Time Machine Series:

Exploring Past, Present, and Future

PAST

Whether bringing me to school, picking me up from the babysitter, or taking my sisters and cousins and me on hikes, my dad was an active parent. He’d take us to the pool in the summer, show us indoor games to play on snowed-in winter days, and tell us stories on road trips. As I grew up, however, I learned that my mom and dad had a dysfunctional marriage that was only hanging on because of us, their children. By the time is went to high school, my dad had drifted. Though very much still a member of our family and household, he lived his own life, one that didn’t involve my mother at all, and not so much us, his kids. It was as though he had done his part when we were younger, and had moved on, becoming more of a housemate than a parent and husband. I can’t say that he was a deadbeat, but there was certainly something missing. He stopped giving it his all.

PRESENT

The other day, we had an electrician do some work at our house, and he saw me pick up my two-year-old to change his diaper. “Wow,” the electrician said. “I think I changed only 10 diapers when my kids were little.” The electrician, a man of my father’s generation, sounded rather proud of this. It reminded me of how my dad used to call tending to our needs “catering” to us. Baby Boomers, unfortunately, defined fatherhood as a job, aligning it to that era’s view of men in the fixed gender role of sole earner, i.e. the outside-of-the-home worker. But fatherhood today has changed for the better. We don’t clock in or out. Most of us are all in, all the time. We cook, clean, change diapers, take the night shift with newborns, and lots of us stay home while mommy goes to work. I see this as a healthy rebalancing of roles within the family unit. It’s an opportunity for home life to evolve in an egalitarian way, something that is long overdue.

FUTURE

Way back, we used to use “hashtags” to sort out the various parts of our lives. All it was was the pound symbol next to a word, used as a miniature flag, if you will. I remember using #dadlife a lot to show how busy and involved I was with my kids. What’s so amazing about today, and I see it with my own sons, and how they father their own children—my beautiful grandchildren—is they don’t put themselves in silos anymore. Life is work, work is life, family is life, life is art, art is food, and so on. They move effortlessly from one part of their lives to the next, with their children involved right along with them. I know this is how it’s been since people started having children, but something seems so much more intuitive now, much more relaxed. It seems as though this is how it should have been all along.

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Photo by Filios Sazeides on Unsplash