Father's Day Thoughts

The material, mundane component of my present to Dad will have to wait for while before it arrives and it deposited in Dad's hands. (Is he 'grandad' now? Do we all just have to shift up by one generation?) But I wanted to take a moment to muse upon the aspects of fatherhood which are the most important but, for some reason, the least often discussed.
Being a parent is not a responsibility, it is the responsibility. It's the thing that everyone points to when you talk about being a grown-up. Are you ready to be in charge of another human being that can't feed, dress, change, or even fall asleep on it's own? All the time? Well then you're responsible now. High fives all around.

And as a task it's really hard to quantify. Being a dad is easy in the same way that knitting is easy. There's really only a few maneuvers you have to know. Few key differences, though, obviously. Primarily, it's okay if you're not very good at knitting. No one wants to be a bad father. Everyone wants to be great at it, it's demanded of us by these little bundles of needs and crying we are presented with every moment of the day. But you can't be great, because you're being measured against your own dad. And he was a full fledged dad. You're just you. For every new generation the task is impossible.

The only secret, as it turns out, is that you fake it. You go with your gut or book-learning, or try to adapt some half-remembered scrap from your own childhood. If you can keep up the facade up long enough, eventually they move out of the house, none the wiser that you never really had any idea what you were doing. Until, of course they have kids of their own, at which point it's too late to go back.

And the sacrifices. Let me tell you, it seems endless. Even just standing on the tip of the iceberg I have to eventually melt, I get a size of the vastness and weight of the things I won't be doing now that I'm a dad. Endless sleepings-in and fast cars sacrificed just so that someone else can have food and diapers so that they will grow past a point of their life that they won't even remember in a few years. And they'll never appreciate everything Dad could be doing with his time and money instead because hey, I didn't. Dad's are expected to toss those things away stoically and without second thoughts because after all, your dad did. Didn't he?

Oh.

So thanks for everything, dad. The more I understand about what you've already given me, the more glad I am to have had it so well.

-N