On Modern Fatherhood

I love the sense of discovery that comes when you see someone else's photos of your kids, especially from events that you did not attend. This is a rare occurrence in my world, but I recently went away for a few days and left Dave to Mr. Mom the girls; he met up with our friends April and Bryan and their daughter Sylvie, and Bryan sent these pictures along from their romp in Prospect Park. My favorite picture from that morning can actually be found here, on Sylvie's blog: Dave can be seen standing up, wearing the Ergo baby carrier loose around his waist, balancing Eleri while feeding her a bottle, while Clio runs away from him. I wonder why Bryan didn't send that one along to us?

While I was away, my mom and her sisters were marveling at modern parenthood, and how much we mothers expect of our spouses in their fathering; as my mom put it, my dad and his peers "got a pass" on quite a lot, from diapering to discipline, and she would never, ever have left us alone with him for a period of four days. Obviously lots has changed in the last three decades, and with the various waves of feminist movements have come different experiments in parental roles. I'm glad that I'm neither expected to stay home in a dress, lipstick, and heels while watching the kids, doing housework, and preparing dinner; nor to forsake my kids to be empowered by a career. I believe it's all about options- ideally each parent would have the choice to stay home and raise their brood or head off to work to support it financially, whatever works for each of the individuals and the family as a whole.

At the same time, I also do believe that we are wired differently, that we can't escape nature, and that men and women do their jobs as parents a little differently. Dave is never going to remember that it's snack day a week in advance and plan to bake, but he will certainly run to Trader Joe's the morning of and pick something up; this may be a silly example, but the point is, we may have different paths, but in the end we can both get the job done. More to the point, as a woman/nurturer/gatherer I kind of want to think about snack day, and I definitely want to bake for it; as a man/provider/hunter Dave's goal is more directly about filling the need of sustenance.

As parents I would say we have both grown a lot, and I'm thrilled to have such a hands-on guy as my baby-daddy, ready and willing to get right in there with me and figure this out. Gone are the days where he would leave the house with Clio but without a diaper bag or one single supply (he always managed, somehow); here are the days when I can get out of town and return to children who are no worse for the wear. In fact, when I returned this time, Dave had managed to wrap up Clio's potty training. I'm not exactly sure how, exactly, but I have my suspicions that she was not coddled, praised, or encouraged; rather, I would venture that he simply did not put her in diapers so that, when nature called, she had no choice but to use the potty. I have learned that sometimes things are just that simple in the world of men. God bless 'em.