Fathers

I’m so fortunate to have five wonderful fathers in my life. I grew up watching “Father Knows Best” and thought he was the ideal dad. He was kind, understanding, and always had time for his kids. He dispensed hugs and gentle advice. Not what I got for a father. No hugs, super busy (a full-time job plus a small business operator), barked orders, manufactured chores, issued advice like a general issues orders. It wasn’t until I met my husband that I began to understand my dad. With a large family (I’m the oldest of seven), he had the responsibility to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Hence the two jobs. Hubs described Dad as having a “bull in the woods” style. It was what he knew at work and how he treated us kids. He believed in “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” He kept us busy so we wouldn’t get into trouble. He insisted I go to college, even though I had to pay my own way. He taught me to look around and see what needs to be done, rather than wait to be told. As an adult, I understood my dad better. 

My father-in-law was a gentle soul. I met him after he retired, so he always had time for us, especially his grandchildren. When we moved 500 miles away, he and Hubs’ mother visited two or three times a year. I never saw him angry—although Hubs did as a kid, especially when science experiments went wrong. He never complained about the long hours of dialysis that he endured for over ten years. Instead, he used that time to write long letters to us and poems on yellow legal pads. The subject of his poems was family—often at the expense of MIL and her sister. If anyone else read the poems, they’d call them doggerel. We call them precious.

I met my son-in-law when he was sixteen and started to hang around our house. He and our daughter went to college together, got engaged, waited until he started medical school before getting married. It was always evident that he loved our daughter. More importantly, he respected her. She supported them by teaching all through his medical school and residency. When he was hired by a hospital, he told her she didn’t need to work. It was her choice. She chose to work part-time, and he supports that plus all her volunteer work. What impresses me most is how he is with his children. Loving, caring, gentle but firm.

My son didn’t marry until he was thirty-eight. He had his first child a year later. From how he was around his niece and nephew, I had a good inkling as to how he would be as a father. In reality, he’s been over the moon with Toddler Girl. It’s like he can’t get over this precious little girl. He’s over-protective at times but so loving. Working in a restaurant means long hours and, usually, no weekends off. While daughter-in-law works, Toddler Girl is home with him on his days off. Just like a mother carts the kid around when she shops, he takes her to Home Depot and Lowe’s, as well as to the park and splash pad. How he will manage when the twins come (in November) will be interesting to watch. I’m sure it will be a challenge, but he’ll manage in the same loving, patient way.

I’m always amazed that I was lucky enough to marry a man who would turn out to be such a great father. It’s no wonder since he had a great role model. Men in my father’s and father-in-law’s generation left parenting up to the mothers. My dad would no sooner change a dirty diaper than cook a meal. Not Hubs. He did his share of diaper changing and cleaning up after a sick kid. When he realized how much of his children’s lives he was missing because of long hours at work, he changed jobs. Neither of us grew up with parents who volunteered at our schools. Yet, he was active with our son’s Boy Scout troop and mentored kids in Odyssey of the Mind. He encouraged our kids to find solutions instead of telling them what to do. He supported their choices even when he didn’t agree. Like his father, he’s always had a gentle way about him. Not one to say “I love you”, he proves it by his actions. Being a grandfather brought out so much of that love. He’s warm and caring with the grandkiddies. A natural teacher, he encourages them to try new things, showing them how to handle tools in a safe way, how to build things, and when their patience ends, his doesn’t. He was/is a wonderful father/grandfather. Loving, caring, patient.

How did I get so lucky to know/have known these great fathers? Happy Father’s Day to them and to all dads.

Father's Day

Yesterday, people in the U.S. celebrated Dads. I celebrated the day I knew my blind date was going to be my husband. We’d had two dates and were going to go on our third. I stopped at home to wish my dad a happy day, and I remember telling him how special this guy was. Turns out I was right. He is special.

On my friend Lucy Kubash’s blog last Friday, she talked about how she and her husband have stayed together for forty-four years. Almost as long as Hubs and I have been married. She says “you can’t go through 44 years without a lot of ups and downs…” Isn’t that the truth!

Living with the same person for that many years takes work. We’ve had our share of health scares, financial worries, and a myriad of nitpicky problems that at the time seemed enormous but in hindsight were mere blips on the road to happiness. I can truthfully say, the good times far outweighed the difficult ones.

They say opposites attract. And that’s true with us. He’s the engineer, the science guy, Mr. Fix-It, a DIY expert. I’m more into the arts. He’s patient and calm while I’m short-tempered and excitable. While he is quiet in large groups, he learned more about my uncles in an afternoon than I did my whole life. He’s an only child. I’m the oldest of seven. You could count on one hand his relatives. I need a calculator to count mine.

We grew up in a time when parents did little for their kids at school or with sports. Our folks went to school if there were problems. They didn’t go to our activities. We talk today about “helicopter parents.” Imagine the opposite. That was our parents. So we didn’t have anything to imitate. We became involved at school and outside activities because it seemed like the right thing to do. Foreign territory for Hubs. Not so much for me as a former teacher. But he did it in his quiet way.

One of the things that drove me crazy when our kids were young was his not telling them they couldn’t do something. Instead, he got them to lay out all the pros and cons and come to their own conclusions. A far better and more lasting lesson than just saying “no.”

