Father’s Day Focus - Are Parents Interchangeable?

Introduction

It has become traditional, or more to the point inevitable, that on Father’s Day I reflect on my role as a parent. This year I was also plunged into reflection by a Culture Desk essay I read in the paper titled “Celebrating mothers who taught me how to father.” I’ve blogged before about whether fathers are necessary and what fathers are for and realized I’m not done grappling with these questions. In planning this post I reached out to my brothers, my wife, and my kids, and their feedback is incorporated in what follows.

(Above: the card one of my kids made me this year.)

The Chronicle essay

The essay in the San Francisco Chronicle is by Kevin Fisher-Paulson and describes how he learned how to be a father from three friends who are single mothers. These women, he asserts, have to be “mom, dad, coach, buddy, the works” and are thus in a great position to share their wisdom. I like the article but it left me a bit confused, because Fisher-Paulson is gay, thus his kids have two dads … so don’t they have to fill the role of mom, too? Aren’t he and his husband really learning how to father and mother from these women?

I was also a bit puzzled by Fisher-Paulson’s fairly traditional sense of what makes a father, given how nontraditional his family is. He cites a number of fathering skills the women taught their sons: barbecue, lacrosse, screen defense, how to install an outside heater. He concludes, “Some days I worry that I will not have taught my own sons how to be a father, that my boys will grow up without knowing how to change the furnace filter” but that “Deirdre, Jill and Sarah taught me that a son does not need instruction as much as he needs support.”

I came away with more questions unresolved than answered. The essay challenges—but also reiterates and thus runs the risk of reinforcing—stereotypes about which parent does what. (I don’t mean this as a criticism: challenging the reader without resolving everything is often what a good essay does.) So I’ve been pondering the matter of whether there is any consistent, demonstrable difference between the nurturing and other resources bestowed on a child by a father vs. a mother. Are parental roles interchangeable? Does the average kid get A, B, and C from Mom and X, Y, and Z from Dad, or is it totally mix and match?

Some obvious parental differences

Clearly there are fundamental biological differences I won’t ignore. To newborn babies, fathers fall into a large category (comprising about 7 billion people) of “not Mom,” meaning they’re not just useless, but in fact barely exist. My brother Bryan echoes this, describing how his wife “certainly had the upper hand initially,” as “it would be many months before the child even realized who I was and that I had anything to do with her at all, while she knew right off the bat where her milk came from.”

I don’t think this is a huge deal, though, in terms of the overall relationship between parents and kids. After all, the breast feeding generally happens before the child is capable of forming long-term memories. And while breast feeding is important, it’s not the be-all, end-all.

There are of course more minor differences. Moms are certainly more valuable in the realm of purses. As a single man, one of the things I looked to marriage for was to have access to my wife’s purse—not to put a lot of stuff in or anything, but because when I need, say, chapstick or a toothpick, there’s a chance it’ll be in there. Kids benefit from this too and in fact it’s far more likely they’ll want something—gum, loose change, cosmetics, a hairbrush—that’s in there. For all the societal changes we’ve seen, it’s almost unheard of for a man to carry a purse.

Many men, meanwhile, still know how to tie a necktie. I taught my younger daughter, in fact, when she needed a necktie for a costume. And men are still on the hook for doing the household jobs that require brute force and drudgery, as detailed here.

But seriously

Okay, I had a little fun there … just seeing if you’re still awake. Of course there are many more noteworthy differences. One, which my wife and both daughters agreed on and which I’ll concede I know myself to be true, regards physical safety. My wife is far more concerned with safeguarding our kids than I am. I’m not talking about home invasion or anything (though I keep a big Maglite next to my bed and fantasize about one day getting to use it) but about keeping the kids out of dangerous situations in general, whether it’s bad neighborhoods or risky activities.

(Speaking of home defense, I once sneaked out of the house in the wee hours of the morning, and just as I made it to the driveway the front door burst open, and there was my mom, in her nightgown, with a large frying pan in one hand and an iron skillet in the other, yelling, “Who’s out there?!” while my father stayed in bed, no doubt sleeping peacefully.)

Here are a couple of examples from my own parenting life. When our kids were very young, my wife found it tiresome taking them to the playground because she feared they’d fall off the slide or jungle gym or whatever, so she would supervise them closely which was exhausting. When I took them, I’d bring a paperback. Or there was the time I had my brother’s family over to visit and their three-year-old went straight to a giant pile of Lego my kids had out, and I asked, “Should I be worried about her choking?” In the same instant my brother replied “no” and his wife replied “yes.”

Another example of this different risk management approach: when I was coaching my daughter’s high school mountain bike team, we were all descending Mount Tam one morning and my daughter was riding more aggressively than usual. Not terribly surprisingly, she crashed. My reaction was twofold: as a father of course I was somewhat alarmed, but as a coach I was glad to see her pushing it a bit to improve her skills. (She wasn’t hurt.)

My wife contends that if the men had to carry those babies around for nine months in our wombs, we’d be a lot more vested. I think it’s also possible that, convinced as we males are of our own invincibility, we may well project that onto our kids.

Now, in terms of sports, math, home repair, and other activities traditionally associated with males, my family members all agreed that the teaching of these things simply falls to whoever is most capable. My brother Bryan described how, as a math major working in tech, he was naturally the one who taught the kids “how to employ the quadratic equation in real life scenarios.” (I hope this was a joke.) He also has the role of fixing broken things around the house, so he said “it was natural for me to show the kids how to take apart the dishwasher or zip-tie something together.” He was quick to add, “I did not discriminate when it came to these sorts of lessons, I was more than happy when the girls wanted to learn something ‘manly’ or fix something. In fact, I would often recruit them just because they were girls.”

Similarly, in my household I do the computer and IT stuff, am more helpful with math problems, and fix the bikes, and I do as much as I can to teach these things. My wife does most of the cooking and gardening, and thus the kids learn these from her. But it could easily be the other way around, in my family or any. My brother Bryan pointed out, “If our roles were reversed and [my wife] was the one running in the rat race, she may have had more practical influences on the kids (how to treat coworkers, how to get ahead of your peers, that kind of thing).”

This being said, it’s not hard to find lots of examples of fathers handling the math, home repair, and sports end of things. Could these truly be a man’s domain? It’s sometimes tempting to think so; just watch small children play and you’ll see predictable gender differences. When our family randomly came to own a toy B-52 bomber (maybe from a garage sale?) they didn’t exactly play war with it. I caught one of them tucking it under the covers of her bed and she announced, “I’m putting my little plane-y to bed.”

But really, can we call this an innate preference when society has been ramming domesticity down girls’ throats for generations, and destroying their confidence in their intellects, particularly where math is concerned? (It’s shocking how often my wife and I heard, growing up, that “girls can’t do math.”) I’m certainly seeing a lot of changes around these attitudes now. Whereas my mom was called a dyke for playing field hockey in high school, my daughters’ high school has a very robust girls’ sports program, particularly their champion girls’ wrestling and mountain biking teams. My older daughter is more science-y than I am, and she and her two best friends crushed it on the math section of the SAT. I don’t think anybody can make a credible case anymore that kids need to learn fix-it stuff, sports, and math from their dads.

