Perceived as

Father's Day isn't for a few weeks, but this past Sunday's New York Times seemed unable to wait, as it included several open references to fatherhood and its potential power. In an interview, Colson Whitehead heaped praise on Kevin Young's Book of Hours, calling it a superb and "wrenching investigation of what it is to be a father." He then went on to describe, rather self-mockingly, the tears that had overcome him at a New York BBQ joint as he read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. "I'd just become a father," Whitehead explained, "and something in the book about the dad trying to save his kid from nutso hillbillies - great, here I go again." But why such self-consciousness, Colson? After all, in a review in the same issue of the Times, John Schwartz singled out a moment in the audiobook version of Rob Lowe's Love Life in which the actor describes the powerful conflicting emotions that he felt as he dropped his son off at college. "Lowe's voice," Schwartz wrote, "grows husky when he recalls that he used to wrap the boy in a blanket 'like a burrito.'"

Rather like Whitehead, though, Schwartz seems to have felt compelled to qualify, or undermine, such open emotionalism. "Some may tear up," he wrote. "I cringed a little." Men opening up about fatherhood, after all, still occupy an underdeveloped territory, and their accounts are often muted or neutered through the use of stoicism or humor. Uncomfortable with Lowe's apparent sincerity? A curt proclamation of your discomfort can establish your own conventional manhood, in contrast.

Or perhaps a reference to Joy Division can do the trick. Shortly after acknowledging the potential emotional force of fatherhood, Whitehead enthusiastically recommends the music of the legendary post-punk band from Manchester. Talk about an antidote to weepy nostalgia: Joy Division is perhaps best known for a sound that has been called eerie and energetic, for lyrics that tended to focus on themes such as coldness, distance, and failure - and for the 1980 suicide of its lead vocalist, Ian Curtis. I remember at least one Joy Division poster in my college dormitory, and I recall associating it with a sparse, rugged individualism - and not with recollections of babies wrapped as burritos.

In fact, though, Cook's suicide did inspire a certain degree of nostalgia, and of what the literary critics would call re-membering. As the band's percussionist Stephen Morris put it, in 2007, "This sounds awful but it was only after Ian died that we sat down and listened to the lyrics. You'd find yourself thinking, 'Oh, my God, I missed this one.' Because I'd look at Ian's lyrics and think how clever he was putting himself in the position of someone else. I never believed he was writing about himself. Looking back, how could I have been so bleeding stupid?"

That's powerful, and understandable. But, looking back, we almost always see things differently. Indeed,as Jon Savage noted, in an obituary of Curtis written for Melody Maker, "Now no one will remember what his work with Joy Division was like when he was alive; it will be perceived as tragic rather than courageous."

And so, too, to an extent with parenting. L. and I have spoken of wrapping Cleo like a burrito. But in time that offhanded and casually affectionate term will acquire a different patina. Will it prompt tears, or cringes? That depends, of course, on how, and where, it's framed, and with whom. But it seems worth remembering that what we do now will almost inevitably be perceived as something else when read in a BBQ restaurant, or heard 27 years after the fact.