Balancing Fatherhood

This will be my first father’s day without my dad and it’s made me realize how fortunate I am to have had a father for all of my childhood and well into my adult life. It’s also made me stop and think how different a father my husband is than my dad was.

My dad was a typical dad of the 60s and 70s who was the primary breadwinner while my mom took care of the kids and the house. But that’s not to say that my dad wasn’t involved in our lives. He was at every school function, vacations were spent with the kids, and he was home for dinner every night. I adored my dad and I know that he truly wanted what was best for me.

However, in retrospect, I’m able to realize that despite my dad’s pride in my talents and grades, he was still enough of a chauvinist to think that women shouldn’t compete with men for jobs. I remember talking to my dad about a woman applying to be a director at a company I was working for and he promptly lectured me about why women shouldn’t apply for those jobs because if she got it, she’d be taking it away from a man with a family to support. I couldn’t believe that in the 1980’s, my dad still held such old fashioned beliefs. Even though I was in my late 20s at the time, it was still a bitter pill to swallow to realize that the dad I idolized wasn’t perfect.

The funny thing about my dad is that his ideals about women taking a backseat to men never seemed to apply to me and he was always proud of my successes. Even when he was in his last few months of life in a hospital in Iowa, he was bragging to his nurses about his little girl’s career successes. I’ve long since forgiven my father for that comment as I realize he was a product of a generation where men were breadwinners and women were homemakers.

I’m truly fortunate that I married a modern man who takes great pride in taking care of our kids. When our kids were young, he was the one that stayed home with them and changed all their diapers and made sure they had their bottles. Twenty years ago he was an oddity and it was made even worse by the fact that we spent the first three years of our son’s life living on an Air Force base on Okinawa, where as a stay at home dad he was a social outcast. He valiantly took our son to play groups even when he was left sitting on a bench alone while the women gossiped about what kind of man would let his wife be the breadwinner.

That hurt my husband tremendously, but he loved our son enough to keep going to those playgroups so our son would get to play with other kids. He also loved me enough to support my career because he knew it made me happy. That’s not to say that life was perfect and that we never argued, but he always put our kids’ well being above his own needs.

Unfortunately for my husband, he married a stubborn and sometimes selfish woman who never realized until much later the sacrifices and hardships he endured for the sake of our family and how much he sacrificed so that I could live my dream of living in Japan. Until I did a stint at home with the kids when they were in grade school, I never realized how hard it was to juggle kiddie obligations and your own sanity and I had help as we lived by grandma. I honestly don’t know how he managed to do it stuck on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific with a wife who traveled every month.

So in honor of my husband, my dad, and fathers everywhere, I’d like to say thanks for the time you spend with your kids and the sacrifice you make.