Fatherhood

It may sound amazing (or not), but I've been writing this blog since 2009, and I haven't written much about being a father. 

 

This is interesting because Father's Day comes around once a year, and you would think I could come up with some Dad jokes.

 

(This would be an excellent time to remind you that I wrote the forward to Greg Marshall's book Attack Of The Killer Dad Jokes. I probably should win some sort of award for it. You should buy the book and tell people you know who wrote the forward.)

I'm in the time of my life where I am watching my son be a dad to his son, Rowan. Rowan is fortunate because my son is a ten times better Dad than me. Most of it was because my son didn't sleep at all for the first year of his life.

 

My son was born in 1991 and that year is a blur to me. There was something called "The Gulf War".  1992 is a blur to me, too. 

 

I woke up in 1993 to somebody from Arkansas running the country and something called "Garth Brooks" on the radio. My advice for all would-be dads is to get as much sleep as you possibly can before the baby is born. 

 

Being a father is one of the most rewarding things you can do. It is also the most frustrating because, let's face it, most of us have no clue how to be a father and have to rely on how our fathers raised us, which can be tricky.

 

Some of our fathers were Ward Cleaver, but some of my friends' fathers were just a mess. Some drank too much, cheated on their wives, or were just plain mean.

But they didn't have classes to teach them how to be fathers, so they had to rely on how their fathers raised them. This is probably the reason they drank too much.

 

When I was growing up, Dads wanted to be something other than your best friend. They wanted to be the King Of The Castle, where every word was treated like some kind of Holy Writ.

They didn't particularly care if you had an opinion. They didn't care if they called your opinion stupid (which it probably was) and it hurt your pumpkin little feelings.  Deal with it. The Germans didn't care about his feelings when they were shooting at him at Guadalcanal.

 

Maybe they were not the most emphatic, but most dads taught you by example. Some of them were bad, but still it was an example nonetheless.

Before the pandemic, a group of our friends from the church we grew up in, had a little reunion. All, except for one, were married to the same person. 

 

 It wasn't that we were holier or better than other people. It was just that we saw our parents, and our parents stuck together. Buying a ticket to Splitsville wasn't in our emotional DNA when things got rough.

All our fathers did one thing: they got up in the morning and went to work.  They made a living to support their families. They didn't gamble their money away and didn't chase skirts. 

When my son came along, our church had something called "The RA Racers." It was a pine box derby race in which the kids "made" their cars and would race them to see who won. 

Another bit of  advice for any dad is to avoid living in an area that has a pine box derby and a large aerospace manufacturer that employs a boat load of engineers.

I have never been handy, crafty, or particularly smart, so my son was at a complete disadvantage when it came to his RA Racer car.

I was hands-off of the RA Racer car, but one year, his car came in second place for "design."  He was really proud of his second place. That's as close as he got to winning anything in the five years we did the RA Racers.

But he learned that he wouldn't win an award every time he showed up somewhere and would have to figure out how to make a fast race car.

Long story short,  he didn't grow up and work for General Motors.

But he did grow up and marry a girl. They saved their money and bought a house.  They had a baby.  

That's what he learned from me.
 

I did teach him how to tell a joke. Greg Marshall had a little to do with that, too.