Recently my wife went out of town for a week on business leaving yours truly and my two sons, ages 3 and 1, at home. While at a church service someone approached me and made the interesting yet innocent comment, “so you’ll be babysitting your sons this week!” I was irritated by the comment but I chose to keep my true feelings to myself because I knew what the individual meant by the comment. To the statement, I responded “it will be just Daddy and the boys for a week.” For a while now, I have been perplexed with the notion that a child’s father can be a “babysitter.” The very definition of the word babysit is to take charge of a child while the parents are temporarily away. Am I not the parent of my sons? Have I not been taking care of my children since they were born? When I bathe them at night, does that count towards being a parent? Did I not attend every ultrasound and almost every doctor’s visit with my wife leading up to delivery? All of these questions and more come to my mind when this comment is made but I never stopped to wonder why the comment would need to be made in the first place.
Society has changed so much in the last 30-40 years, my lifetime, although the argument could be made that it was changing well before then. For the most part the days are gone when, within a married couple, the husband went off to work and the wife stayed home and tended to the house and the children. The family dynamics have changed with the increase in men in the penitentiary, the increase in the gay population, men that just want to “hit it and quit it” and don’t have any feelings of responsibility to the children that they helped to create, etc. It’s a numbers game and there aren’t enough available men for the number of available women. This has caused women to lower their standards to “get a man.” The problem with this is that the men have clued into the fact that women have lowered their standards and have taken advantage of the situation because they will not be penalized for not being monogamous. Waiting for sex until marriage is no longer the standard and we have had an enormous increase in unwed pregnancies. It is to the point now that being a teenage parent is seen as a badge of honor and greatly celebrated. The Maury Povich Show has no shortage of “Are you My Baby’s Daddy” shows.
I was born in 1979, the oldest of 3 children. Growing up I had a lot of friends whose fathers were involved in their lives but about half weren’t. At some point during my lifetime, my father became my hero simply because he was there. Most of my friends didn’t have the “complete” family unit and I was so proud that I did. My father is and was a man of very few words but he was supportive of all of my endeavors and I saw him every single day. My father worked hard and almost never took a sick day. He was an auto mechanic and he would go to his regular job and then come home and work in the backyard, sometimes until late in the evening. When he would come in the house, he was usually pretty tired and would fall asleep as soon as he sat still for more than 30 seconds. When my mom would go out of town we would have the most fun with him because he wouldn’t work in the backyard. We would do fun things and just hang out. I remember him saying to me on occasion that there would be times when he would get up and didn’t feel like going to work but he would look in our room while we were still sleeping and that was all the motivation that he needed. There are just a few tangible things that I remember my father teaching me; how to drive a car, play basketball and play the saxophone. Every other tangible thing was taught by my mother but growing up my father’s greatest achievement was that he was there.
I realize that the criteria for my father being my hero was lower than it should have been and shouldn’t have been dependent on a comparison of other people’s lives. Unconsciously, I thought so little of the state of fatherhood that simply doing what he was supposed to do qualified him for hero status. This feeling of mine came during the mid 80’s and in the 90’s. Now, we have lowered our standards so much that we have just basically accepted our current societal situation to be the norm. I still consider my father to be my hero, but for much different reasons now than I did growing up. My goal was to improve upon what my father did for us growing up. I try not to be so busy that I don’t get to have time for dinner with my boys, giving them a bath, teaching them things and playing with them. When people see me, I want to change the way they see men in general. I want them to see me as a hero and not a babysitter.
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!