The Modernish Father

I failed to mention the enormous indignity heaped upon me when I dropped The Boy off at school after his dental appointment the other day. It’s a shining example of how no matter how good of a father you are, 99% of women you don’t know assume you’re a deadbeat.

I like The Boy’s teacher, I really do. She seems very nice and she’s been going out of her way to keep my son challenged while the other kids in his class drool on their number charts. (Apparently it’s only taken me four year to develop the “my kid is an honor student” bumper sticker mentality.) Plus, he really seems to like both her and the assistant teacher in his classroom.

Usually The Wife drops him off in the mornings and his teacher is gone when I pick him up the afternoons, so I don’t really interface too much with her. So, it was a pretty random thing when I dropped him off late Wednesday morning after his dentist’s appointment.

Anyhoo, as I leaving, she said, “Oh, could you please tell [The Boy's] mother that he’s out of baby wipes?”

COULD YOU PLEASE TELL HIS MOTHER THAT HE’S OUT OF BABY WIPES?!? What about me? Aren’t I smart enough to handle picking up a $2 box of wipes at the store and sending them to school? I mean, I did drive the car all the way over there by myself. I am a functional person with a college degree and a job that requires an advanced skill set. I cook my meat before I eat it. I am housebroken (mostly).

She didn’t do it on purpose. In fact, I doubt she ever actually thought about me being an incompetent parent. She just automatically assumed that I was because I’ve got that Y chromosome.

I get up with my son each morning and get him ready for school. I pick him up from school every day. I read him three stories every night before bed. I treat him to toys and Happy Meals far more often than The Wife would prefer. I take him to the library and the zoo and to baseball games. We sing songs in the car and talk about numbers and presidents. I took a job that gives me the flexibility to stay at home more with The Boy than I could before. I think I’m a pretty involved father.

Yet when I take him to the grocery store without a visible female chaperone, the mom pushing a cart with three screaming little terrors flinging Oreos at innocent bystanders looks at me like I’m some kind of weirdo. That’s fair.

CROWD CONTROL
The Wife has posted a humorous anecdote about The Boy’s preferred method of crowd dispersal over on her blog.

VIVE LE USELESS GESTURES
So, the French decided to protest global energy waste by shutting the lights off at the Eiffel Tower for five minutes this week. I love France, the French people and am pretty big on environmental concerns, but come on… Nothing like making a big show of “helping the Earth”, making everyone else feel guilty for five minutes and then flipping the switches back on.

Isn’t it time we stopped making useless gestures and started doing some real things? I’m tired of “Hands Across America”, major sports’ all-star games and pretending that all we care about redecorating one room in our houses on a ridiculously small budget. I don’t really care what most other folks do, but stop wasting my time with things that don’t mean anything.

Besides, you know thousands of herd-mentality French-hating Americans saw that story on the news and purposely left all their lights on the next week to counter-balance the miniscule energy savings in Paris. In fact, I can think of at least three people I know personally who will probably leave their blenders running for the entire month of February.