And they are many. Every year, whether they are dads who are working at home in order to care for their children or dads who are working away from home to keep a shelter over their children's heads, more and more fathers become increasingly involved in the emotional and day-to-day lives of their children and reap the amazing benefits while shouldering the bewildering responsibilities that all parents must face. Yay, Dads. Happy Father's Day, Dads. God love you.
And I do mean, that, truly...but it is very hard for me to accentuate the positive on this one. Until my career change of this summer, I spent every summer of the last almost-dozen years compiling a behemoth of an annual report on the activities of my little delinquency prevention agency - pages and pages of statistics about the children we worked with and the results we achieved. The children we helped back on to the track of safety and citizenship were a varied bunch...from the drugged out kids of the wealthy and well-known elite to the poorest of youth without food or clothing. A host of different things brought them through our doors and it took a host of different services and supports to help them, but one thing was very constant in most of their lives - absent fathers, if they were lucky and ones that beat the shit out of them if they weren't. It rather ticked me off. The mothers were rarely absent. Nine out of ten times, the mothers were there, showing up, being condescended to by courts and schools, being judged and found wanting, tsked at about their poor choices, bad parenting, how it was all their fault...but they were there. And they took it. They kept trying, even when their kind of trying never seemed to pass muster for anyone. Not the dads, though. It was always a weird surprise when a dad came to a case management appointment; mostly they just didn't. Usually, the ones who did show were hiding something and trying to keep us off track. Not always, of course. There were some great fathers we worked with over the years, ones who went through hell and back to redeem their troubled babies...but not many. Not too many at all.
I see little evidence that a critical mass of fathers are approaching proportional representation on the less troubled shores of parenting, either. There are plenty of 'Room Mothers" in our schools who are holding down outside jobs in addition to all of their parental involvement, but I have only met one "Room Dad" (and he moved to Austin - hey, Doug! Happy Father's Day! You rock!). My mama-friends still make jokes about their husbands not knowing their kids' teachers' names or their pediatricians' names...but they are the kind of jokes you make when you are really pissed off...and how come it's just the mamas who are around enough to make friends? My own husband has crept gradually into equal-parenting status over the last two years (our oldest is almost 11) and most people behave as if his level of involvement merits rewards and parades. Really. I think the Girl Scouts may be erecting a statue in his honor soon, but I still had to post on the refrigerator a list of things he needed to make sure to do with the girls every day while he is home with them this summer (he is having the most trouble with feeding them 3 meals a day and sees absolutely no reason why they ever need to brush their hair). So...it is hard, just hard, not to feel in many ways that dads need to get their acts together already - big time. I try not to be that way, but all this life experience keeps getting in the way.
My frustrations aside, though, I know that most dads are working on it. My husband was always one of those "involved dads" that the moms go gaga over but the change from playing-with-kid involvement to reliably-caring-for-kids involvement that has happened in the last two years has astounded me. More and more dads, even if I have only ever met one in my whole life other than summer-teacher ones like my husband now is, are staying home with their kids and even more wish that they could. When they are involved, dads bring a richness to their children's lives that is precious and priceless - a security and confidence and sense of worth that the poorly fathered rarely attain. My perennial, statistical report-driven anger over bad fathering aside, there are lots of great fathers out there and I appreciate them and all that they do for their families. Happy Father's Day to them...may their numbers keep growing until all these other children have good fathers by their sides as well. Please.
Good fathering sites:
Dads And Daughters
Rebel Dad
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