The murder of 10-year-old Zahra Baker was horrific. No surprises there. Homicides are rarely known for their rainbows, fluffy puppies and happy endings.
But there is one aspect of the killing that is especially shocking – not because it reflects a particularly perverse aspect of criminality but because it exemplifies a family problem that is so prevalent it’s rarely seen as a problem.
I’m speaking here of absent fathers.
Common ab-dad stereotypes include Bucket Bong Teen Dad (who abandons his up-the-duff girlfriend to pursue a career in advanced stonerism) and Convertible Buying Mid-Life Crisis Dad (who trades in his reproductively exhausted lifewife for a younger and more gravity defiant model).
But the absent fathers I’m talking about are those who officially live with their female partners and offspring, yet in reality are rarely present.
These are the dads who miss much of their children’s lives or – in the dreadful case of Adam Baker – their children’s deaths.
Zahra was the freckle-faced, Australian-born girl who disappeared from her North Carolina home last October after losing a leg and her hearing to bone cancer.
Her American stepmother, Elisa Baker, is now facing up to 18 years in jail for killing the disabled child and scattering her dismembered remains through bushland.
During Baker’s September 15 sentencing, Zahra’s father, Adam, said he had no words to express his hatred for the woman he’d met via a goth-themed website in 2006.
The rest of us, meanwhile, are struggling to find words to express our incredulity at the fact that it took the former North Queensland saw miller 15 days to realise that his daughter was missing; that the lump he saw each night in her bed was just that.
An inanimate lump.
In a TV interview, Adam insisted that the pressure associated with his work as a tree feller meant he was gone first thing in the morning and didn’t get home until late.
“I was told that Zahra was in bed because Zahra normally went to bed early,” he said. “I checked every night. From what I could tell, she was in bed. There was something in bed.”
When he finally rang the police emergency line to report his daughter missing, he laughingly blamed her absence on adolescence.
“My daughter is, I think, coming into puberty,” he chuckled to the operator, “‘cause she is hitting that brooding stage, so we only see her when she comes out when she wants something. And that’s about it.”
The Baker case is a particularly extreme and terrible example.
Yet I can’t help thinking of all those normal, non-murderous families which contain fathers whose non-weekend interactions with their children are also limited to cursory viewings of bed lumps.
Like Adam, these ab-dads leave for work early and return home long after their ankle biters have been fed, bathed, played with, de-tantrum-ed, read to and patted to sleep.
As such, they could also be fooled by child-shaped bed lumps.
I personally know of no mums who could be similarly tricked.
While the world obviously does contain some negligent and noxious mothers (hello Elisa Baker), most of us poke our heads into our children’s bedrooms at night not in lieu but in addition to all the other stuff we’ve done beforehand.
And the shapes and sounds of those bed lumps speak volumes.
I reckon I can tell from the tossed blankets and snuffles whether my four-year-old is too hot or too cold; whether her perforated eardrum is finally healing or whether we need to head back to the grommet doc; whether she’s dreaming of happy things or of that scary “spider stranger monster” that’s been scuttling round her subconscious lately.
I also know whether Pinky Yik Yak – her fluffy yellow elephant from Bangkok – needs to be returned to her arms to avoid the night terrors that ensue if she wakes and can’t locate this not-negotiable bed toy.
As a single mum, I’m intrigued and irritated by claims that sole parenting, declining marriage rates and defacto-ism are to blame for spiraling rates of child abuse and neglect.
Apart from feeling supremely confident about the safety, stability and happiness of the home life I offer my daughter, I wonder about all those supposedly superior nuclear families where the kids actually see their fathers way less than Alice ends up seeing hers.
After all, does a wedding certificate and a live-in dad really count for all that much if the latter’s primary engagement with his offspring is a brief, post-work lump check?
The explanations for the sexist asymmetry associated with child raising are complex.
Some families prefer to have hubby bring home the bacon while a barefoot and duffed up wife cooks it. But others feel pressured by labour force chauvinism.
The gap between male and female full-time earnings is as wide as it has been in more than two decades.
As such, it often makes financial sense for fathers to continue full-time work while their female partners raise the kids – or, as is far more often the case – raise the kids in addition to juggling some version of paid employment.
Exacerbating these structural inequities are those chaps whose minimal domestic involvement is entirely of their own selfish and sexist choosing.
When I last worked in an open-plan office, I was always intrigued to watch the metamorphosis of my colleagues post baby-making.
The women developed that dark-eyed look of malignant exhaustion while trying desperately not to be seen as slackers as they expressed breast milk in the toilets or made sudden, frazzled exits to collect sick kiddies from day care.
The work routines of the new dads, on the other hand, often remained blissfully unchanged. One 30-something ab-dad actually increased his seeking of evening assignments and after-work alcohol commitments after the arrival of his infant daughter.
This led to the strong suspicion among his female colleagues that the number of cutesy baby photos he tacked up round his work station was in inverse proportion to the amount of time he spent with his child.
If you’re a father reading this column and are feeling miffed because you make a multitude of work and social sacrifices in order to spend quality, daily time with your children (perhaps even serving as their primary caregivers) – then that’s fantastic.
I’m so very glad there are some of you out there.
I do, however, wish you could find a way to reproduce your egalitarian attitudes as well as your genetic material.
As feminist icon Gloria Steinem put it recently, women have spent decades showing they can do what men can do. Isn’t it about time men proved the reverse?
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