A more complex suggestion

The most intriguing feedback I got on this topic was from my younger daughter. She proposed that perhaps a child learns shame from his or her father. This gave me a jolt, needless to say. “Do I make you feel ashamed?” I asked, incredulously. No, no, my daughter said, and went on to explicate the idea: she doesn’t mean it as a criticism; it’s more like the father wants to be more stoic, even to the point of denouncing shamelessness. The mother, on the other hand, may be more freely emotional, and is more likely to model tact than to confront people.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what my daughter meant—this conversation was in a loud restaurant, and we got interrupted, and I have a hard time keeping my teenagers on such a topic for long—but it’s a good jumping-off point for me. It ties into my visceral sense that there’s a traditional male behavior that does need to be modeled, now more than ever as it’s somewhat under assault, and it has to do with keeping a stiff upper lip. I’m not holding up stoicism as a major virtue; it’s more than I’m pretty fed up with this whole emo thing.

Now, I’m not an expert on the exact meaning of “emo” but I’m talking about guys who think being really modern by eschewing traditional male traits like fortitude automatically makes them better. It’s as though appearing vulnerable, and freely describing their feelings, gets them off the hook for suffering from arrested development and other versions of age-old male prickdom. I’d rather see guys bravely facing the music than begging for forgiveness because they can’t.

The singer Lana del Rey illustrates what I’m talking about. In her song “Norman fucking Rockwell” she totally rips on her “man-child” boyfriend, complaining, “Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news/ But I can’t change that and I can’t change your mood.” The fact of his writing poetry isn’t the problem; it’s that the poetry is bad, and moreover the boyfriend is too self-absorbed to realize it. She goes on, “Self-loathing poet, resident Laurel Canyon know-it-all/ You talk to the walls when the party gets bored of you.” Del Rey continues in this vein on the next song on the album, “Mariner’s Apartment Complex,” complaining that this boyfriend took her sadness (which is temporary) out of context, equating it with his own (which is perennial). But she offers him support: “You lose your way, just take my hand/ You’re lost at sea then I’ll command your boat to me again,” and concludes, somewhat surprisingly, “I’m your man.” No, this is not some gender change-up; the persona in this song is very much a woman. More to the point, I think she’s saying, “If you can’t man up, I will.” Just like the single moms in Fisher-Paulson’s essay, perhaps. If all moms were like Lana del Rey, perhaps my daughter wouldn’t equate such fiery criticism with fathers.

Does any of this even matter?

In response to my inquiry about parents’ roles, my brother Max took a step back and challenged whether there aren’t more important matters to contemplate:

The question about parental gender roles may need to be further contextualized. The question as you put it asks about the average kid. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 45% (2.8 million out of 6.1 million) pregnancies in the U.S. were unintended in 2011. Of these, 58% ended in birth. So the question isn’t whether a kid typically gets A, B, and C from mom and X, Y, and Z from dad. The average kid, if lucky, may get A from mom and Y or Z from dad, but rarely A, B, C, X, Y, and Z. The average kid has to grow up navigating a minefield of parental indifference and/or incompetence. 

I’ll add to this that more and more families don’t have two parents to begin with. According to the US Census Bureau, “Between 1960 and 2016, the percentage of children living in families with two parents decreased from 88 to 69.” So almost a third of children don’t have the luxury of wondering what resources derive from which parent. They only have one.

Max went on to say,

So the short answer is that gender roles in child rearing have much less bearing on the success of the child being raised than the child itself. It is ultimately the work of the kid that will determine success or failure. Sometimes researchers use twins to dig down into these matters, as a control group sort of tactic. … [One] example would be that of Remus and Romulus in ancient times, twins raised by wolves. Remus was eventually killed by Romulus, who of course, went on to found the city of Rome and the Roman kingdom. Although they both grew up with exactly the same advantages (although the sexes of the wolves have not been determined) one was wildly successful, while the other, poor old Remus, wound up dead … most would agree, less than successful.

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World’s Second-Best Dad!

Introduction

Today, obviously, is Father’s Day. My day, really. With my own dad having passed away, this has become one of those rare holidays (my birthday being the other salient example) when I can just relax and bask in … well, in the hope, at least, that I’ll be remembered. My wife always remembers, of course, because she’s an adult. The kids are touch-and-go. Today, they rose to the occasion, but perhaps not all the way up. Metaphorically speaking they propped themselves on an elbow. But I got an unexpected bonus as well. Read on, because albertnet features some special guest stars today!

The card from Secunda

When my wife and I needed a code name for each of our kids, we went with Prima and Secunda for a short while until the kids figured it out. Well, Secunda was the first kid to give me a Father’s Day card, and since she didn’t actually sign it, I have to wonder if she’s willing to be held accountable. Thrilling to the idea that any member of her generation still values privacy, I’ll honor it. Here is the card Secunda gave to me:

My first reaction was, wait, what does age have to do with Father’s Day? But then, it seems almost impossible for my kids to even think of me without automatically cringing at how fricking old (and thus largely irrelevant) I have gotten.

Opening the card, I see that my daughter was apparently thinking ahead to my birthday (in just a few days) so the ageing theme actually makes sense. Fortunately she hadn’t gotten very far on that card—and I can’t blame her, it’s really hard to think of what to write inside—so she pivoted and repurposed it for Father’s Day. Here, you can read the whole thing:

Because her handwriting is so poor, here in legible text is what she wrote:

Hey Dana,

Thanks for making the moola all these years. Every time I buy overpriced crap I think of you, sort of. I like your Mickey Mouse pancakes. I would say they might be the second best Mickey Mouse pancakes I’ve ever had (but you don’t make them anymore). Being 2nd best at anything is pretty meh, good enough though. World’s #2 Dad! I’d buy you a mug but I don’t think they make them like that. Silver medals suit you, they match your hair. Thanks for trying your hardest!

From,
your favorite daughter

Wow. Ouch. You like how she calls me “Dana”? She’s been doing that for a couple months now. She says it in a somewhat pejorative voice, with just a touch of a sneer. I love the smiley face with $ eyes. You can see the kind of values I’ve instilled, or rather failed to instill.

Now, I have to confess, I had forgotten about the Mickey Mouse pancakes. I used to make those when the kids were very little, especially when we were camping. I’d make the batter a bit runny, and do multiple connected cakes to form a Mickey Mouse head. The kids were enchanted. Looking back, I really miss having the ability to enchant my kids. So why did I stop making these pancakes? Because the kids outgrew them? I’d like to claim that, but clearly my kid remembers them still whereas I forgot. Surely there’s at least one dad out there who still enchants his kids, so I guess I can’t protest having to settle for World’s #2 Dad. It’d be a sweeter sentiment without the dig at my hair, of course. I guess she couldn’t resist.

