Liam Johnson on the “joys” of parenting, and why he hasn’t received a Father’s Day card yet.
By the time this essay posts, Father’s Day will be well past. But, for me, it will still be relevant, because if this year is true to form, you’ll be reading this about a week before my children get around to giving me a card. They’ll insist that they’ve had it since well before the day, and that they’ve just kept forgetting to send it. They won’t realize that they’ll have accidentally left the dated receipt in the envelope. In my family, Father’s Day isn’t so much a day as an afterthought.
What does fatherhood mean to me? For starters, it means a lot of diapers. A lot of diapers. No one warned me before I had children that the stress would make me incontinent. Oh, and the kids go through a lot of diapers, too.
Diapers come to us from massive diaper conglomerates—Big Poop—which have managed to subliminally train our children to eliminate waste according to the pattern and time schedule that makes for the highest usage rate. My son believes that it isn’t proper to poop in a soiled diaper, so he will come to me and say “I need a fresh diaper.” This is easily confirmed, because the one he’s wearing is hanging to his knees and has developed a color like a golden delicious apple gone squishy. I’ll ask, “Liam, do you need to poop?” and he’ll say “No, daddy,” and so I’ll change his diaper, and within minutes (sometimes as I am fastening the Velcro) he begins straining as though he’s trying to give birth to a younger sibling, and viola, Big Poop sells another unit.
Fatherhood also means a lot of yelling, and saying things like, “Because I’m the daddy, that’s why.” Each time this happens, I die a little bit inside, as I think back to when my father would say those same infuriating words, and I swore to myself that I’d never say them to my kids.
It’s not until we have children of our own that we realize that it isn’t the one reasonable question that sets daddy off, but the series of 276 that follow.
“Daddy, why does it rain?”
“Well, son, it’s because water evaporates to form clouds and when those clouds get too heavy and full of water, it falls back to Earth.”
“But why does water evaporate?”
“Well, son, because the sun heats up the water and so little bits of it end up going up into the air.”
“But why does the sun heat the water up?”
“BECAUSE I’M THE DADDY, THAT’S WHY!”
♦♦♦
Still, it’s not all yelling and fathers losing their minds. There are also moments of bliss—like the second time our child successfully urinates without a diaper (the first being the time he got us squarely in the side of the head as we, new to the changing of diapers, failed to check the pistol to make sure it wasn’t loaded). Or when (this one happened a few months back) we’re out to dinner with friends, and our son says, “that’s my daddy. I love him.” (You’d be surprised how few times you need to make him repeat that phrase at home before he’ll go and repeat it to others, verbatim.)
Then there are the joys of older children. When my 16-year-old son asks to borrow my car, I tell him to be careful, because I worry that he’ll wreck it, or hurt himself—but I’m more afraid he will turn out to be significantly more successful at picking up women than I am. I might then be forced to confront the fact that it’s not my dorky Toyota Prius, but my balding head and doughy middle aged body, that’s putting me off my game.
My teenage daughters are becoming beautiful young women—it’s wonderful, but it comes at a price. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, decided that teenage girls must behave like narcissistic crack addicts—but with more showers. As men, we will never truly understand PMS, which might be why women get so annoyed when we mention it. But as fathers of teenage girls, we know PMS in a way that makes any previous experience with it seem trivial. The truth is that PMS was named by the father of a teenage girl, and he intended it to stand for Please Make it Stop.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughters. They are good girls, all three of them, and they make me happy. They’ve also made the few remaining hairs on my head turn gray. And just in case my blood pressure wasn’t high enough, Mother Nature has also made teenage girls beautiful—so while half of me is crying out for them to leave the house for a few minutes, so I can have some peace and quiet, the other half knows the moment they do, some balding, fat, middle-aged guy will try to pick them up in a Toyota Prius.
Hello would you mind letting me know which web host you’re utilizing?
I’ve loaded your blog in 3 completely different web browsers and I must say this blog loads
a lot quicker then most. Can you suggest a good hosting provider at a fair price?
Thanks a lot, I appreciate it!