Notes on How Not to Break Down: A Review of Matthew Dickman’s HUSBANDRY
Lately, my four-year-old son has taken to asking me—in the middle of whatever we may be doing together—what things did my father like to do with me when I was little. Today we were building a Lego set and I had to answer that no, his grandad and I never did that together. The boy then helped me do some laundry—also a “no”. Ditto for watering the plants. Then he asked me how come he’s never met his grandad. My answer was that he lives much too far away. But the boy already learned at school that Puerto Rico is a relatively small place. Plus, he’s aware that he’s visited relatives and friends on all sides of the island. So, he insisted. And I, not knowing how to answer, opted not to, and called for fifteen minutes of quiet reading time. He turned to his dinosaur book. And I turned to Matthew Dickman’s new collection of poems Husbandry (Norton, 2022).
Dickman’s speaker is a father to two boys. His marriage has just fallen apart and though he wants to break down, he can’t, because he has meals to prepare, laundry to wash and fold, children to care for. The book documents this routine, yes. But most importantly, the poems—all written in couplet form—document his loving devotion to his children. In large part, it is this devotion—this seemingly unflinching will to be there for his kids—that sees him through his heartbreak, even as he’s struggling to see past the fact of his heart breaking.
Dickman’s speaker is a very sensitive man. Part of this sensitivity lies in a hard-won self-awareness: “Loss has// a peculiar way of/ making us feel more// important than we are.” Part of it is realizing that even when we are doing well by our children, we can hurt them. Chasing the youngest child around the table, the father playing at goblin at the boy’s behest, does too good and therefore too frightful a job: “I’m going to eat/ your skin, Then he stopped,// knowing that I was/ no longer there and looked// up at my face and not/ seeing my face began to cry// and shake.” And part of it is gesturing toward some form of personal accountability for the way your life has turned out, especially when most everything seems to have turned out badly: “Everyone is hurt/ even people who have been really// shitty to other people./ Like me.”
This reviewer, by the way, fancies himself a sensitive man. And, very much like Dickman’s speaker, I have trouble dressing in front of my son, as the body he sees is not the one I see when standing before the mirror. Dickman writes: “I’m getting dressed// while my son plays/ with his foam// bath blocks. I put/ on a pair of// black boxer shorts/ and he looks up// at me and says/ you look cool, poppa.// Then I begin to put to/ put on a T-shirt// and he stops me./ Don’t do that,// or I can’t see/ your belly.” Like the speaker, I withstand my son staring at my belly because I don’t want to show him how a body can be a source of shame. There is, I think, no ready-made, socially approved language for this sort of encounter. A father can, of course, show his boy to handle his business as it pertains to the body. He can show him to view and treat his body like an instrument. But the father seldom lets himself be regarded by the boy with tenderness and wonder. The pull, for example, that I feel in these scenarios is to cover up and put my body into action: grab something, lift something, break something. In Dickman, the father submits to the boy’s glance, embraces, and entertains his vision. He writes:
In the morning/ my three-year-old// looks up from his/ cold glass// of milk, the color/ of a white dogwood// flower, and says/ poppa, you have a penis// and I have a penis./ and I say yes// you have a penis/ and I have a penis.// But I’m a princess/ and you are not// a princess. And I/ say yes, you are// a princess and I am/ not a princess.
Dickman’s speaker is the father many of us strive to be, as well as the father we may wish to have had. God knows my dad would have never put up with any princess talk from me. Fortunately, I was mostly mothered into adulthood. The speaker too: “And of course she did/ not hit me, spank// me, scream or yell/ at me more// than she ever did/ not, her hands// so busy folding her/ children’s clothes,// cooking them dinner, running their baths,// holding their hands,/ lifting them into bed.” This, of course, is the exact same litany of tasks the speaker undertakes for his two boys. He, it almost goes without saying, is nothing like his father: “My childhood// had fathers in it/ but it was as if their// kids were watching them/ through telescopes// from a safe distance.”
Those of us who come to see the best we are as the parents we’ve become feel increasingly distressed, I think, at the absence or disinterest of our own fathers. We know, deep down, that no matter how hard it gets, it is also very freaking easy to love your children. And so, in considering our fathers through the lens of our own fatherhood, we can be more given to empathy, but at the same time, their disinterest or disconnect appears even more incomprehensible. Dickman captures this feeling plainly and perfectly: “When the bodies/ of our fathers ask our// bodies to be theirs/ we set ours on fire.”
The children in the book, it should be noted, do not want for anything. Their father can meet all their needs, and then some: “If I could// I would nurse them,/ I would turn// myself into/ a bowl of cold milk// and call to them:/ Here, little kitties.” There is something beautiful here: how the father who does everything for his children comes to recognize himself in what he could never do for them. There might also be something disconcerting: because the mother left and because the father is left doing all the work he was already doing for their children, he feels like he deserves to have mothered them too. Mothering is thus at once exalted as the supreme form of parenthood and somehow reduced to that which the father would love to, but cannot biologically, do. And perhaps that’s the rub: that fatherhood is a service, and that motherhood inevitably transcends it. Dickman writes:
I am in service// to him as the snow/is in service// to the field and the stone/ in the field// is in service to/ the window// and the window is/ in service// to the body/ standing there, looking// out at the field,/ wishing it were the sea.
And it’s to be expected, perhaps, that in your fatherly devotion to your children, you come to quarrel with the immovable limits of said devotion. What the author perhaps owes readers is a more sustained exploration of those feelings instead of, or in addition to, the speaker’s ‘simple’ longing to supplant the mother: “I’m jealous of his mother,/ that he lived inside// her. Sometimes I wish/ I could open myself up// and place him inside,/ wrap him up.”
On the other hand, Dickman owes us nothing. In the same way that I do not necessarily owe my son a tidy and tender answer for why he has yet to meet his grandfather, the speaker in these poems is under no obligation to have his feelings worked out and packaged sensibly when having to attend to his children and his heartbreak. And these are, ultimately, poems on and around heartbreak. And, as we know, when the heart breaks the wreckage can and will rule all. Only the speaker will not let his personal pain father his children. That much he owes to them. And only to them. I, in turn, owe my son no more and no less than to be the father he will happily go visit when he’s grown, no matter the distance.