Speaking of silver, there really is a silver lining to my daughter razzing me like that. My brothers and I never had enough rapport with our dad to tease him, even lightly. He was always dead earnest and could not laugh at himself. There were so many opportunities, such as most nights at the dinner table when he would hold forth at length about science, engineering, and so forth … usually whatever he was doing at work. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we heard several dozen lectures about the interferometer he was building. It would have been so cathartic at some point to say, “You know what, Dad? None of us has understood a word you’ve said for the last twenty dinners. We don’t even have the slightest idea what an interferometer even does or why anybody would pay you to build one. Everything you say goes right over our heads.” But we wouldn’t dare.

The closest I came was when I took my kids to the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. They had an interferometer exhibit and I begged my younger daughter to go pose with it. I posted this photo to the album that I shared with my family, adding the caption, “Lindsay went straight for the interferometer and we could scarcely peel her away...”

I was worried this might be too much of a gibe, and that my dad would realize he was the butt of a joke, but he was clueless. He responded with a comment something like, “It’s impressive the interferometer exhibit was clever enough to engage such a young audience so effectively.” To which I replied, “Yeah … unlike you.” (No, of course I didn’t say that.)

I guess it kind of stings, to be honest, that my daughter signed off with “From” instead of “Love.” But then, affection of any sort, even verbal, seems to strike my children as tasteless.

The card from Prima

Moving on, here’s the card from Prima:

Okay, what is up with that smear? I’ll confess, given how well both my kids can draw, I was a bit less than impressed that the first card was clearly store-bought and rather uninspired, but at least it was clean. What, is that chocolate? Or did the cat throw up on it? I guess I’ll give Prima the benefit of the doubt … maybe she did the card (if you could call it that) many days ago and it floated around the house for a while. Even still, you can tell she didn’t put her heart and soul into this. Probably she was prompted: “You better have a card for your dad.” Perhaps she resented being required to produce one. Anyway, here’s what she wrote:

Now, some people just have better handwriting than others. To a large extent it’s generational—my mom, for example, has beautiful penmanship—and I could forgive a kid, even when her college classes have ended, for not taking a lot of time to painstakingly write out her card as prettily as possible. But then, this kid does calligraphy for fun, so I can’t say I’m completely blown away here. To spare you trying to decipher her accidental encryption, here’s what she wrote: 

Dad—

You’re pretty good all things considered but I think there is room for improvement. Hope you take constructive criticism.

1. Your bald spot is gross
2. You snore way too loud
3. You have weird sunglasses
4. You think listening to Eminem makes you cool (it doesn’t)
5. You drive a Volvo you dweeb
6. You have weird veins
7. You keep getting injured (stop)
8. You have a weird beard
9. You keep getting old
10. Yeah

Love,

Your better daughter

Wow. And ouch. That’s not really a greeting card, it’s a roast! And yeah, I like having solid rapport with my kids, but this might just be a little over the top. On a day when I’m supposed to kick back in the hammock, ponder with satisfaction what fatherhood means to me, and bask in the glow of a doting family, I feel blindsided … I mean, is it just me, or is this kid straight up rinsing the piss out of me?

Look, I know I have a bald spot, and it’s one of life’s disappointments since when I was growing up my mom explained that, based on the genes in my two family lines, I would have a full head of hair my whole life, which I clearly don’t. It’s like my hairline and my bald spot are racing toward each other until I only have hair left on the sides, like a clown. Suddenly the reassurances I’ve heard on this matter—for example, that I’m tall enough that not too many people can even see the bald spot—are just attempts to be nice. Attempts, I should add, that are no longer being made.

As far snoring, that’s not exactly fair. My wife tells me, perhaps honestly, that I’ve only been snoring lately, because I’m forced to sleep on my back since my arm is in a sling due to a broken collarbone. But okay, fine, I’ll own it. I snore. Sue me.

It’s number three, “You have weird sunglasses,” that really kind of stings, because I really put a lot of thought into choosing my sunglasses. They’re prescription, and cost a bundle, so I wanted to make sure I chose the frames carefully. In fact, I even dragged my wife with me to the optometrist’s, so she could weigh in. While I modeled them, I asked her to take a photo because I can never see much in those tiny little mirrors the sunglasses display cases have. Well, my wife snapped the photo and started laughing. I started to get a little annoyed—like, if they’re that bad, why am I wasting my time trying them on?—until she showed me the photo. My wife doesn’t have a smartphone, and struggles with the soft-key interface, as you can see:

She had no idea how the cartoon enhancements were made, and I don’t either. Once we figured out how to turn off the silly effect, I got a good look, and we agreed these are the cool shades. I was, I’m a little embarrassed to say, kind of proud of them. But now my daughter has weighed in, speaking of course for her entire generation, the new generation, the only generation that matters, and has pronounced them “weird.” Here, you might as well mock them too:

Moving on to #4, do I think listening to Eminem makes me cool? No, I know 50-somethings can’t be cool. This is truly a musical choice based entirely on my appreciation of Eminem’s music … but to my daughter, it’s just a pose.

And driving a Volvo makes me a dweeb? I thought I deserved credit for recognizing myself as a family man and owning it, vs. buying a big dumb SUV just to show the world how “rugged” and “sporty” and “outdoorsy” I am. And I could have done worse, style-wise, than a Volvo. What if I had a Nissan Cube, or a PT Cruiser, or a Scion XB? (Oh, wait, I do have a Scion XB.) Okay, fine, I give up. I have a dweeb-y car. Two dweeb-y cars.

On to #6, “You have weird veins.” I feel like I’m under a microscope or something. Who knew kids even noticed this kind of stuff? And to be honest, I’ve historically thought my veins were kind of cool, showing off my low body fat etc. In fact, I even mentioned in these pages how, when I donate blood, the technicians praise my for my easy-to-find veins:

But of course I’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. Nobody likes prominent veins. They’re … weird.

I guess I can’t really defend myself against the next criticism, that I keep getting injured. I could argue that statistically I’ve got a pretty good track record, as I’ve ridden my bike over 200,000 miles in my lifetime, and competed in over 250 races, with only three significant injuries. Alas, all three injuries have been in my kid’s lifetime (a separated shoulder, a broken leg, and now this collarbone), so I’ll have to face the music here.

Now, this weird beard, which you can see in the sunglasses photo above, isn’t really by choice. It’s my right collarbone that’s broken, and I’m right-handed, so I think I should get points for at least shaving my neck left-handed. Yeah, I get that my beard is turning grey, particularly this little patch near the corner of my mouth so it looks like stray toothpaste. I know if my colleagues saw this graying beard, I’d probably be laid off from my job since I work in tech. So it’s kind of a race: will my shoulder heal by the time my employer reopens their offices?

On to number nine … I “keep getting old.” Well, what am I supposed to do? I guess over in Marin County, and certainly in southern California, all the 50-something men are getting testosterone shots and taking human growth hormone, and maybe they have time to meditate and be mindful, and they’re getting hair plugs, all positive steps in the war on ageing, while I’m just out injuring myself. Forgive me for living!

I asked about #10, “Yeah…” and my daughter said, “You should be grateful I ran out of things to complain about!”

Bonus card – the trifecta!

