be present was to be absent much of the time?

With every new child it becomes harder and more painful to combine family life with meeting your own needs. That’s something my wife understood long ago. Now that we were completely connected we needed to be open about our personal vulnerabilities and needs if we were to be strong together.

But as a child I had learned to despise weakness in myself and in others. I looked down on my mother for being a victim in a patriarchal world. Now, I couldn’t handle my own weaknesses so I wanted to split my family in two: them and me. They could stay at home while I tested my manhood with a formidable winter challenge.

I did the race. I broke my promise. My wife stood helplessly at the door as I got in the car to head north. She looked at me as if I were dead.

So why didn’t I just stay? Could I not show empathy for her? Was I hurt because the birth of a child meant I was no longer the focus of my wife’s love, no longer sexually desirable? Was I afraid of the responsibility, or was I trying to regain a position of power?

I don’t think I am the only modern Swedish man who feels conflicted. The Swedish state gives you every economic support you need to share parenting: it leaves you with no excuses for shirking a complete presence in the family. But I am not sure it can make you psychologically ready.

I tried to express my masculinity and not hide my vulnerability at the same time. But I had only ever learned to be a man by showing strength. In the intimacy required in love and family life, I was painfully reminded of the fragile ambivalence of my emotions.

It then became a source of shame not to be able to balance the expected equality with expressing my masculinity. I was in a no man’s land where the old – the attitude of my father’s generation – was dead, but the new was not yet born.

Skiing 90km was a wonderful experience. I glided through the winter landscape, filled with direction and purpose. But I felt no sense of victory at the finish line. Just overwhelming fatigue and confusion. I felt the shame of all absent fathers and men who betray their families, the guilt of all male selfishness and the stirrings of deep sorrow. My face was covered in snot and ice. I longed for home.

As a family we worked things out eventually, but when I wrote about this experience for a Swedish newspaper I got a lot of hate mail. Some people said I should be denied custody of my children. Columnists on other newspapers were mostly critical: I had betrayed my wife, I was a weak, selfish man, my conduct was toxic masculinity in the best patriarchal tradition.

And the social media outrage followed an ancient script. Men should love home life. Women should long for career. I was the bad conscience of all absent fathers, all failing husbands and all parents of babies or small children, all male selfishness – out of the village with him!

Going public about the tension between family and autonomy, home and career, is treacherous territory. From private individuals, however, I received a lot of emails that spoke if not of happiness, then of relief that I had raised these questions. Many of them, men and women, said that that they recognised themselves in my story.

Translated by Paul Rapacioli

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