You know that no one likes to be made obsolete. Every day you hear someone mention some job that has been taken over by a robot or some other form of automated process. We want everything faster, cheaper, and if possible – controlled by an app on our Smartphone’s. There is a price for getting what we want, and it means that some people will get left behind, if they cannot be educated to perform a new function.
None of this comes as a surprise to anyone, but people losing their jobs to robots, which will eventually take over the world and enslave us all; forcing us to fight in some form of post-apocalyptic games is not what I am here to talk about. I am talking about the kind of job that we knowing and willingly make ourselves no longer necessary for – Fatherhood.
For Father’s Day, I thought I would reflect for a moment about what is a serious logical conundrum. On one hand we are suppose to prepare our children to be fully functional living human beings, perfectly capable of existing without us, but on the other hand we want to protect them from everything from germy looking microbes to zombie attacks. Before my daughter was even born I set out on a mission. That mission had multiple parts; with the first part being that I needed to insure that my daughter popped out so freaking healthy that she would be able to deliver herself.
As in any good mission, preparation is everything. One thing that you may not know about me is that I have been known to make a list or two in my time. I read every “What to Expect when you are expecting” type of book in print at the time. I believe by the time I finished my research I had achieved the equivalent of a neonatal child development postgraduate degree. Since I was apparently not going to be able to bear this child completely on my own, I was forced to make my wife’s existence during pregnancy a living hell – no caffeine, no white sugar, no late night book reading – sleep! I installed a water purification system and every day before she left for work, I filled up a large water cask for her to take with her. I was shoving vegetables and lean chicken down her, no fried foods, and as little processed food as I could get her to gag down. We changed gynecologists because the guy she was going to was not good enough. I went on interviews of new doctors until I found a neonatal specialist who had enough certifications to wipe out a small forest printing them all. I made up and distributed a survey to all the hospitals in OKC, to insure finding the absolute best. I also researched and interviewed pediatricians around the city, which I assure you; they did not really fully appreciate some of my questions.
I installed an alarm system in the house, because no way was some mutant going to break into my baby’s room. The nursery had to be made ready, so we shopped for just the right furniture. I found a crib which had been rated to withstand an F5 tornado. I also found the absolute best car seat. It met all the standards of ejection seats designed by NASA for the space program. If you have ever been in my daughter’s old bedroom (and you better have been a girl!) then you may have noticed a small painting that I painted for her on one wall. It was nothing really. It only took me two and a half months to complete.
So eventually she was born – now the real work began.
I had to find just the right name for her too. That was much more important than you think. My name – Jim – is so boring. My daughter had to have a really cool name. Something reflective of someone able to kick ass and take names later. I also did not want her to have a name that other people could screw with. What I mean is that with Jim, you get Jimbo, Jimmy, Jim Jim-a-nee, crap like that. So I settled on Dallas, which means wise. I knew she was going to be smart – how could she not be with me as her dad. Now I knew the kids at school would ping her about the Dallas Cowboys and junk like that, but that was so lame that I was not worried about it. However you can never discount the imagination and creativity of those little bastards. One day she came home from school and was a little upset over some kid making fun of her name. The little snot nose whelp had bested me. He thought of something I had not – the reverse of her name – Salad (Sallad – kid got an F in spelling). Damn him. To this day, his whereabouts are still unknown.
I remember the day that I actually became a dad. It was not the day of her birth. No that was nothing – I just had to get her mom to the hospital before the blizzard hit. No kidding! The newspaper headline on the day of my daughter’s birth – “Worse Blizzard in 50 Years”. No, the day I really knew I was a dad was the first time I left the house with her – ALL BY MYSELF! Anyone remember Taco Tico? I stopped in there for lunch, carrying her in this Kevlar/titanium reinforced baby carrier/rocker, with a diaper bag on the other arm which was the size and weight of one of those mini fridges that people keep in their offices. Now picture me carrying all that and a tray of food and a big gulp size soft drink. Why not put her and the fridge size diaper bag down you ask? Are you nuts? Someone could get her or breathe on her or look at her or smile at her. What if they looked over at the diaper bag, coughed some tuberculosis cough towards it, and some mutant germ land on a baby bottle that I had previously sterilized, not once but twice, in the laboratory grade sterilizer I had purchased?
Thank God, my parents were retired by the time my daughter was old enough to go to daycare. I did take her to daycare one day – for 1 day! I had found what according to everyone I could tackle and drill with questions, was the best one in the city. When I dropped her off, she sat in this big circle window, and starred at me. I was ready to quit my job, keep her home, raise sheep for their wool, and milk goats. As I said, thankfully my parents took her and they spoiled her beyond belief. I, of course, still ran full background checks on both of them and had my parents drug tested. It seemed like a reasonable precaution, because how well can you really know another person?
