A favorite pastime of mine (besides blogging) is catching the media making fun of us bumbling fathers. If we’re not almost dropping our kids on the floor, we’re bleaching out the family’s clothes and begging for our spouses to come bail us out. Truth is, most guys I know are as equally adept at household work and parenting as their spousal counterpart is.

This weekend, MLI (my little introvert) had two birthday parties to attend. One was smack dab in the middle of a baby shower CareerMom was having for her sister, so I took MLI and MLE (my little extrovert) to the party. It was at a place called, “My Gym.” If you don’t have these, they are wonderful little indoor playgrounds, full of plastic ball pools, monkey bars and zip lines. After an hour and a half of playing here, the kids are blissfully wiped out. It’s the best venue we’ve found for a party yet, and that includes the places with the big jumpy things.

When we arrived, I had MLI offer up his birthday gift and he took off to play with his friends, while I and MLE headed off to find a seat where I could let my little one wander around under my watchful eye. The father of MLI’s best friend wandered over and we struck up a conversation. He’s in a similar situation as me. He works full time, as does his wife. His wife frequently travels, as she is somehow involved in sports broadcasting. After we had the, “You play golf? We should get together...” conversation where we are both kidding ourselves about having enough free time, we inevitably turned to a talk about our kids.

Me: “So you got moved into your new house today huh? Congrats! Ethan (MLI) is sure going to miss your son when he changes daycares.”

Him: “Oh, we’re not sure we’re gonna move him now. We’ve heard some bad things about XY Daycare.”

Me: “That’s too bad. We went there for a while too and came back. It just wasn’t right for us either.  Hey, is your wife doing the NCAA games?”

Him: “Nah, she took off for a few weeks. It’s been great because I can go into work early, work late if I need to; it’s gonna be tough when she goes back to work. Which is part of the reason we were going to change daycares, since this one is a bit far for me to drive every day. Otherwise, the only other thing I don’t like about our daycare now is the merry-go-round of workers.”

Me: “Yeah, the class our youngest is in drives me nuts. The head lady there acts like I’m a total buffoon and talks down to me like I have no clue what I’m doing. She’s pretty annoying!”

Him: (Animatedly now!) “Oh, I know. People don’t think I know how to take care of my kids, but truth is, they are better with me than they are my wife and she doesn’t believe me. But the other day we had some friends over and the kids were misbehaving and my wife was trying to get them settled down and our friends told my wife, “Oh, those kids have you snowed! When it’s just them and Joe, they are completely different.”

He just smiled that knowing fatherly smiled, and I of course, launched into my “Me too” speech.

It’s funny though, but before I had kids if you had asked me what would make me the most proud, I would probably have said, “Being a successful and respected writer.” But now, I might have to say, “Raising respectful and well-rounded children.” Oh, I still occasionally let MLE get too close to the stairs, or I let him wander into the dog room knowing full well he’s putting his hands in their water bowl and then licking his fingers, but overall, I think I’m doing pretty well.

I bet most of the dads who bother blogging about their kids are doing pretty well too. What do you think?

We just got back from vacation- a week down in Austin with my dad and step mom.  I could spend time recapping the trip, but I think that’d be boring.  I wanted to talk about father-child relationships.  I come from a “broken home”; my parents divorced when I was 8 and my dad moved to Texas when I was 12.  Over the last 20 years I’ve made 6 trips now.  Two trips came when I was 12 and 13...the third, after my dad’s heart attack when I was 24.  The fourth came a year or so later, and the last 2 have been in the past 6 months. 

My dad’s and my relationship has been rocky...though lately, better.  What changed?  Simply, Kaelyn did.  I think we both realized we could try harder, and have.  Our relationship is the strongest it’s been.

Briefly, I was a disillusioned dad...it’s hard to admit this, but I actually wanted to be a mom...sort of.  Ok… I didn’t want to BE a mom, but I wanted that easy way that moms slip into conversation about nothing - diapers, diets, sleep habits… you know.  So I tried talking to moms like that at my daughter’s swimming lessons - and it didn’t work so well for me.

I’m a teacher, so I’ve been able to go to the 3:30 swim lessons from the beginning.  Typically, I’ve been the only dad there.  When the kids turned three and we were asked to not join them in the pool, I found myself standing on an observation deck with the moms, anxiously watching our kids brave four feet of water.  Due to our shared emotional experience, I began to feel like one of the crowd.  After a couple of lessons, though, when I tried to strike up those easy conversations, my attempts were met with perfunctory responses - and deep concentration on their children’s progress.  Time after time, the conversation went something like this:

Me - “It looks like your daughter has gotten over her tears from last week...(pause, waiting for response)...that’s great, she is really taking to the pool...(pause)...We have a one year old, who isn’t nearly as interested in the water as his sister, she’s the blonde one right there...so we’ll probably have to push him a bit like you did with your daughter… it looks like it all worked out for the best in your case, though...”

The Mother - “Yeah.”

Inevitably, as the conversation died a painful death, I would drift away and a real mother would approach and suddenly the two would be talking, laughing, sharing their deepest child-rearing secrets, and generally having a great time.

