Father’s Day
Yesterday was my very first Father’s Day as a dad. I spent the day trying to focus on all the stuff that I didn’t do before I was a dad: changing diapers, feeding the baby, working on my car… Just kidding. I don’t know the first thing about cars.
But it got me thinking how different our generation is from the previous one. My dad never changed a diaper in his life and that was probably common of the fathers in his generation. (Or maybe not, he was really fastidious, so that might have just been him.) Heck, my brother made his kids baby food from scratch. On the one hand, it might seem like our dads had it easier back then. But I think that we just have more options as dads now. We have the opportunity to take part in things that just weren’t a part of a man’s world before.
In a strange way, though, owe a lot of that to my dad. I mean, he wasn’t exactly breaking gender role expectations, but he was always encouraging me to explore new territory and do things differently. If he were alive today, I’d like to think that he’d look at all the things I do with my own son and smile and say, “Good, good.”