Imagine my surprise and delight when my smartphone chirped to alert me to a third Father’s Day card, this one from my brother, known to my kids as Evil Uncle Max:

This card pretty much speaks for itself. Man, what a work of art! If I’m not mistaken, this was created without the use of Photoshop. In case you’re wondering, yes—that is my mom holding me in her arms. That isn’t a baby photo of me, but it’s at least from the first half of my life, when I still had a full head of hair. Here’s what Max wrote inside:

Kind an “A for effort” sentiment, walking that fine line between showing me the love and damning me with faint praise. “Totally reasonable” indeed! I particularly appreciate “So take yourself out to dinner or something,” the subtext being, “No point waiting for anybody else to take you.” Clearly, he knows my family well!

Well, there it is, another year of fatherhood done and dusted. Some say our kids won’t fully appreciate us until they’re parents themselves. Caveats being “if and when,” I guess. But you know what? I’m going to look on the bright side … I seem to have excellent rapport with my kids. At least they know I can laugh at myself.

But wait, there’s more!

To my surprise and delight, my kids produced bonus Father’s Day cards just a bit ago, after I had written most of this post. These second cards were done with much more care than the gag ones above. Prima even wrote me this nice limerick: 

There once was a weirdo from Boulder
Who constantly messed up his shoulder.
He is always in pain   
But he’ll do it again
As he keeps getting older and older.

Okay, not that nice … I guess she couldn’t help herself!

Further albertnet reading on this topic:

Father's Day

What Are Fathers For?

A Father's Day Poem

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

A Father’s Day Poem

Introduction

This is a poem I wrote for my father, but it could apply to many a father—which is more than I can say for all those stupid Father’s Day cards featuring clichés like the hammock, the necktie, the golf clubs, or the fishing gear. Those tropes seem outdated and twee. If the greeting card industrial complex is trying to guess accurately about fathers’ behaviors they should show a dad in a dingy t-shirt in a La-Z-Boy armchair watching sports on TV.

My dad was the rare kind who didn’t watch any sports. But he also didn’t lie in a hammock, wear a necktie, play golf, or fish. The only card I ever found that would have been totally appropriate is this one, which I could never bring myself to actually send:

So I’d pick some generic nature-themed card, but that only solved half the problem, the other half being what to write inside. After all, beyond “Happy Father’s Day,” what more is there to say? In my case, I couldn’t say “You were always there for me” or “Best Dad ever!” without seeming a bit disingenuous. So that’s how this poem came to be: it nicely solved the blank card problem. (In my case perhaps I had the sneaky ulterior motive of rubbing my dad’s nose in my choice of English as a major, when he was a passionate STEM proponent well ahead of all the Johnny-come-lately STEM-pushers who are terrorizing the current crop of teenagers.)

I guess you’re free to steal this poem for your own card. But if you do, and your dad doesn’t know you to be a competent poet, he’ll surely see right through your plagiarism. And if you are a competent poet, well, write your own ode!

The Poem

To Dad - June 19, 2016

A father, residing in Boulder

Was young once, and then he got older.                2

He looks quite distinguished

And though he’s no linguist                                     4

He knows the right way to say “solder.”

This father, though lacking a daughter,                6

Was odd once, and maybe got odder.

He’s quite good with language—                            8

Can easily manage

To get the right rhyme out of “solder.”                10

Footnotes & Commentary

Title

I know, “To Dad” seems really generic but you have to remember “Dad” in this context is a proper noun so this is actually very personal and special. We fathers know this viscerally. Particularly when my kids were younger, when I was in a crowd of people and would hear a young girl yell, “Dad!” I would look around in a panic for a second before realizing some unrelated kid needed her dad.

Line 1 – a father

Given all the stuff I just said about “Dad” being personal, now I go off and start the poem with “A father”? Like, just any father? Of course I knew this would be jarring, but good poetry is supposed to be. If I wanted treacle, I’d go buy a Hallmark card. And no harm done: I knew by the time my dad got to the end of the line he’d realize this was a limerick, and I was just following the convention (e.g., “There once was a man from Nantucket”).

Line 2 – was young once … got older

This is an allusion to the Simon & Garfunkel song “The Boxer”—the extended version they performed at their concert in Central Park:

Now the years are rolling by me,

They are rockin’ evenly.

I am older than I once was

But younger than I’ll be.

That’s not unusual.

Would my dad catch this reference? Nope. He didn’t listen to much music. He had some records but they were all even older than Simon & Garfunkel. He never played the radio unless it was the classical station, as background music. Missed allusion aside, I figured my dad would enjoy knowing that somebody remembered the fact of his once being young. (My own kids won’t shut up about how old I am.)

Line 3 – looks quite distinguished

I kind of had to say something nice after reminding my dad how old he was (even though he prided himself on his agedness, his favorite self-referential term being “geezer”). Besides, he was distinguished and he knew it, so this was a compliment that wouldn’t come off as disingenuous.

Pretty respectable looking chap, eh? I must admit that I feel a bit odd forming your opinion based on such an old photo of him … I guess I’m sensitive to the rampant, unbridled deception taking place all over Instagram and other self-celebration platforms with people posting ideally unrepresentative photos. So here’s another shot of my dad, taken mere months before I wrote this poem.

If you look closely there’s a hard set to his mouth, and a strain shows around his eyes, and the eyes themselves are looking a bit blank and distant. That’s because when this photo was snapped, my dad already knew that he had cancer and likely wouldn’t be long for this world. Still, I think he was a very handsome guy well into old age (or as he’d put it “geezerdom”).

Line 4 – no linguist

This was perhaps a bit harsh, because even though my dad was a scientist and engineer through-and-through, he prided himself on having perfect grammar. Still, there’s no shame in not being a linguist. In fact, if I had become a professional linguist, my dad probably would have been a bit disappointed, even if I rose through the ranks and had a team of linguists working under me.

Line 5 – the right way to say solder

This line is a trap! Instinctively, the reader—or at least an astute reader like my dad—would be expecting the last word of the line to rhyme with “Boulder” and “older” in keeping with the limerick form, and then this word would look like it would rhyme, but of course it doesn’t. My dad would know the proper pronunciation, being the kind of guy who loved soldering things. He would have been really honored had I also learned how to solder. (If I could have found a Father’s Day card with a soldering iron on it, I’d have bought it in a heartbeat.)

So at this point in reading the poem my dad had to be perplexed. Surely, he’d muse, his own son couldn’t think “solder” rhymes with “older”—could he? Dad would mull this over for a bit. My level of intelligence wasn’t something he was totally confident about. He knew full well I wasn’t as smart as he was (his IQ having been measured at 180, with this result unwisely disclosed to him). A long-standing and still unresolved family argument concerns whether, back in 1983, my dad did or did not say to me at the dinner table, “You’re not very bright, are you.” (For the record, I don’t believe he actually said this to me, but the fact that we could imagine it does say something.)

It’s not like my dad considered me a dumbass—after all, I did manage to get a degree from his own alma mater—but to somebody as smart as he, everyone must have seemed a little dense. So I imagine he wondered for a moment if I’d just had the pronunciation wrong, before thinking, “Wait—he’s specifically talking about the right way to pronounce this word, so of course he knows.”

