Last week on Facebook I kept seeing daily updates from an expecting first-time mom who mentioned how excited she was to finally meet her son.
It took me back to a year ago here on The Dadabase (I’ve been daddy blogging since April 2010, six months before he was born) when I was the one anxiously wondering what my son would end up looking like and acting like.
Like popping a quarter into the machine of Made in China toys and waiting for a fun surprise, so I waited for who I thought would be a little dark complected boy.
Now here I am a year later, with a blonde son who is experimenting with the idea of standing and walking on his own, literally applauding himself every time he makes it a few steps.
We live in a world where surprises are often hard to come by. If I want to know the population of Chandler, Arizona, it takes less than 7 seconds to find out on Wikipedia. No anticipation. Instead, instant gratification.
But having a kid is an exception to that rule. Parenting is a moving target and kids are constantly growing up and changing. Therefore, my son is a daily surprise to me. I never know what new thing he may do to catch me off guard- and I mean that mainly in good ways.
Will he finally begin walking today?
Will he discover a new body part today? (Yes, that is how I mean it.)
Will he fight back the boy who hit him by elbowing him nice and hard? (He did last week. I’m so proud of my boy for sticking up for himself.)
How will he make me laugh today? What random household item will become his newest toy?
I’ve been a lot of things since my son arrived, but one thing I’ve yet to be is bored.
There’s no doubt that the gender roles of parents today have become less specific as compared to the way it worked back when The Dick Van Dyke Show was a model for the American household; back in the days when men simply brought home the bacon, women were “homemakers,” and it was that simple. No Mr. Mom’s or Mom CEO’s.
In my version of reality as a dad, I have done many things that a dad from the 1960′s would not have been expected to do, like preparing the baby’s bottles and getting involved in the process of rocking him to sleep. Meanwhile, my wife makes more money at her job than I do at mine, which also probably wouldn’t have been the case 50 years ago.
So in a world where I have had to become more feminized in order to be a modern (actively supportive and involved) husband and father, I jump at the chance to do masculine things; to remind me that I was designed and built for specific manly purposes.
This past weekend, my brother-in-law and I loaded the moving truck, then I drove it three hours to Nashville. (Due to the recent water damages, we still haven’t moved back into our townhouse, but went ahead and moved our belongings into the unaffected rooms.)
I thought to myself:
They shouldn’t trust me with this moving truck. I’ve never driven anything this big before. With all that’s gone wrong here lately, I’ll end up running over a street sign or flipping this thing over.
But I reminded myself that there was only one way to learn this kind of stuff- by simply just doing it. It turns out, thank God, not only did I make the three hour trek safely and without traffic violations, but not one item of cargo was damaged or destroyed.
I did a manly thing. I drove a “big” truck without any problems. And if I can brag on myself for something so minor, I’m actually good at driving a moving truck.
So what have we learned about me today? Sometimes I feel like the process of helping raise an infant has taken away much of my sense of manliness. Maybe that’s why over the past two months I made an effort to watch all four Die Hard movies for the first time in my life. Granted, I had to split them up into 45 minute increments to find the time to watch them, but I got it done.
The older my son gets, the more manly and relevant I will feel. I will transition from “biological babysitter” to a mentoring, adventurous dad.
As for now, driving a Budget truck across the state line to move my family back into our townhouse is the manliest thing I can do right now. As for the upcoming years of Star Wars marathons and exploring the woods with my son, I’ll just have to wait it out, cleaning out bottles while wearing my extremely manly Smurfs t-shirt and flannel pajama pants.
Do you think it may be perceived as pretentious that you are interviewing yourself, since you yourself are the creator and author of The Dadabase?
“I do, actually. But I also believe that every time I publish a new Dadabase post, I am essentially interviewing myself; only in a different kind of format. See, I’m planning on starting a new blog series here where I interview non-famous people; since I don’t know any famous people who are willing to let me question them for free. To get in some good practice, I just figured interviewing myself is the best place to start.”
What has been your biggest challenge so far as a dad?
“My son Jack can get pretty clingy with my wife, so trying to distract him with something else can sometimes take a lot of energy and creativity. Leaving the room with him often is the best remedy. But part of the challenge for me is psychologically accepting the double standard of how he treats us both, regarding his clingyness. I can pick him up; he cries. She picks him up; he’s happy. That’s annoying.”
What is the weirdest thing about your parenting style?
“Man, I feel everything I do as a dad is weird. I get it that ‘there is no normal’ when it comes to figuring this thing out. But if anything, maybe the weirdest thing about my parenting style is that I am so normal as a dad. Being a parent is the most normal thing about me!
The paradox is that you end up having to do strange stuff when you become a dad- like make up off-the-wall songs on the spot to pacify your infant’s attention and speak to them in strange Muppet voices. That’s not normal- but in parenting, it is. For once, in this one huge aspect of my life, I’m normal; and that’s pretty weird.”
What is your favorite quirk about your child’s personality so far?
