On Father's Day

This weekend represents the first time I have been a father on Father's Day. Last year at this time, the Wife was showing, so I will admit that I pressed the definition of technical fatherhood with a local restaurant's "Dad's Eat Free" Promotion. I think I heard the waiter cursing lawyers under his breath the whole time, but I got my free hot wings. This year is a little different, what with the baby being on the outside and all. I may or may not take advantage of the free wings again.

Fatherhood has been a frequent subject, directly and indirectly, of the posts in this blog. It is not the whole of what a man is when he has a child or children, but it certainly does its share to define him as a person. Fatherhood changes you. Hopefully, if you are a father, you have experienced love before - love for your parents and family, and ideally love for the woman you share a child with. But the love of a father for his child is completely different from these other loves. Not to say greater, but different. Unlike a parent or a spouse, a child is a child -  completely helpless and dependent on you for survival, knowledge, skills, affection, everything. A father's love for his child is as deep and resounding as it is because it resonates with hopes and dreams you have for that child's future, with our responsibilities, with the joy of watching that child grow day-by-day, and the delight of seeing them develop into the person they will become. These are all things that, by and large, are not all that similar to our love for our parents and spouses. Adult parents and spouses don't need our help to survive, they have their own hopes and dreams, and, by the time we meet them, they are generally far along the path of character development. But a father has great power in shaping a child, morally, ethically, spiritually, physically (although this latter aspect is mostly genetic). As Stan Lee is credited with saying, with great power comes great responsibility.

Fatherhood gives you new perspective. In an ideal world, it gives you added patience. At a minimum, it frequently exercises the patience you already had. Children need all the time. They are the definition of consumers. They consume time, energy, resources, and until they reach a certain age they are unable to communicate what it is that they need to consume. Hence the patience thing. Objectively, they give you nothing in return. Subjectively, nothing they could ask of you is too much for the joy they bring.

I cannot fully describe what it is like to be a Dad. Even if I could it would mean nothing, because despite shared experiences most fathers would have, every experience of Fatherhood is unique. To anyone who hasn't yet experienced fatherhood, my descriptions would be inadequate in any event. All I can say is that there is nothing like it in the world. Olivia's laughter brings me more delight than the view from the heights of a  mountain, her smile is more beautiful than a sunset, and the simplest demonstrations of her ever-expanding set of skills - gripping a spoon, standing, throwing toys on the floor - are more awe-inspiring than the greatest feats of man's ingenuity. Watching every single "first" as she experiences it is priceless. I love this child more than words can say, and she has me utterly and completely at her mercy. Thankfully, she is still too young to fully understand that.

It is humbling to think that there are people who loved me this way as well. Intellectually we all know, unless we are from a rough background, that our parents love us. We see demonstrations of it all our lives. You never doubt your parents' love for you, but you do not fully appreciate it either. It is something else entirely to go from conceiving of a parent's love for us in the abstract, to experiencing it, and realizing that your own father and mother experienced that for you - had those hopes and dreams for you, felt the same pressures and fears, delighted in you the same way you do in your own child.

So this is my twist ending - this post is only ostensibly about my own experience as a father. As yet, I am too inexperienced with the concept to have anything more to say than rambling sentiments on the subject. But what my experience has taught me is, I think, a better and deeper understanding of my own dad. Somehow, socks and ties seem an insufficient gift this year, and in any case, the Wife does all the gift buying anymore because she's better at it than I am. The only gift I could come up that seemed appropriate for my old man this year was the public embarrassment of a blog post sappier than any Hallmark Card I could ever hope to buy. Happy Father's Day Dad. I love you too.