My dad’s relief would quickly pass, though, because until he fully appreciated the joke, he would be a bit prickled by my audacity in deliberately spurning the rhyme scheme of the limerick form by using a non-rhyming word here. This might strike you as an unfair accusation of extreme pedanticism, but I assure you this is a realistic consideration. For my dad, using “real” as an adverb was tantamount to cussing. He once challenged me about using the phrase “that’s me” on this blog because “that’s I” is, strictly speaking, the correct grammar. Also, he was once scandalized because, when emailing a large group where all the recipients were blind-copied, for the main “To” address I used “nobody@nowhere.com” which obviously isn’t legit. My dad took me to task for this, and when I replied that this was a victimless crime, he drew my attention to the mail servers on the Internet that would waste valuable computing cycles searching in vain for that address. O, the humanity!

So yeah, that line ending in “solder” was me having a bit of illicit fun, being a literary bad boy, if you will.

Line 6 – lacking a daughter

This phrase is clearly the weakest part of the poem. You could quite reasonably accuse me of using the word “daughter” just because it rhymes with “odder” on the next line. In that sense, I’ve stooped to the level of that abysmal Hall & Oates song, “Your kiss is on my list.” (Have you ever thought about that? This guy makes a list: “Get up, shower, make coffee, empty the cat box, kiss Marcia, drop off dry cleaning…”)

The better line would be: “This dad, though not liable to dodder.” This would work very nicely with the ageing theme I’d already developed, and there’s a nice alliteration with the Ds in “dad” and “dodder.” But of course it wouldn’t be very nice, even though I’m technically saying he doesn’t dodder. We English majors love to ponder how you can’t say something without also implying its opposite, and this is a great example. (If you’re looking for another, consider how you’d feel if the big boss started his or her next staff meeting by saying, “Okay, I want to be clear here: nobody is talking about layoffs!”)

Meanwhile, I think it’s pretty much impossible to use the word “dodder” without summoning the phrase “doddering old fool.” So even if my dad was reassured that I’m clearly stating he doesn’t dodder, that phrase would be lurking nearby, casting a shadow over his poem-reading experience. I just couldn’t do that to the guy … I mean, the card and poem are supposed to be a tribute, right?

It also happens to be that “lacking a daughter” was totally apropos, and in my dad’s case the most powerful phrase in the whole poem. Family legend has it that he always wanted a daughter. My mom refutes this, but I think she’s just trying to keep me from feeling like the very first thing I did upon being born was to disappoint my father. I like to joke that my parents were hoping so hard for a girl, they chose a girl’s name, and when I ended up a boy, they saddled me with it anyway.

Line 7 – odd  … odder

Was this line mean-spirited? I’d say it was pushing the edge of the envelope. I owed that to myself after decades of pathetically obsequious letters to my father, trying to win his approval. I figured if I was being nice enough now to write him a poem, I could playfully tweak him a bit at the same time, to shore up my own self respect. (And you thought this was a simple limerick!)

All this being said, “odd” and “odder” wouldn’t have particularly irked my dad because he had to know he was odd. He didn’t exactly strive to fit in, and sometimes wore his eccentricity on his sleeve. For example, he ditched the hubcaps on his (already odd) Scion XB and painted the rims bright blue. During his last years he wore, almost exclusively, this pair of bright cranberry-relish colored trousers that he liked to boast were significantly discounted at L.L. Bean due to their unpopular color.

Did Dad get odder over time? Absolutely. He eschewed the normal methods of running a household; for example, he would board up his windows during winter with custom-cut forms of silver-surfaced Styrofoam, to improve insulation, and he took to storing his underwear and undershirts in a filing cabinet instead of a standard dresser. (What benefit he saw in that is beyond me.)

Would having a daughter have kept my dad from becoming odder? Possibly. My brothers and I didn’t tend to challenge our dad, because he didn’t seem comfortable with that kind of thing. Where males were concerned he was pretty competitive, in a way he wasn’t with females. A daughter would have had an easier rapport with him and could probably have said, “Lose the berry-colored pants, dude! You look like a doddering old fool!”

Line 8 – quite good with language

Even if my dad wouldn’t mind being called odd, I knew I was close to the line so a bit of praise couldn’t hurt. Besides, it’s true: he was very good with language. When I hear the rampant errors committed by modern engineer-types (e.g., “between you and I”), I tend to cringe; after all, my dad proved that respect for language and for STEM aren’t mutually exclusive.

Line 10 – get the right rhyme

This line deliberately conflates the reader with the poet, as though my dad himself could have written this poem. I think with the right motivation and some effort, he could have. As evidence, I draw your attention to a couplet he casually tossed off at the dinner table one night when protesting my mom’s choice of side vegetable:

It takes more than a muscled lout

To make me eat a Brussels sprout.

It occurs to me (only now, alas) that it would have been fun to challenge my dad to try his hand at a limerick or a sonnet. So you know what? I’m going to do some poetry with my mom and my brothers the next time I see them.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

What Are Fathers For?

Introduction

On Father’s Day I can pretty much loaf.  I’ve already put the card to my own dad in the mail, so my duties should be over.  So why am I making work for myself by doing a Father’s Day blog post?  Well, even though that’s a rhetorical question, I’m going to answer it:  it’s because I’d expected the Critérium du Dauphiné to be too boring to bother blow-by-blow blogging (or even watching) and I’ve got to blog about something.  On top of that, some parenting questions have been festering in my brain, so I’m going to lance it (yes, lance my brain) via this blog.  Enjoy.

(Yes, I know I blogged about Father’s Day once before.  But I find I have more to say on the topic.)

Do fathers actually serve any purpose?

I guess before I answer the question “What are fathers for?” I should address the possibility that, other than providing sperm, they really serve no purpose at all.  Alas, this ends up being true for a number of deadbeat dads.  (And of deadbeat fish, who don’t even get involved with the mom other than swimming over her eggs and literally dropping off their genetic input.)

In most cases, fathers at least provide food and shelter.  Beyond this … well, a lot depends on the father.  One dad I know, of my father’s generation, made this blanket statement early on, to the mother of his children:  “Look, the children are your domain.”  As society has evolved, I think this position has become less tenable.

Before I describe the various roles that I try to play as a dad, I should point out that a father’s purpose is to some degree a matter of perspective.  To newborn babies, fathers fall into a large category (comprising about 7 billion people) of “not Mom,” meaning they’re not just useless, but in fact barely exist.  I particularly remember how little use my younger daughter Lindsay had for me as a baby.  She wouldn’t even let me hold her.  Only gradually did I go from a peripheral non-entity to being ... “the help.”  That is, she’d cry for a toy or something and then, once I fetched it, go back to ignoring me.  (Had my older daughter been like this?  I just don’t remember.  Either she hadn’t, or I was too stunned by the rigors of first-time parenting to notice.)

Here’s an early cuddle Lindsay indulged me in.

It wasn’t until Lindsay was almost a toddler that she realized, “Hey, this guy makes pretty funny faces, and isn’t so bad at snuggling!”  But I didn’t feel fully respected until she began coming to me for information about the world:  questions like “Who’s smarter, a dog or a cat?”  The fact that my answers were (and are) complete malarkey has only increased her enthusiasm in picking my brain.

