Please. No more grilling accessories, neckties or sports gear.
These are our Dad’s father’s day gifts, when Dadfood meant occasional meat and fire, the tie was Pop’s power and major parenting moments usually meant sports.
Nope. Today’s ultimate dad gets a roomy diaper bag in granite canvas; Spanx for Men for when he goes back to work after months of wearing elastic-band pants on paternity leave; and the book-of-the-moment that perfectly encapsulates the joys and frustrations of parenting: “Go the [expletive] to Sleep.”
The fact that a man wrote it and that millions of men love the profane little book about getting their sweet angels to shut up and doze off every night speaks volumes about the state of American fatherhood.
In a good way.
Getting that granular about parenting means that more dads are in on the inglorious grunt work of raising children — the bathroom trips, the nightmares, the stuffed animal crises.
And it means the long, slow turning of gender stereotypes and social roles in our society is actually changing with whiplash speed, when you look at all the centuries that dads were clueless about that stuff.
Best example? Our military, actually.
For a Mother’s Day column, I set out to profile military moms who find ways to stay connected to their children while they are deployed. Their stories were interesting, poignant and inspirational.
But the other — and equally revolutionary — part of that story was the dads.
In most of the married couples I spoke with, Dad took the back seat to Mom’s military career and stayed home to take care of the kids while wifey was jumping out of helicopters in the Hindu Kush or pitching tents in the desert.
While Lt. Col. Michelle Rose was commanding the Virginia National Guard’s 529th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion in Afghanistan, her husband was home in Virginia Beach parenting their three girls. This wasn’t Mr. Mom, videos-and-pizza survival stuff. He was making decisions, going to doctor’s appointments, scheduling activities, attending meetings, co-parenting.
When she was home on leave, Rose was a bit taken aback by the huge bag her husband had begun carrying around.
“You need something to carry all their stuff in,” he snapped at her. “It’s my Man Bag.”
In other words, back off, honey: I’m in charge here.
That’s a new and potentially game-changing attitude. We’re still getting our heads around the fact that Michelle Rose can command a battalion. Meanwhile, she and her husband have already rewritten the gender-role rule book without breaking a sweat, Man Bag and all.
For the first time ever, the American workforce tipped last year to become majority female. Women are entering and graduating from college, earning advanced degrees and out-earning their husbands at record rates.
The rise of women has worried some men. There was the whole fatherhood movement in the late 1990s, which took nasty turns into anti-woman territory and involved more about legislation and child support and custody than the business of actual parenting.
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