It Takes Two
Kids need both a mom and a dad. The parents don’t necessarily have to get along, or even occupy the same living space. But they both have to play a role in a child’s life, and have their son or daughter’s best interest in mind. This, however, can mean two different things depending on which parent you are.
The mother’s duty is fairly obvious and quite natural, especially early on. Having just spent nine months lugging this thing around in her tummy, it makes sense for a mother to care for a baby like they’ve never cared for anything in their life. Suddenly life has meaning. Rather than waking up every morning and listening to Cindy Lauper’s Girl’s Just Want To Have Fun – and thinking about what career they’d like to pursue, what bar they’d like to try this weekend, what trip they’d like to take with their friends, or what NFL player they’d like to seduce – new mothers embark on an exciting adventure that will last the rest of their lives.
Naturally, the first few months of this adventure are pretty boring. Infant care consists primarily of ensuring safety and survival, providing food and nurishment, showing love and affection, and, for some reason, talking in a voice that comes from the back of the throat rather than the middle of the belly.
Contrast this with the mother/offspring relationship of most animals in the early stages of their development. Mother polar bears have to teach their cubs to swim. Cheetahs have to teach their young to hunt, which means they also have to learn to kill. And deer have to teach their young to run. A deer fawn that is just 5 days old can usually run faster than most men, and the mother has to be able to communicate, “Hey, see those wolves running toward us? They are not our friends. Follow me. Quickly!”
But human babies are totally useless for months, so there’s nothing to do but feed them, ensure they have a quiet and safe place to sleep, and try to teach them a few words. (Unless of course they’re Chinese, in which case they would know what 9×12 is before the polar bear cubs are even in the water). All that’s left for young mothers to do is change the theme of their Instagram – by taking lots of baby photos and removing all the bikini pics – to get attention from friends and relatives rather than thirsty guys.
Dads, on the other hand, experience something completely different after the baby is born. And although many fathers have the same immediate attachment to the newborn baby as the mother, I’ve had plenty of friends who, on the day they became fathers, confessed that they felt almost nothing – and it stayed that way for the first few months.
Whereas mothers have a clear and distinct role to play from day one, the father’s duty tends to be a little more fuzzy. Yes, on paper, this kid is going to go to university in less than twenty years, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to work a little more and try to earn a decent living. But for the time being, as long as a man has a job, he can probably afford to buy some baby food, a few diapers, and a teddy bear, so he doesn’t experience the 180 degree change that the mother does. He just goes to work and makes money. Only now when he comes home, he gets handed to him this thing that can eat, sleep and poop, but can’t walk, talk, or swim. There’s nothing to do with it. Yet.
Dad’s role unveils itself over time
The dad can’t do the mom’s job. Only the mother can do the mother’s job, and she can’t try to delegate the task to someone else. (She can try, but it usually doesn’t go so well). A mother leopard can’t hire a babysitter (or an early childcare assistant), because the babysitter isn’t going to fight off a hungry male lion to defend the cubs. It’s just going to say, “Fuck this! I didn’t sign up for this shit. Enjoy your meal, lion.” I think this is approximately what happens when young, working mothers decide to entrust their baby with a non-relative babysitter, especially one who isn’t paid well.
If mom’s job is to ensure safety, nourishment, and survival, what on earth does dad do?
Dad’s job is to be there to mitigate some of mom’s innate overprotectiveness. But this doesn’t mean that the two parents have to be at each other’s throats about how to raise the kids for the next eighteen years. It’s quite the oppostie, and opportunites for dad to play his role manifest themselves in a variety of ways, especially when mom isn’t around.
If dad takes his three-year old son to a friend’s swimming pool, he might not be totally against the idea of his kid trying to swim for the first time. It might be with water wings on, it might not. It might just be in the shallow end, but it might not be. And if the kid’s older brother happens to push him into the deep end of the pool, ‘to check if the deep end is safe,’ dad might not be in such a hurry to tell mom about it.
Mom finds out about this much later, when for some reason, her son just instinctively ‘knows’ that he can jump into the deep end of a pool, despite the fact that he’s ‘never swam before.’
My dad also let me have a taste of his beer at the age of four. This was a great idea. He was barbequing in the backyard, and I asked him if I could have a little sip of his beer. A Coors Light isn’t nearly as appealing to the taste buds of a four-year old as an ice cream cone is, and before the booze even touched my tongue, it smelled like I was sticking my head into a toilet I’d just peed into. I never touched another can of beer until I was twenty years old.
When a kid is four, and his dad and older brother go for a bike ride, he can’t tag along unless he can ride a bike. And those training wheels aren’t making the thing go any faster. Is a four-year old kid old enough to ride a bike? Of course. He can already swim. Dad just needs to be there to show him how. In fact, he doesn’t even have to do that. He just needs to let him know it’s okay to fall, and scraping an elbow or a knee isn’t going to be the end of the world.