(Example:  she asked once, “Why is it called a manhole, not a person-hole?”  To which I replied, “If you opened that cover and climbed down the ladder, you’d enter an underground environment populated exclusively by males.  Sometimes a man just needs to get away, and that’s where he goes.  A whole lot of chest-bumping goes on down there.”)

Of course the role my kids try to assign me continually evolves.  My older daughter Alexa, though only twelve, has already adopted the classic teen delusion of omniscience, and with it the wish that her father would stop dispensing advice and become a silent hybrid of personal assistant, tutor, chauffeur, and ATM.

What purpose should a father serve?

There is a disconcertingly large amount of anecdotal evidence that the best thing a father can do is get out of the way.  Look at some of the most enchanting and endearing figures in literature:  David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Sara Crewe (of A Little Princess), James (of Giant Peach fame), the Baudelaire orphans (of the Lemony Snicket series), Tom (of the Captain Najork books), Huck Finn, Heidi, Harry Potter, Anne of Green Gables, and (perhaps most indelibly) Rudyard Kipling’s character, Kim.  All of these characters are fatherless, and their independence, fortitude, and resourcefulness are key to their appeal.

On the flip side, I cannot think of a single book that celebrates the devotion of a father for his kid.  The closest thing I can think of is the movie “Finding Nemo,” where the dad is an overprotective hand-wringing (well, fin-wringing) dork, and the fun only begins when Nemo is separated from him.  Perhaps it’s no coincidence that my favorite character in that film, Bruce the shark, never knew his father (as Bruce’s friend Anchor tries desperately to explain ).

Does this mean I leave it to my kids to make their way in this world without my help?  Of course not!  I’m fully aware of the difference between fiction and real life, and between a father and an author.  My natural impulse is to give my kids every advantage.  When Alexa was in a piano competition recently, and I was in the audience watching her rivals as they took turns playing dizzily complicated music with exquisite precision, I wondered if I shouldn’t yell and wave something to try to distract them, like basketball fans do during a free-throw.

Character vs. privilege

I knew a guy, my age, who grew up with plenty of privileges.  His dad paid for everything all the way through college:  tuition, books, rent, food, even clothes.  The kid did well, earning high grades at an expensive private college, being awarded Phi Beta Kappa, etc.  Upon graduating, he had absolutely no idea what to do with himself.  He had thrived in the structured environment of college, but was lost without it.  Naturally, he decided on grad school.  There was just the matter of his application essay:  he couldn’t figure out what to write.  I happened to be there when his writer’s block came to a head, and his dad—roaring his terrible roar and gnashing his terrible teeth—wrote the essay for his kid, who proceeded to get into grad school, last less than a year, and drop out.  His dad had also yanked his financial support, so the kid collapsed completely and went to work for Arby’s.  True story.

My dad was quite different.  He expected my brothers and me to get good grades, but otherwise didn’t involve himself in our schoolwork (even when we fell short).  He was too busy to help with homework, and if we’d asked for help with a grad school application he’d probably have laughed.  (That was our problem, after all.)  But he did buy one of the first home computers, long before the IBM PC or Apple 2C became popular, and gave us permission to use it.  He didn’t exhort us to do so, or even do much to encourage us, much less help us, with programming projects.  I only dabbled in programming that computer, but my brother Bryan got way into it.  He was a pioneer among computer nerds (decades before they became kind of cool), spending every spare moment in the junior high computer lab thrashing away at a primitive teletype.

You might expect that our dad became Bryan’s one-man fan club, since all this was right up my dad’s alley, but I’m not sure he knew anything about it.  He didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, even when Bryan made his own laser for a college physics class.  And though Bryan lived with my dad for some of his college years, he had to cover his own tuition.  But none of that mattered; Bryan was motivated by his own interest, not any need to please his parents, and now makes a good living as a programmer despite being (gasp!) a Type-B personality.  Sure, our dad could have been a more engaged parent, but he did model some good behaviors, being an industrious scientific type who read a lot and used good grammar, and we didn’t have any delusions about him—or life—giving us a free ride.

Role model?

Myself, I’m torn about how much to involve myself in my kids’ activities.  On the one hand, I want to give my kids everything I can:  private music lessons, constant reminders to practice, cool bicycles to ride and a dad to ride with, help with homework and reminders to do it, and raw silk to use as toilet paper.  But I also like to lecture them about how hard I had it as a kid—mainly to stop their whining, but also to inspire them to solve their own problems (and ultimately, perhaps solve some of mine, or some of society’s).  I don’t want to give my kids too much, because I’m fully aware of how obnoxious pampered kids are, like the evil rich-kid nemesis in “The Karate Kid.”

Then there’s the sticky matter of whether or not I should strive to be a role model.  In some ways, this is easy.  I recognize, for example, that I’m supposed to model responsible drinking.  This is very easy, and in fact enjoyable:  several times a week I drink exactly one beer, and occasionally I get wild and split a second beer with my wife (half a bottle being her version of good modeling).  But as a more general role model, who am I to hold myself up as the kind of person my daughters ought to become?  Shouldn’t they do better than I have?  I’m not trying to raise a Mini-Me.

The helpfulness quagmire

I am a very modern father.  I do a great deal of housework, which my kids witness.  In a perfect world, they’d respect me for not being the kind of sexist primitive male who treats household chores like a game of chicken that his wife always loses.  But in reality, I don’t think kids respect anybody’s willingness to do housekeeping.  To them, it probably just shows that their parents don’t have anything better to do.

When I was a kid, my dad wasn’t around that much because he was this genius guy, an honest-to-God rocket scientist who worked long hours.  To the extent I thought about this at all, I assumed that the fate of the free world was in his hands and it would be silly to expect him to mow the lawn or do dishes.  He also wasn’t the type to throw a ball for us or play a board game; he was rather aloof and mysterious.  I was kind of in awe of him. 

(Did I have the same awe for my mom, who did the majority of the housework while also holding down a full-time job?  Not exactly, but I did feel profound admiration for her one morning, well before dawn, when I was sneaking out of the house:  just after quietly closing the front door, while I was climbing on my bike, I was stunned to see the door fly open and my mom storm out in her pajamas, a frying pan in one hand and an iron skillet in the other, yelling, “Who’s out there!?”)

I fear my kids have a somewhat low opinion of me simply because I’m too available, too helpful, too quotidian to occupy any pedestal.  The other day I was lecturing Alexa about taking on more of the housework.  She pointed out that she occasionally does the dishes.  (Emphasis on occasionally, in the sense of Halley’s Comet occasionally swinging by.)  I said, “Well, what about when I suggested you clean out the cat box?  You looked at me like I was crazy.”  She protested that that’s a totally gross chore.  “So?” I retorted.  “Am I somehow impervious to grossness?  Do I have some kind of special super powers that make me invulnerable?”  She stammered, “No, it’s just that you … well, you’re a dad.”  So that’s what “dad” means to her:  not above cleaning the cat box.  To recap:  that chore is below her; it’s not below me; therefore, she is above me.  Role model, indeed!