After initially feeling like a freshman in high school who can’t bust into the upperclassman’s conversations, I realized that something was going on.  I asked my wife, Tonya, about it.  Her response?  “Stay at home dads have it rough - it’s always a little awkward.” I related the story to women that I work with, and every one of them said the same thing, “It’s easy to talk to other women, but I’d never do that with a man.” So what was a she-dad to do?  Not much, I realized, unless I wanted to force myself into conversations where I wasn’t wanted and seem really creepy.

For a few months, that was it.  I wasn’t pleased with my conclusion, but at least I’d figured it out.  Then, I realized there was a little more to the story; it wasn’t as neat an ending as I had assumed.

In May that year, Tonya delivered our third child early.  While five weeks premature is hardly a blip on medicine’s statistical radar screen, our little guy wasn’t happy being a statistic.  His lungs were premature, resulting in respiratory distress syndrome, and he aspirated a large amount of amniotic fluid, resulting in pneumonia.  He was taken by helicopter to Dartmouth-#########’s Newborn Intensive Care Unit, where he spent almost three weeks.

For that period of time, our lives stopped.  We froze.  We could do nothing but sit next to his bed and stare at him, tiny and naked under a warmer, and watch his numbers:  His breathing rate, his heart rate, his blood/oxygen levels, his blood pressure.  My mother came and took care of our two other children while my wife and I watched, too frightened to do anything but hope that he would be ok.  We were afraid to share our own fears because we didn’t want to scare each other.  We just watched him try to breathe as we held our breath.

Tonya’s friends swung into action.  They called her, they came and sat with her, they set up a meal chain that supplied food to our kids while we were gone.  They understood her fear and her pain and they knew what to do.  My friends, on the other hand, did nothing.  They did absolutely nothing.  No one called; no one drove to the hospital.

For that short while, I really longed for the overt emotional expression that women seemed to be so comfortable with. I remembered the swimming pool; perhaps it wasn’t that women don’t want to talk to men, maybe men are just so bad at it that most women have given up on them.

In the ensuing weeks, however, I realized that what I had mistaken for emotional reticence was actually emotional subtlety.  Slowly, things began to happen.  The receptionist at the Intensive Care Unit called me over to inform me that a friend had called.  He’d gotten my wife and I a gift certificate at a steak house near the hospital so we could go to dinner.  Then, a male student of mine secretly found a female co-worker and gave her a card to give to me.  He asked her not to tell anyone.  In the card, he cracked a couple of jokes at my expense and wished me well.  Then, about three days after we returned home, my neighbor called.  He had some trees that he’d cut down in his back yard and wondered if I’d help move them after the kids were in bed.  I went over.  We dragged the big logs around for about an hour, then he said, “I got some beers, want one?” We sat on the back steps of his garage talking about everything that had happened, swatted mosquitoes and drank beer.  It was nice.

At the end of it all, my son came home, gained weight and became a beautiful baby.  Slowly, we regained balance and normalcy returned.  I went back to work and began telling our story time and time again.

At about the 100th retelling, it hit me.  Tonya had gotten a lot of support, but she had to talk, on demand, to every visitor and every concerned phone call.  Twenty times a day, she was exploring her emotions and re-living our experience even as we were living it.  I, on the other hand, was pretty much left alone.  I was never bothered when I didn’t feel like talking.  In trade, I had no one to talk to when I needed it.

I did get some support, though.  I got made fun of, a bit of a workout, a few beers and a great steak.  I hated to admit it, but if any of my friends were having a tough time, that’s exactly what I’d recommend for them.

Maybe I had been too hard on my friends, maybe I’m not as sensitive as I thought, and maybe, just maybe, I’m just your average Dad after all.

Obey...NOW!

For some reason, I dunno, maybe it’s a guy thing, I place a high value on my kids’ obedience: their instant, joyful obedience. Okay, maybe I don’t usually get joyful, but as long as I get instant, I’m satisfied. This value has affected other aspects of my parenting. For example, I’m very anti-counting. To me, counting just lets the kid know just how much longer he can disobey.

Recently, Jane and I were talking about this. And Jane brought up a very good point: God never demands our immediate obedience. Sure, he wants our obedience. And he does punish us for disobedience. But how long does he defer punishment? How patient is he with us? To what extent does he let us work through our “issues” before we finally obey him?

A long time. Very. A lot.

I think I need to keep this in mind regarding my kids. Especially because they’re - well, kids. Obedience is good. An unconditionally loving and accepting relationship is better.

My daughters are adopted. We met both of them in China. One thing we will probably never do is meet their birthparents. I write about this today because our little one, who is only 4, asked about her birthparents.

It started out like this:

LO: Is Yogi’s birth-mom alive? (Yogi is our 15 year old dying cat)

Mama: Well considering he is over 15 years old, probably not.

LO: Oh! Will I ever meet my birth-mom?

Mama: Ah, uh, um… truthfully? Probably not! Would I like too? Yes!

LO: I would like to too!

Sometimes even 4 year olds can have a completely perfect and logical conversation and seem that they are well beyond their years.

4 year olds are not supposed to think of these things. They should be thinking about starting to read, learning their numbers, coloring pretty pictures. What I really like is that she IS thinking about things like this. It means she is a little person and learning and growing. I will say that I want her to grow up as slowly as she can. Fast enough to be normal, and smart enough to become the woman I know she will become.