The next year, when a kid starts to play competitive team sports, dad is always there to watch.
I remember when I first started playing T-ball, at the age of six, and if my dad showed up to the game a little late, I’d tell him that I’d hit six home runs before he got there. I think I knew that my dad knew I hadn’t hit six homers (it was a five inning game and you only got to bat once per inning), but we both got to pretend that I had.
Then one day, after a game in which he was really late to the ballpark, we were driving to my grandma’s house and I said, “Dad. Guess what? I hit a home run today!” (Just one?). He knew that meant that I really had hit a home run, and after that, it was almost impossible for my brother or me to play a game without my dad being there to watch.
My brother’s lacrosse tournaments regularly included visits to the hospital (and sometimes even the police station) at the end of games, but my dad was always there to be a part of it. He witnessed hundreds of goals, touchdowns and three-pointers, and if it weren’t for him, I don’t think we would have been able to play some of the sports we did. I doubt very much my brother and I would have been allowed to play football had my dad not played himself, and I think my mom would rather watch me try to jump across the Grand Canyon on a dirtbike than endure the brutality of some of those lacrosse games.
I even had a basketball game (an exhibition game) – against another team that we would normally beat with our eyes closed – where my coach had to call a timeout because we weren’t playing very hard, and said, “What’s up with you guys today? You’re not getting back on defence! You aren’t hustling for loose balls! And we just let that kid walk in and score on us three times in a row! I don’t remember telling you guys this game isn’t important just because it’s not a regular season game.”
You could hear a pin drop, but not just because we didn’t know what to say. Also because there wasn’t a single person in the bleachers watching the game. Then all of a sudden one of my teammates said, “Well it can’t be that important if Nick’s dad’s not even here.” I think a few of us thought our coach was going to explode, but when he looked up at the stands, all he could do was smile, and our whole team started to laugh.
None of my friends ever actually said it, but when they made fun of the fact that my dad was always at every game, I got the sense that they wished their dads were there, too.
Dad gets concussed
Then there was skiing. This one turned out not to be such a great idea, but not because it was too dangerous for us. My brother and I both picked it up right away and became good skiers. But my dad knocked himself out!
This picture is even funnier in really life, until your dad can’t remember where he is, how he got there, or what your name is.
Luckily, a couple hours in a hospital and a few stitches later, things turned out to be alright. (I think).
And lastly, there’s the golf course. There are probably thousands of people who have had their dad on hand to witness them jarring a hole in one. But how many kids can claim to have seen him make one? I can.
But what about actually ‘being a man?’
Have you ever driven a snowmobile? I assume that every snowmobile nowadays starts with the turn of a key, a push button, or even a remote control. But an old one from the 70s or 80s used to have a pull-cord, just like a lawnmower, and it felt like you had to be the world’s strongest man to pull the cord hard enough to get it to start. Technically, though, if you were big enough and strong enough to start it, you were probably old enough to ride it, and it was one of the best things about growing up as a Canadian kid in the winter.
The thought of us smashing into a tree, getting stuck in a ditch, or running out of gas probably had a mother worried sick when she pictured a 12-year old kid on a snowmobile. (Especially back then, when there was no such thing as a cell phone). But that’s what dads are for. Dads were doing that 25 years earlier, on an even less reliable machine. Worst case, you get stranded somewhere you’d never been, and had to go for a long walk in the snow. You know which way north is, don’t you? You won’t forget after today, and you won’t need your phone to tell you, either.
Oh, and speaking of lawnmowers, when is a kid old enough to drive a tractor, or start cutting the grass? Apparently the answer to this question is seven, although I’m sure some dads would argue that it’s even younger than that. And what about changing the oil on the tractor (or car), or changing the blades on the mover, or changing one of the tires? How on earth are you going to do any of those things without a dad? You aren’t.
Sometimes I wonder what single moms do to supplement the masculine component of their kid’s upbringing that is missing from their life. Do they even do anything? Or do they think youtube can just replace dad?
Sure, you can learn how to bait a fishing hook, sand a floor, or drive a standard automobile just by googling it, but if you just had a dad (a good one), you’d already know.
Dad’s job is to be there, to show you how to do everything he can do, and maybe a few things more. It’s to encourage you through all your inevitable failures, tell you to get up when you fall down, and congratulate you when you succeed. It’s to be proud of all the parts of you that are similar to him, and accept all the things that are different.
If he can do all of that (and that’s a big ‘if’), then he can also tell you when he thinks you’ve fucked up, because now he knows you can still respect both him and his opinion, whether you agree with him of not.
Have I really been talking about the influence of a good father, or have I just been bragging about my own dad? Both. They are one and the same.