Dads Trying to Get it Right

by John Ettorre

You deserve a break, gentle reader.

So this month, I’ve decided not to burden you with another impossibly engaging yarn about my own kids or about their warm, wonderful parents. Nor will I venture into the kinds of controversial subjects—partisan politics, for instance—that have more recently been grist for my mill. Instead, this month I bring you a trio of smaller stories about parenting that have in some way touched my heart, largely because they involve dads whom I know and admire.

One of these stories arose some months ago over breakfast with a friend and client named Ralph, who prompted a small aha! moment. We were talking about children and philosophies of parenting when he observed that American dads tend not to share much about their working lives with their children. Given that, is it any surprise that the average kid knows so little about what the old man does for a living? “I tell my kids all about my day at the dinner table. And not just the good things. I tell them about the difficulties and challenges, too.” That way, he explained, they would grow up with a realistic sense of the world of work awaiting them. This wasn’t one of those stunning pieces of grand wisdom that bowls you over. Rather, it’s the kind of small insight that seems so obvious when you hear it that it leaves you wondering why you never thought about it in quite that way before.

My pal Chris, meanwhile, tugged at my heart a bit when he told me the story about his son and the necktie.

Chris is a high-powered executive in Washington, D.C., one of the brightest and warmest people I’ve ever met. He married a little later than some, and when he found the right lady, they had a child in relatively short order. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, their first child arrived right around the time of 9/11, when some madman began mailing deadly anthrax to various addresses around the nation’s capital. Naturally, that unnerved some people. Chris’s wife was among them: she decided to take their new baby and move back to her hometown of Akron. And for the last two years, Chris has carried on an unnaturally extended commute, living and working in D.C. during the week, and traveling back to Akron on weekends to be with his wife and son.

His son, who’s still a toddler, has learned to interpret certain signs that daddy is about to leave again. Whenever Chris dons a necktie, his little one grows agitated, and begins tugging at it. He knows that that sliver of silk around his dad’s neck signals that the old man is about to leave again, and he’s having none of it.

Then there’s Mike. He’s the son of an electrician, and a large, warm-hearted bear of a guy. He really loves his two adolescent boys, and can talk about them for hours. He especially enjoys coaching them on the athletic field, reliving his own childhood.

When he worked for himself a couple of years ago, he told me that he enjoyed under-scheduling himself during the summer so as to leave plenty of time for hanging around with them. He figured that in the end, that bonding time would be far more valuable than whatever he might buy with the income he passed up. Now that he’s working for a company, and has less flexibility, I asked him how it’s going.

I was happy to learn that he continues to steal those extra moments with his boys wherever he can. The boys both have only a half-day of school one Friday each month, and so Mike’s grown into the habit of working from home most Fridays. That way, even when the boys have a full day, he’s there to greet them when they return home from school.

What do these stories have in common? Not much, other than the fact that each of these dads reminds me in a particularly dramatic way that there is no one right way to juggle the demands of fatherhood in post-millennial America. Each of these dads has sucked it up and done the hard thing, the right thing, to balance their role as family breadwinner and nurturing parent, which often tend to be warring instincts. To me, there’s far more art than science to it. And none of us thinks we’ve gotten that balance right.

But the good ones keep trying anyway.

A note to my readers: September’s column, about Teresa Heinz Kerry’s attempt to discipline the son of her husband’s running mate, prompted a mini-storm of protest from a handful of readers. The common theme of these complaints: how dare I use the pages of a family publication to delve into the murky issue of partisan politics. Point well taken. While I would never apologize for writing something about which someone might take offense (and my friends laughed out loud to learn that many readers assumed I was a political conservative), I can also say that your objections were heard and will be taken into account when next I tackle such a charged subject. Thank you for continuing to read.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has also worked in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Over a 20-year career, his writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including the New York Times. His online weblog, Working With Words, can be found at www.workingwithwords.blogspot.com. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or leave a message at (440) 708-2994.