Modern Dads

We watch them and are amazed. They are like the Internet and Velcro and DVD players and cell phones, everyday staples that weren't even imagined when we were young. My husband and I gawk. "Unbelievable," he says. "Fascinating," I add. Different, we say, and agree that this time different is, indeed, better. 

We are watching our sons-in-law father. We are watching them make lunch, change diapers, read stories, give baths, sing lullabies, tuck their children into bed, clean up, load the dishwasher, and unload the dryer.

We have been watching them, one for four years, the other for three, do things that our fathers never did: Comfort their children in the middle of the night, take them to doctors’ appointments and for walks, to the post office, the bank, the grocery store. We have been watching them play dolls and trains, blocks and peek-a-boo, read to them, sing to them, even play dress up!

"You never did these things," I say to my husband. And he shakes his head and says, "I know.” 

His father never did them, either. No father we knew did. My husband's father was British-born and strict. He kept a thin, cane stick, part of a Kewpie doll carnival toy, at the kitchen table next to him. And when little elbows weren't where they were supposed to be, or little arms reached across the table in lieu of, "Would you pass the butter, please," the stick was used. Just a tap on the hand, but so out of step with today.

He had a band when he was young and continued to sing his entire life, in the church choir, with the Barbershoppers, at parties and on trips he organized. He sang whenever he had a chance.

But he never sang to his children. Fathers didn't sing lullabies back then.

"When I was a little kid, a father was like the light in the refrigerator. Every house had one, but no one really knew what either of them did once the door was shut," columnist Erma Bombeck wrote many years ago about fathers of this generation.

These fathers were breadwinners, disciplinarians, and kings of their castles. They went to work, came home, ate dinner, asked about school, said "Help your mother with the dishes," then disappeared again, to wash the car, to cut the grass, to fix, to build, their attention and energy given to doing, not to just being with their children.

They didn't know the names of their children's teachers. They didn't help with homework. They didn't take time off in the middle of a workday to go to their child's school for a concert or a field day or to eat chicken kabobs in the school cafeteria. And they certainly didn't cart their babies everywhere in Baby Bjorns or get up in the middle of the night to feed a baby or stay home and play with their kids while their wives went out with friends for dinner.

My father was different, more modern, more hands on. He cooked my dinners on the nights my mother worked and he ironed my school uniform and played games with me: War and Cribbage and Monopoly.

But he didn't do all the things my mother did.

He taught me to ride a bike, but it was my mother who bandaged my knee when I fell off. He took me to horror movies, but it was my mother I cried for when I couldn't sleep because of them. He rescued me so many times, "Dad, can you? Will you?" And he always did. But it was always my mother I ran to when I got home. 

My grandchildren run to their mothers AND their fathers. They cry for both. They say, sometimes, when I am watching them, “I want my Daddy!”

"It's amazing,” my husband and I agree. He is feeding a bottle to Charlotte, who is six months old. He never fed his own children. He said he didn’t know how.

But he’s learned some things from watching our sons-in-law. They didn’t know how, either. Babies and bottles and burping and changing diapers and swaddling and shhh-shhh-shushing were all new to them, too. And they do these thing now. And they do them well.

My husband burps Charlotte. Then he plays peek-a-boo. And then, when she starts to fuss, he holds her close and he sings to her.

“You’re learning,” I tell him. And he looks around at a playroom full of toys, then down at Charlotte, who is falling asleep in his arms. And he smiles and says, “ I know.”