Is laissez-faire the answer?

Like so many of their generation, my parents took a laissez-faire approach to child-rearing, and were generally unaware of what my brothers and I were up to.  The upside of this was that I had complete freedom, as a teen, to ride my bike all day, sometimes 100 miles or more, with nobody fretting about me back home.  I could stay out as late as I wanted; at 14, I once came home from a friend’s house sometime after midnight, and was surprised to find my dad sitting in the dining room having a snack.  He’d just come home from work, and didn’t seem to think there was anything unusual about me rolling in at that hour.  We had a nice chat.

The downside of laissez-faire was that I couldn’t just bring all my problems to my parents.  If, say, my bike got a flat tire, I was on my own.  My dad was not the sort of person to a) waste his money hiring some banana-fingered mechanic to fix a flat tire when it’s so easy to do yourself, or b) take the time to actually fix the flat or show me how.  So I had to try to get my brothers to do it, when they obviously had no incentive.  (Quite the opposite:  as connoisseurs of schadenfreude, they enjoyed my miserable pedestrian purgatory.)  Necessity being the mother of invention, I had to learn how to fix bikes.  My brothers did give me some help there, and I took to buying old non-functional beater bikes—the cadavers of the bicycle world—which I practiced on.  These totally expendable machines became my commuter bikes, and my wrenching skills led to a series of fairly lucrative bike shop jobs.

So should I take the laissez-faire route, like my own father?  Well, no.  For one thing, I seem to have the worrying gene that somehow escaped my parents.  I want  to be involved, to make sure my kids have the best possible experience under my roof and beyond.  Second, since my wife worries far more than I do, a laissez-faire approach on my part would clash with her hands-on, all-worrying-all-the-time parenting style.  Such a clash would lead to all kinds of good-cop/bad-cop scenarios (which children naturally exploit, ultimately to their own detriment). 

Meanwhile, my kids do a lot of cool stuff, like learning the piano, which I’m pleased to be able to foster (not just through paying for the lessons but through hassling my girls, daily, to practice).  When push comes to shove, playing the piano is a better capability than fixing bikes.  By fostering these activities I can guide my kids, so they don’t end up rotting their brains out (like I did with TV for a number of years when I wasn’t off being resourceful and inventive).

BikeGate

The other day Alexa biked home from school and casually mentioned that her chainring had fallen off. “Huh?  You mean your chain fell off the chainring?”  No, the chainring had fallen off.  This could not be.  I asked for details.  She replied, “You know, the chainring-thingy?  The round thing?  In back?”  I said, “You mean your cog.”  She replied, “Yeah, that’s what I said!  The cog-type-thing.”  She explained how it had come off the hub and was spinning uselessly, and she somehow managed to get it back on long enough to finish riding home.  At this point I should have applauded this ad hoc repair and acknowledged her resourcefulness, but I’m not that big a person.  Besides, I was concerned about a) her bike being broken, b) her own lack of concern about it, and c) my growing tendency to make itemized lists in the a, b, c format.

As it happened, I had a window of opportunity that evening to fix the bike, so I did—the alternative being to drive Alexa to school the next day.  (I guess I don’t have the heart to make her walk, schlepping all her books and her violin.)  Her bike is a three-speed, and they’re mothers to work with.  What’s worse, beyond the low-tech cog that had popped its circlip, a fancy little plastic pulley had broken into three pieces and had to be epoxied back together.  Alexa didn’t participate in the repair, nor did she seem aware that I was doing it.  (An unspoken rule when I was a kid is that if somebody fixed something for you, you had to stand around watching and handing up tools, to show your appreciation.)  Worst of all, when I went to tell her it was done, she barely looked up from her comic book, and didn’t even thank me.

(Before I completely throw my daughter under the bus, I should point out a few things.  First, she seldom reads comic books, and was merely unwinding after two weeks of working like a slave on her schoolwork, with added residual stress from that piano competition.  Second, she has taken on the ubiquitous tween/teen tendency to mumble, so it’s possible she thanked me and I didn’t hear it, though I endlessly remind her that if she doesn’t hear “you’re welcome,” the “thank you” didn’t happen.)

So I confronted Alexa about her lack of gratitude (building on a lecture I had given her and Lindsay a week or so before about what “sense of entitlement” means and how insufferable ingrates are).  Alexa assured me that she appreciated my help with the bike, but her manner struck me as rote and perfunctory.  I told her to prove her gratitude by writing a sonnet on the topic.  (This is my version of making her kiss the signet ring.) 

Not unexpectedly, she tried to barter for something shorter.  “No haiku,” I said.  “A rhesus monkey could write a haiku.”  She proposed a limerick.  “Okay, but it has to be good,” I replied, “meaning you have to rhyme on at least two syllables.  And if you don’t finish it today, you’re back up to a sonnet.”  She didn’t finish that evening, but did produce a creditable sonnet the following day (though, alas, she’s asked me not to post it here).  Her sonnet goes far in reassuring me, with lines like “Expecting service is a foolish act” and “You didn’t have to, that’s a certain fact.”  The tone is so earnest I almost feel sheepish about the whole thing, though she insists this was not her goal.  In this poem she strikes a nice balance between appeasing me and asserting her independence, deliberately breaking with the sonnet form by tacking an extra foot to each line of the final rhyming couplet, flamboyantly rhyming on three syllables. 

I can live with that.

Father's Day

Introduction

For me, Father’s Day is almost like a birthday: I can enjoy others fussing over me a bit. But beyond that, it provides a nice lens for self-reflection about my role as a dad. If a blog post on such ruminations sounds tedious, fear not: I’ll try to keep it light, like a soufflé. But not as chichi as a soufflé. Maybe more like a cake. Maybe like a cake that a girl jumps out of, but without being tacky.

The card

Although this is kind of my day, I’m also a son, so I have my own duty to carry out. It’s never easy for me to find an appropriate Father’s Day card for my dad. I comb through all the cards and none seems appropriate. The same clichés appear over and over on card after card: the necktie; the hammock; the golfing; the fishing; the pretend report card. The printed sentiments are just as hackneyed: “You were always there for me”; “Thanks for everything”; “The best dad in the world!”

The composite father suggested by these cards is a devoted family man, sharp-dressed, hard-working but alternately leisure-seeking, who dispenses cash like an ATM, drives a cool convertible, fixes stuff around the house, leads his kids in the kind of fun activities that Norman Rockwell liked to paint, and spends his weekend lying around when he’s not golfing.

None of these match my actual dad, nor me, nor just about any actual dad I can think of. I finally found a decent card with a stylized drawing of a penguin on it. The penguin kind of looked like James Bond—the Daniel Craig version. It’s a pretty special card that can make a penguin look like a badass.

Are fathers necessary?

There is evidence to suggest that a kid’s peer group has as much to do with his development as his parents. That may be true, but that doesn’t mean a father shouldn’t do his best. And I’m pretty sure I’ve seen signs of my influence on my two daughters.

