Dads Used to Have it Easier

By Geoff Williams

Used to be all you were expected to do was provide meat or money for the family.  Hunt a 
mammoth.  Develop lung disease working in the coal mine.  Spend your days pushing paper and dreaming of the sweet relief of retirement, in only 39 years. As long as you occasionally grunted at the family, then you were a successful father.

Today, it’s different. We’ve evolved, and we’re expected to be at the baby’s birth, read to them, take them to the park, attend a PTA meeting or two, or maybe join the school board and be an all-around role model.  If you’re like me, you’re enthusiastic and excited, but you feel woefully 
unprepared.  Reading The Hardy Boys and shooting down aliens on computer games was fun, but it wasn’t much preparation for the phenomenal responsibility of helping to raise a child.  That was always the mom’s job.  We were supposed to kill bugs and work ourselves into an early grave.  But somewhere in the last few decades, that’s changed.

I have two daughters, 4 and 6, and fatherhood is as hard as you hear.  You won’t sleep much in those early years, and I expect to not sleep much in ten years when hormonal teenage boys are pursuing my girls.  At some point, I promise, you’ll be driving down I-75, begging your baby in the back to stop wailing.  You’ll stop at a rest area or gas station and offer a bottle, but that won’t work.  You’ll offer money.  That won’t work either.  There will be days when you’ll go insane, and you’ll be so tired that you’ll be pretty sure you were actually born 40 years before the date on your birth certificate.  You will think some days that maybe you erred and should have just bought a pet turtle.

But then there will be those other times, when your baby falls asleep in your arms while you’re watching TV, and you’ll realize that you want this moment to never end.  Or your two-year-old will beg you to read a book, and you’ll realize you really love reading to her.  Then a few years later, you’ll be begging your child to let you read to her.  Best of all, there will be those times your son or daughter will look up at you as if you’re the most important person in the world, and you’ll realize that at this moment, you are.  And years from now, you’ll look at your friends who 
didn’t have children, and you’ll think how organized their lives seem, how clean their house looks, and how nice it must be to go out to the movies without worrying about finding a babysitter. How calm, relaxing, uncomplicated, and Zen-like.

 I wouldn’t trade my world for theirs!