When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be A Cool Dad
I aspire to wear a baby sling around a music festival and get praise heaped on me for how progressive I am. I wanna take paternity leave but still sleep through the night while my spouse gets up with the newborn and then go back to work and joke about how “women are so amazing I could never do that” with my cool job work buddies. I want to take my kids out for ice cream on a Saturday night to “give mom a break” and have the waitress think I’m dad of the year.
I want to wear flannel and listen to Ryan Adams and be a shitty parent basically.
I want to have the confidence to be a completely inept parent who is totally okay LOL-ing publicly about it. I want to assume all the boring details of my daily life are handled by my partner, who also brings income into the household budget (because, yay, money). I’ll let him do most of the parenting work because he’s probably better at it and I’ll just mess it up if I try.
I’m all about low key treating my partner like an indentured servant. But in a chill way that’s approved of by my peers.
Every woman wonders if she can ‘have it all’, but cool dads have already proved that you can — as long as you’re okay with being aggressively mediocre at most of it. They have the career, the marriage and the adoring family, but without all the pesky upkeep. Cool dads are the American dream and I want in.
I understand that a ton of moms on Facebook post jokes or memes comparing the hard parenting work they do with the barely competent work of their male spouses, about how those men get praise for the most minimal of effort. The posts always generate a lot of “Tell me about it!” comments from their friends.
Oh, now that’s comedy, right? Wrong. It’s an unfair stereotype based on that person’s own narrow experience with what is clearly a drop-dead shitty partner.
Let me tell you about what a father is really like:
I get my boys up and dressed every day.I make them breakfast every day.
While they’re eating breakfast, I make their lunches every day.
I make their dinner every day.
I take them to school, to practice, to activities.
I rush home from work to pick them up from school.
I clean their cuts when the fall.
I help them with their homework.
I make sure their library book is in their backpack the day they’re due.
I take them to the doctor when they’re sick.
I read to them every night.
I console them when they have nightmares.
I cry when they feel pain.
I laugh when they make a joke, even if it’s not really funny.
I live my life to make their lives the best they can be.
Basically, I parent.
I don’t win parental victories every day. But, I try. No one has ever called me “dad of the year” for doing any of it. If they did, I’d say, “No, I’m not. I’m just a dad,” because I’m not doing it for praise. And I don’t treat my wife like an indentured servant because I can’t do all of this without her strength and partnership.
That guy who wrote the article that drew your ire, he’s not representative of the whole. He’s a goddamn idiot who was playing into the same stereotype as the moms I mentioned above. It’s cliché, it’s stupid, and it’s an easy joke that has no substance.
And I’ve never worn a baby in a sling at a music festival. I don’t have time for music festivals because I’m a fucking father.
Plus, Ryan Adams sucks.