One example that comes immediately to mind is my daughter Alexa’s first word, which was “no.” Did she necessarily get this word from me? Well, I think so. Neither her mom nor I was probably telling her “no” at that tender age, for two reasons. One, babies cannot be expected to obey—they are pure id. Second, what could a parent really take exception to that isn’t completely hardwired? In other words, what do babies do that they really shouldn’t? A parent cannot say “No!” when the baby dribbles mashed peas down her chin. It wouldn’t be fair. Babies lack the motor skills to do any better.

I highly suspect that Alexa learned “no” from hearing me bawl out the cat. But wait, you’re saying: didn’t my wife also bawl out the cat? Yes, but not with the same inflection. Erin’s tone with the cat, in such circumstances, is certainly sharp, but not as booming as mine. Even as a baby, Alexa captured something of my cat-chiding essence. She even pointed at the cat, just like I always did.

Okay, you’re saying, maybe Alexa was particularly impressionable and this has nothing to do with father/offspring memes. Not the case: after giving the matter much thought, I realized that my own tendency to berate the cat is modeled on the example my father set. Growing up, we had a much-loved Siamese chocolate-point named Mulla. My dad, being terribly allergic to cats, couldn’t hold or pet the cat much, but he did get some pleasure from bellowing at the cat about his—the cat’s—feasiliness. I never fully understood what “feasily” meant, but our cat was apparently the epitome of it. “You are feasily! Yes, you!” my dad would say sternly, as Mulla looked back opaquely. Or Dad would spontaneously shoot the cat a look and say, “Feasil-thing!”

I’ve never accused my tabby cat, Misha, of being feasily, but my utterances have much the same peculiar spirit as my dad’s did. I’ll frequently boom, “You are a part of the rebel alliance and a traitor!” Her scavenging of table scraps earns my sharp invective: “Look at you! You’re supposed to be a proud, powerful hunter, not a shameless scavenger! You are a disgrace to your species! Yes, you!” Even when she’s innocently lounging in the sunshine, I can be acidly sarcastic: “You really need some rest, puss cat—you’ve been pushing yourself too hard.” It’s all uncannily similar to my dad’s faux-scornful feline obloquies.

Meaningful influence

Okay, so cat-bashing behavior may follow the father’s example—big deal. Is there meaningful behavior passed from a father to his offspring? One very important example comes immediately to mind: television policy. Growing up, my three brothers and I were forbidden to watch TV. We did own one: a big black-and-white Panasonic with a blown-out speaker. My brothers and I tried to watch it on the sly, but were sloppy and got always got caught. To prevent recidivism, my dad hid the cord. We hunted around until we found something compatible, which was the cord to his slide projector, and when he caught us again he angrily cut it into pieces, not realizing what it was.

Determined not to be foiled again, he then removed all the knobs from the TV. After that, we took turns being the one who had to endure powerful electric shocks from reaching into the box with needle-nose pliers to work the controls. Through this experience we learned a) resourcefulness, and b) ultimately how worthless TV is. (When my mom bought a nice Sony color TV during the ‘80s, my dad gave up, and we rotted our brains out for years before realizing our dad had been right all along.)

If my dad hadn’t made the TV officially off limits—if, in fact, my family all sat around watching TV together—perhaps it wouldn’t have occurred to me to forbid my kids to watch it. But, seeing my dad’s point, I can take advantage of the evolution of TV by going one better and making it impossible for my kids to watch: we don’t have cable. In fact, with much delight I had the opportunity to explain to them, a year or two ago, the concept of a broadcast. They’ve only ever had VHS/DVD videos and were unaware that there are boxes in people’s homes that you just turn on and then sit back and have your brain extracted automatically. They haven’t thought to question whether or not “vidiot” is a real word. And like all kids deprived in this way, they drum up their own amusements.

Obviously most families don’t have such a prohibition of TV, but that’s just on example. There are countless others; consider Jerry Seinfeld’s comments on his dad’s thermostat proscription: “I didn’t go near a thermostat until I was 28 years old. I was in a hotel room somewhere when I finally got up the guts to move it a little bit. The whole night I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid my father was going to burst in the door, ‘Who touched the thermostat in here? You know I set it there for a reason.’”

Lectures

As a parent, I cannot resist lecturing my kids, as they are such capacious vessels for knowledge, and are (so far) a willing audience. I do strive to accurately discern whether or not my kids are following me, and will abandon a topic (e.g., the day’s Tour de Suisse stage) if I sense I’m losing their attention. I’ll ask straight out if they’re interested, and sometimes they say no.

Still, I really don’t expect—perhaps I don’t dare expect—that my kids actually listen and absorb what I’m saying, and I’m tickled when I discover that they sometimes actually do. For example, I was reading to Lindsay recently and paused to test her comprehension: “Should Clarice tell Betty about the movie tickets?” Lindsay answered, “No, because Betty is moving away and wouldn’t be able to go.” I said, “Right. We know Betty is moving away, but Clarice doesn’t. What is that an example of?” Without missing a beat, Lindsay replied, “Dramatic irony.” That’s my girl!

An easy job

Frankly, it seems almost too good to be true that a day is set aside to celebrate fathers, because between you and me, it’s pretty easy gig. Sure, the modern dad is on the hook for changing diapers and a lot of the housework (which my dad’s generation mostly weaseled out of), but many of us still get the plum assignments. For example, when I cook a meal, I don’t have to worry about it being particularly nutritious, because I’m not the main cook of the household anyway—whatever I serve can be classified as “treat” and is thus exempt from the family’s standards for a healthy lifestyle. Lunch today was my special Corn Goo Pasta, a starch-bomb if there ever was one. (Recipe is here.) I remember my cousins talking about how much they loved their dad’s macaroni and cheese; when I asked how he made it, they conceded that it really only had two ingredients: macaroni and, well, cheese. It was the fact of his making it that somehow made it special.

Meanwhile, there’s still an inequality in the running of a household that generally favors the male. I’m talking about that game of chicken couples play: who can withstand squalor for longer? I certainly pull my weight where dishes are concerned (possibly in part due to my special relationship to our dishwashing machine) but in several household realms I can turn a blind eye for much longer than my wife. Where mopping in particular is concerned, I can always outlast Erin, having learned, in my college days, the golden rule of kitchen floors: Don’t Look Down.

This household chore inequality frees me up for interesting “special projects,” such as cleaning my bike, in which I can enlist the support of my kids. Teaching them bike stuff—traditionally the realm of the male—is especially rewarding because I get societal credit for transcending outdated gender roles even as I exploit them.

Conclusion

All this merriment aside, I must confess that it’s possible to take Father’s Day too far. A couple years ago, I spontaneously decided to join a friend for the annual Nevada City Criterium that is held on Father’s Day. The timing, in my case, was terrible—the following day my family and I were leaving for a two-week vacation and hadn’t yet packed. I played the Father’s Day card and my wife let me go, but the aftermath was not pretty.

This weekend, I thought of weaseling out of some window washing and hedge trimming, based on the Father’s Day loophole, but I knew that would mean doing these chores during the week, after a workday. That would be pretty harsh. So, I finished these tasks today, so tomorrow I can be lazy and useless. I almost wish I had a hammock to lie in, or knew how to fish.

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