[Note: I wrote this on Father’s Day last year but never had time to post it. I probably won’t have time to post anything else today so… :-) —fl]
Today is father’s day. I’m a father. My partner is a mother. We have two wonderful children.
Despite conventional imagery Father’s Day and Mother’s Day are society’s gigantic admission that normal human beings actually have sex. You’d never know it based on the conventional imagery of
...poolside relaxation (for fathers) or
...flowers (for mothers.)
Yes, there are ways to get around the sex part these days, thanks to needles, petri dishes, and turkey basters, but the point remains generally overlooked. Here’s why I don’t mind.
Being a father is surprisingly easy. Way easier than I imagined. Sure, there are hard parts but none any harder than many other college courses or professional jobs I’ve had with their all-nighters, their sometimes tedious days, their repetitive tasks, their anxieties or stresses, their petty bickerings, their mid-day office parties, their… everything. But… but… I dunno, maybe like owning your own business or something you don’t mind when it means something to you! A bad day being a father is still better than a good day at work.
Take today for instance. I got to sleep in a little this morning, but as soon as we’d placed our order at the special little local cafe we sometimes go to my daughter, who’d been complaining that her stomach hurt, said she wanted to go home… because she thought she might need to throw up! After a bit of “are you sure” type negotiations I left my partner and our son with instructions to bring home my order to go I scooped up Her Majesty and whisked her home. She never did throw up but we spent the next hour just lying together on the couch because she really did feel awful. She’s been running a fever since and she’s pretty under the weather but… we’ve had a lot of time to talk and just be together. It’s not how we planned to spend Father’s Day but it was actually a pretty great way to go.
I also spent a bunch of the afternoon with my 4th-grade son today, helping him pull together material for his end-of-year presentation on global warming. Yeah, since I sort of live online and I seem to be a natural writer I could have done the whole thing myself in, oh, five minutes but… it was very, very cool hanging out with him while he tried to master Google with a purpose instead of for random entertainment, helped him pick categories, helped him find diagrams and then draw them out his way, helping him say things in his own words, and helping him write down his sources.
In biological terms my partner and I didn’t just find them in the cabbage patch…
...but (sorry “why buy the cow” traditionalists, and shared-genes-calculating sociobiologists) it wouldn’t matter if we had.
Submitted by 1440 (not verified) on Tue, 2008-06-17 10:03.
Hope you had a great Father's Day, fl, even though "Her Majesty" was a bit under the weather. I think your children are very fortunate to have parents who do not respond to a child's stomachache as a terrible inconvenience. I don't think any number of computer games or sparkly toys can make up for the wretched feeling that being sick will really piss off your mom or dad. Because that sets up the premise that the only feelings that matter are those of the people in power.
[Thanks, Kochanie. I admit I get fussy about some perogatives :-) but sick isn't one of them. --fl]