“I just think that in general, he’s a cool baby. It’s not that he wants to be cool or tries to be cool- he just simply is. Like right now, he does this thing where he sticks his fist up in the air when he sees me. So I am trying to teach him to do the “exploding fist bump.” His attempt at making the explosion sound is hilarious! Instead of ‘pa-khooch-shh!’ like I do it, he does ‘rhhrr-ugghh-ahh.’
“The fact that it’s important to him to learn to do the exploding fist pump is just adorably awesome. I really like that kid. I really do.”
I can think of three universally recognizable examples of unconditional love: God and man, parent and child, and dog and owner. But what about whom you marry? Is that unconditional love?
Isn’t that sort of the whole concept of marrying someone? To choose to unconditionally love a person you wouldn’t otherwise love to the point of “no matter what?” To me, that’s the most romantic thing a person can do. Even stripped of emotion and sentimentality, marriage is/should be mutual unconditional love at its finest.
And maybe that’s one of the reasons that marriage isn’t as easy as a lot of people may assume going into it. Instead, marriage is an ongoing process of mutual maturity. Marriage causes people to see how hard it can be to live with even themselves, from the perspective of someone who happens to love them unconditionally.
To love someone unconditionally means there is nothing that that person can do to cause them to fall out of ultimate favor with you. Sure, some days it’s easier than others, but that falls under the whole “for better or for worse” part of the wedding vows.
Actually, for a human being (outside of the parent/child relationship) to love another unconditionally is one of the biggest paradoxes I can think of. But it helps to put things in perspective by turning the tables: I, myself, want to be unconditionally loved.
I want to know there is a person who doesn’t judge me when I’m not in the room, but at the same time is brave enough to tell me directly and privately how I can improve as a person, in both big and small ways. I want to know there is a person who understands me, or at least puts up with me, when I’m being weird or simply not myself.
So maybe choosing to love another person is challenging, but for me, the bigger challenge was finding someone who would love me unconditionally. Thank God, that’s exactly who I found.
Exactly five years ago this very moment, on October 5th, 2006, I met my wife. And that’s exactly what I intended to write about today. I was going to explore how differently our lives would be today if that fateful night at a taping of a CMT show never brought us together and ultimately, how Jack would not be here today as the star of The Dadabase.
But instead, I’m psychologically processing the fact that this is a picture of our recently water damaged living room in our townhouse which we are supposed to be moving back into this weekend. God bless this mess:
And this is actually one of the tamest pictures. The rest are saved on a friend’s digital camera to send to our insurance company, State Farm. But I don’t have the right cord to upload them to my laptop tonight.
Truly, I am the kind of person who avoids drama at all costs. Some people are wired for it, like the people on Facebook who seem to constantly attract romantic partners who are destined to cheat on them. But not me. I duck out every chance I get when it comes to the mindset “why does it always rain on me?”.
Is it “the blogger’s curse” that I am experiencing?
In a cosmic effort to make sure I always have something interesting and relevant to say, must I feel compelled to move back to my hometown in Alabama only to move back so that I can learn to manage my finances better, then literally on the move back to Nashville have one of our cars break down so that we have to buy a new car, only to find that a few days after our renters moved out of our townhouse, that there was a loose washer on the upstairs toilet, causing my thousands of dollars worth of water damage?
Thank God our insurance policy was written up right before this happened and that our deductible is only $500. That goes well with the unexpected $250 I had to pay for two new tires on my car last week because I evidently ran over two nails in the road and the day of work missed last week when my wife was sick.
I get it that that trying times like these only mold us into more mature versions of ourselves. And I totally I am obsessed now with budgeting and saving as much money as I possibly can in every way. So really, I’m over this whole “life lessons” thing for a while. I would love a mental break.
We (jokingly?) said to each other if only pot were legal, tonight would be the night to try it. But then again, we’ve said that inside joke to each other more times than we can remember, throughout all the other challenges we have faced during these past few months.
In this moment, I am not seeking life lessons of self improvement and maturity. I’ll settle for mediocre and immature. Maybe I should start watching reruns of Two and a Half Men.
We are strong and we will soldier on. We may be lost and holding hands, but we’ll find out way out of this mess. It helps that Tom Petty’s song “I Won’t Back Down” has been playing on repeat in my head all day. (“You can stand me up at the gates of Hell but I won’t back down.”) My wife is taking this so much better than she should and I think she’s dealing with it slightly better than me. I am so blessed to have her and our son.
Our house will be repaired with enough (insurance) money; hopefully. But my wife and son are beyond priceless. Thank God for them.
*Editor’s note: I am letting my wife sleep instead of making her correct today’s Dadabase post; considering the circumstances. So do me a favor, leave me a comment for any typos or punctuation errors that you find and I’ll take care of them. Thanks!
Last week on Facebook I kept seeing daily updates from an expecting first-time mom who mentioned how excited she was to finally meet her son.
Will he finally begin walking today?
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