A Fathering Attribute I’d Like to Have

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A Fathering Attribute I’d Like to Have

Before I had kids, back when I still knew everything about parenting, I read an article that cautioned mothers to just let fathers be. Basically, it said, there is a separate but important set of skills taught by dads through the type of roughhousing, kidding, and what some might call Benign Neglect (others might even call it Actual Neglect) that characterize many interactions between dads and kids. It made sense to me—I know there are things I learned from my father that were vital, just very different from what I learned from my mom. A good parenting team is one that fits like puzzle pieces, each partner contributing something important to the whole.

With Father’s Day around the corner I was thinking about the one puzzle piece attribute of my husband’s that I would appropriate if I could, and it’s this: the ability to maintain a sense of humor. Ironic coming from someone who describes herself as a humor writer, I know. I think it’s just proof that I married up in the humor pool.

Many are the times that some new parenting challenge would have best been met by an objective response of “Wow, that is hilarious.” You know, if you could just take three big steps back and imagine the conflict played out on a big movie screen in a PG rated family comedy. Like when a child laments the tiny discomforts of her life as she sits in a warm, dry house in nice clothes with a full belly and decent Wifi. Or when three requests in a row to pick up shoes from the front hall are met, finally, with the question: “What did you ask me to do?” Or when a toddler screams “I hate da twees!” and refuses to step one foot further into a redwood forest to which we’d driven expressly for the nature hike.

And yet the three aforementioned examples are ones that I have taken seriously. Seriously as in grinding my teeth, throwing death stares, hissing nasty responses that sparked mild discontent into the fiery flames of open family warfare.

I know it’s my job to be the grown up and to pick my battles, that laughing at a preposterous moment is a time-honored moment of deflating tension. I’m just not as good at it as my husband is.

Truly, I marvel. We’ll have a child stomping around the kitchen, about to boil over into mad about something, and instead of launching a lecture about being oversensitive or being grateful or being less persnickety overall, which are my go-to strategies, my husband takes a different tack. He’ll intentionally misunderstand something to comic effect, or tell a weird and unrelated story, and pretty soon the daughter in question is smiling, pitching in, brightened up. The storm has passed without even breaking a leaf off a branch.

I should have expected that this would be a parenting strength for him. He has long used jokesterism as a means to jolly me out of my own bad moods, and most of the time it works.

The other day was a long, bad one and I was at the end of my rope at the foot of my bed, crying and feeling sorry for myself, and my husband said, “Would it cheer you up to know that I almost got punched on the airplane today?” By the time I’d heard the bizarre story – he accidentally hit someone with his briefcase while walking to his seat on the plane, and the guy tried to sock him – I was taken out of my self-pity long enough to get my head on straight again. Sometimes you don’t need to describe the problem. You just need to stop staring at it so hard.

So on this Father’s Day, here’s to the Dads who remind us there is always another way. Even if it puzzles us moms.

What’s the fathering attribute of your partner or your own dad that you most wish you possessed?

While you ponder, here’s something else that made me laugh – a new (NSFW) video from Lonely Island. Just promise me that if you watch it, you’ll watch the entire thing. Promise me. Otherwise rampant semicolon misuse could spread even further.