One day when my daughter was sick I took her all the way across town to the pediatrician. This was absolutely one of the worse experiences in my life. It was not that my daughter had some major illness. It was actually just a minor cold, but we dragged her in there for examination if she ever showed any sign of anything. Since the Lord God had not seen fit to install a diagnostic port into children, I required a second opinion from an actual doctor since I had already whipped out the huge Book of Symptoms and had eliminated Whooping Cough and Bubonic Plague. Anyway the doc examined her and said it was nothing, but then she said my daughter was old enough now that it was time that she did an “EXAMINATION”. I had no idea what she was talking about until she asked if I wanted to step outside or just look away. Obviously, I am not leaving my daughter with ANYONE, so I examined the minute cellular structure of the corner of the room. Once the doctor was done with the exam, she began explaining to me in pain staking detail exactly what to be expecting as my sweet little baby girl began to come into “womanhood”. I say that she began to explain, but I cannot really say for sure. Now you may not believe in such things as out of body experiences, but I can attest to the validity of them. I remember being in the room, and it seemed like I was floating on the ceiling looking down on what was going on below. I could see me standing there, nodding understandingly to the doctor. I could see the doctor explaining things, but her words were as if in some unknown language. All I could think of at the time was that she was a sick bitch! This was my little baby girl that this pervert was talking about. I got home and explained what had happened to my wife, and told her that she would need to call the doctor because I have no idea what was being said in that room, and instead of comforting me in my time of need as any loving wife should do, she simply laughed at my pain!
Now I won’t bore you (nor further alienate my daughter) by revealing other aspects of her young life, but suffice it to say that I might have been what some might call a tad bit engaged in every aspect of her life. Hey, what can I say, I wanted it to be perfect and for her to have the perfect life. That’s what dads do right?
Back before my dad passed away, when I was younger, I made the mistake on a couple of instances of telling my dad my plans to do this or that type of manual labor around my house. I say that I made the mistake because my dad was one of those man’s man kind of guys that always thought a real man should just do it himself, whereas I wield a mean checkbook to hire a professional who knows what the hell he is doing.
“Don’t hire someone to do that,” he would say. “We can do that and save you a lot of money.”
“I don’t have those tools, Dad.”
“Well, you need to buy them, that way you’ll have them when you ever need to do this again.”
“I don’t know how to do it, Dad”
“Well, we can figure it out. How hard can it be?”
“Dad, it is going to cost me more money than if I just hire someone to do it.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Well, by the time, I buy the tools, buy the supplies, buy more supplies to replace the ones I screwed up trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, go to the ER to get the nails/screws/drill removed from my kneecap, and then hire someone to come out and rip out what I screwed up, it would be cheaper just to hire a professional in the first place.”
Needless to say, after a few of these I would just tell him after the job was already done. He would ask me how much it cost me, and then just shake his head.
I did come to appreciate something though. Dads like to feel needed. I do not understand why women can’t understand that when they come to explain a problem that they are facing and they explain this problem to a man, that we have been genetically preprogrammed to try to fix said problem. I know women wonder why we can’t understand that they simply want to talk, and that they aren’t asking for us to fix anything or even to offer advice. Evidently they have not been watching any of the National Geographic channel where they explain the Hunter/Gatherer concept. It is exceptionally difficult for me, since being a computer programmer by trade, the core of my job centers around figuring out how to fix problems for people. So when my wife and especially my daughter came to me with a problem, I always immediately began analyzing how the problem could be most effectively resolved and sat out to develop a plan of action, which all too often or not seemed to irritate the very people that I was trying to assist. Later I could see them in the other room, talking in hushed voices, over issues that they were facing, making sure that I was out of earshot, lest I try to be, God forbid, “helpful”.
As my Dad got older, I came to appreciate that he needed to feel necessary even more than he did before, because he was less physically capable of being able to offer direct assistance. So even though I knew exactly how I was going to handle things, I would often time go over and talk to him about something, just so that he could give me his opinion. He would pull some old envelope or scrap of paper out of his pocket and begin to draw out exactly what I needed to do. When I left, I like to think that it made him happy to be helpful, and then I went off and did it the way I had planned to all along.
My daughter has grown into a young adult. Seldom does she need me for anything now. She found a new apartment, without me coming over and checking out a long Dad-list of things. The other day she bought a new car, without me analyzing on the internet the various aspects of each vehicle and developing a pro-con list. On one hand as a Dad you have to be proud of the fact that you have raised them to be able to stand on their own two feet and to function autonomously, but on the other hand it blows. I am proud of my daughter, very proud in fact. There is no finer daughter on the face of the Earth, I would take a bullet for her without a moment hesitation, and I would gladly insert dozens of them, manually if need be, into anyone whoever hurts her. However she is all grown now and does not need me to stare down anyone for her. No one wants to be obsolete, especially a Dad. We want to be helpful, and to be able to make sure that our children’s lives are exceptional, but we know that they also have to be able to function without us. It is a logical conundrum. Apparently society, and more importantly the legal system, frowns on you locking them in their childhood bedroom closets where you can look after them and keep them safe.
So here is to all you poor bastards out there today on Father’s Day wearing those God awful ties and other totally impractical gifts that the women and children of our lives think we will love because they are absolutely clueless as to the fact that all we really need is to turn back time to the days when your little girl would crawl up in your lap with that damn tongue twister Dr. Seuss book that you have already read to her a million times and have her throw her soft little arms around your neck and kiss you on the check with one of those amazingly sweet kisses that could turn a two hundred pound man into jelly, and then say “I love you”.
