CELEBRATING TODAY'S DO-IT-ALL DAD

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

We watch them and are amazed. They are like the Internet and Velcro and DVD players and cellphones, 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. It's a few days before Father's Day, and 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 three years, the other for two, do things that our fathers never did: Comfort their children in the middle of the night, take them to doctor's appointments and for walks; take them to the post office, the bank, the grocery store. Play with them: dolls and trains, blocks and peek-a-boo, and even dress up. Read to them. And sing to them.

"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 them.

My husband's father was British born and strict. He kept a 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 synch with today.

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

But he never sang a lullaby to his children. Fathers didn't used to sing lullabies.

"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 about fathers of that generation. They had specific roles. They 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, to do their attention and energy given to doing, not to just being with 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 or stay home and play with them while their wives went out with friends for an evening.

My father was a bit of an anomaly. 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 knees 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 grandbabies run to their mothers AND their fathers.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" I say to my husband, a man who has never changed a diaper in his life.

Amazing and different and great. Sensor lights, caller ID, TiVo, and today's fathers.

We wonder how we lived without them. And we're grateful that we don't have to anymore.