Meet the modern dad: A guy who really knows his kids

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

She never laid out a suit for him. He didn't wear suits. He wore a navy blue police uniform - wool pants, wool jacket, long sleeves even in the summer. And my father pressed his uniform himself.

He ironed in the dining room, probably because we hardly ever used that room. I would sit on a chair, my back to the window, and watch as he placed a wet handkerchief up and down each pant leg and meticulously steamed in a crease.

``You don't ever put an iron directly on wool or you'll end up with shiny pants,'' he told me.

My father ironed his police shirts, too, creasing the sleeve with care. And he cooked dinner on Friday nights - fish cakes and beans - and he cooked at Christmas and Easter, too. When my mother worked late on Thursday nights he'd make fried bologna sometimes, or his specialty - a western omelette with extra cheese.

But that was it for his feminine side. Every other thing he did was all male. He cut the grass, trimmed the hedges, took out the trash, washed the car, shoveled snow, painted the house. He did the outside work; my mother took care of the inside.

It was the same in every house in the neighborhood.

And children, back then, were part of the inside job.

Children were a mother's main responsibility. Mothers washed their clothes, combed their hair, made sure their books were covered and their lunches made, took care of them when they were sick, held them when they cried, taught manners, checked homework and dealt with all teachers and every crisis.

That's the way it was. Infants and babies? A father would pat them on the head and bounce them on his knee. But feed them? Or change them? Or get up in the middle of the night with them?

Some father, somewhere must have done this, but not any father I knew.

My youngest daughter, now 27, was in fifth grade when I first realized that times were changing. At the big, chicken kebab bring-a-parent-to-school-lunch-day, there were fathers sitting at their children's sides. Not many, but some. All the years before, there had been only mothers in the cafeteria.

These days fathers are everywhere. They're part of the pregnancy. They're involved in the delivery or the adoption. They wheel their infants up and down the streets. They carry them in Baby Bjorn's. They feed them, change them, get up with them in the middle of the night. They read to them, sing to them, play with them. They hear the differences in their cries.

They know them.

A friend's 3-year-old granddaughter cries for her father when she's hurt or sad or tired.

``I want Daddy,'' she says. Not ``I want Mommy.''

Imagine that.

I watch my sons-in-law with their babies and I am struck by how much all the older fathers missed. My father didn't even know I was born until after he came home from work.

``Your grandmother fed me dinner. Then she told me.''

Then he rushed to the hospital. Then visiting hours were over and he had to leave.

My father taught me to ride a bike and to drive a car. He took me to movies and to Paragon Park. He was nice to my friends. And he always, always listened to me.

He looks at young fathers today and he doesn't say, ``You'd never catch me wheeling a baby carriage or going to a school lunch or making an appointment with a teacher.'' He looks at them wistfully.

He plays with his great-granddaughter. They draw. They make things. They watch movies and TV. She's 9 now, but he's been doing this since she was born.

People talk with regret about how times have changed. People talk about all the things we've lost. But we've gained some things, too. And one of them is that Father's Day isn't a poor relative to Mother's Day anymore. It isn't just tit for tat. Fathers today are allowed to father the way mothers have always mothered, right from the beginning.