This week’s Friday Focus prompt is all about dear old Dad.
Society (that is, the media) portrays a wide range of images
of fatherhood. I promised myself, though, that I wouldn’t go on a rant. I’ll
just say that I suspect most of you have experiences with fathers that don’t
match the television portrayal of Ozzie Nelson, Cliff Huxtable, Al Bundy, or
Raymond Barone.
Whether you are a dad or know a dad, what does the term
“fatherhood” mean to you? Did you grow up with a stand-offish, reserved Father
or a playful, involved Dad? What did you call your male parent—Dad, Daddy,
Father, Pop—and how does that name reflect your feelings toward him?
Aside from your biological father, did you have other older
men that you considered father figures in your life? Why?
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| Chopp'n Wood With Dad by Clearly Ambiguous CC BY 2.0 |
If you have children, how has your father’s parenting style
influenced your own? As I get older, I see more and more of my own dad in
myself and in how I treat my kids. At the same time, I can understand my dad
better and can find specific ways to consciously diverge from the way I was
raised.
Take a few moments and jot down memories of fatherhood from
your own life. Some typically father-ish things to think about are:
- Camping
- Sports, whether playing or attending games
- Fishing
- Fixing cars or other household repairs
- Visiting Dad’s workplace
- Yard work (mowing, raking leaves, trimming
trees)
- Cooking, especially outdoors (anyone get their
dad a King of the Grill apron?)
- Keeping secrets from Mom, usually of potentially
dangerous activities
- One-on-one outings
- Learning to drive
- Having your first beer
I grew up with a stay-at-home dad in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. Mom had the better paying job (by far), and so Dad raised me and
my sister until she started first grade. I don’t have many specific memories
from my first half-decade of life, but I know that Dad used to help out in our
kindergarten classroom and volunteer around the school. One time, for some
reason we were talking about buttermilk in kindergarten class, and my teacher
asked how many of my fellow five-year-olds had ever had buttermilk (keep in mind this was a suburban school in
the Mid-Atlantic; there’s probably still not much buttermilk consumption there
today three decades later). Nearly every hand shot up. My skeptical father,
in a proto-dad-joke moment, stepped in and asked how many of the kids had ever
had bubonic plague—same response.
A dozen years later, my dad and I formed another strong
memory during a late summer trip. I was in the midst of my college search and
we decided to take a road trip through North Carolina to check out three
schools. Dad rented a Sebring convertible and the two of us headed out,
cruising down the Skyline Drive and stopping in to visit his mom in East
Tennessee. We even took Grandmother for a drive with the top down – an
eighty-something woman with a bandanna in her hair rolling through the back
roads and mountain passes of the Smokies. I don’t remember much about any of
the colleges (I ended up choosing my hometown University of Delaware –
literally across the street from my house), but I do remember that convertible!