The best testament to Hubs came from his daughters yesterday on Facebook. Our daughter wrote about her dad and her husband: “I'm grateful for two amazing dads who are willing to share their wisdom, their humor, their patience, and their geekiness with their kids!”

Our daughter-in-law wrote: “You raised a wonderful son and taught him how to be an awesome father and husband! It's clear he had an amazing role model!”

So here’s to my husband, my best friend, and the best father. As I write in the acknowledgements in my books: How glad I am that our friends fixed us up on that blind date!

Men are Different

Is that a "duh" statement or what? Around Mother's Day, I wrote about how women are different. I figure it's the guys' turn now. hehehe

We all know that men are bigger, stronger and can lose weight more easily than us—the last we hate them for. I suppose I'd better insert my caveat: the above and what follows are generalizations and don't apply to all men.

In this post, I'm concentrating on how they think. I mentioned before about the workshop Eileen Dreyer did for Mid-Michigan RWA's Retreat from Harsh Reality in April on how men's and women's brains are different. Since this was a retreat for writers, the purpose was so the characters in our books are more true to life and their motivations more realistic. A side benefit (which many of us talked about during meals) was she helped us understand our guys. Those of us who've lived with a man—father, brother, best friend, son, husband—already knew that men think differently. Many of us didn't know why or to what extent.

Men are wired for survival. From the beginning of time, their job was to hunt, thereby providing for the family/clan, while women protected the nest. This delineation of the sexes remained unchanged until the last century. Men are becoming (or allowing themselves to be) more nurturing. They are sharing child care with their spouses. As a mother and grandmother, I'm thrilled to see men becoming more involved with their babies. They don't hand off the baby with a stinky diaper. They read bedtime stories and, in general, share responsibilities with their wives.

Women define themselves by who they know, whereas men define themselves by what they do, which certainly explains why it's so devastating to a man when he loses his job. Or retires. He's lost his purpose. If a woman loses her job or retires, she still has her friends and family—the people with whom she has bonded. Women share their feelings with other women. Men don't. They talk about achievements and sports. "How 'bout those Lions?" Which makes when we start talking about how we feel almost painful for our guys. Sometimes, I think they'd rather have a root canal than discuss how they feel.

Men tend to be single-task oriented. Sorry, guys, but we multi-task better. Well, most of us do. I'm told I have tunnel vision when I'm into a project. Here's something I wasn't aware of: when men are in the middle of a task, they are so absorbed they don't feel pain. Whoa. We should have gotten that trait. It would've come in handy during childbirth.

Did you know that a sense of color is attached to the x chromosome? Is that why my guy can't tell the difference between beige and tan? To him, it's brown. Women have a more highly refined sense of smell, too, which probably explains why men don't smell the onions in the wastebasket.

Men are problem solvers. They want/need to fix things. Which is wonderful when the AC doesn't work in the middle of a summer heat wave or the garbage disposal doesn't work. However, don't you want them to just listen when you try to talk out a problem and not tell you how to fix it? "Now, honey, this is what you should do . . ." I have to say the guy I live with has never (not that I can remember, anyway) told me what to do—especially with my writing career. He doesn't do it with our kids, either, though there were times when they were young that I wanted him to. Instead, he patiently waits for us to work out our problems, come to our own conclusions, make our own mistakes. When asked, he offers information and, sometimes, suggestions. The best part is he doesn't say "I told you so" when our decisions don't work out.

There were many other points Eileen made during her talk, but this next one surprised me the most. To men, help means failure. If a man offers help to another man, this translates as that person doesn't think he's capable of doing the job. Consequently, men wait to be asked for help. Women see help a lot differently. We see what needs to be done and offer help instead of waiting to be asked. We often wish our guys would do the same. Really, I don't think I'm a failure if he offers to run the vacuum. Women helping each other (say, in the kitchen) is a time of bonding and sharing. One of my brothers started hanging out in the kitchen after large family gatherings because that's how he found out what was happening in the family.

Men tend to be more left brained—detail oriented, stronger in math and sciences. Women tend to be more right brained—languages, arts. Again, a generalization, but it's interesting how many female writers are married to engineers (raising my hand here). I wonder if it works the other way. Do male writers (musician, artists) marry scientists?

For all our differences, we make good teams. Rather than declaring one sex is better than the other, I think we complement each other. Together we are stronger than we are as individuals. Although we drive each other crazy at times, I wouldn't want to go through life without my guy.

If this post about the differences between the sexes helps you write better characters with more believable motivation, great. If you understand your guy(s) better, terrific. I know Eileen Dreyer's talk certainly helped me understand some behaviors. One of the really great things about the time we're living in now is that men's roles and women's roles are no longer etched in stone. Women can be "hunters" who bring home the necessities of life and men can be "nurturers". Again, complementing each other.

Although this is a day late, Happy Father's Day to all the men who are modeling to today's children what a "real" man is. To our fathers who are no longer with us, we miss you.

 Forty years ago, on Father's Day, I told my dad I'd met the man I was going to marry. We'd had two dates and I knew he was the one. Happy Father's Day, again, sweetie.