Father of the Year
By Michelle Martin
II want to nominate my husband for Father of Year.
I just don’t know of any contest in which to do it, because he doesn’t fit neatly into anyone’s prescribed molds of what a father should be like.
Certainly not the TV fathers of his childhood, in the 1960s, or mine, in the 1970s, who left the house in the morning, came back to dinner and managed to dispense a few pearls of wisdom along the way. In our house, I’m the one who goes to work in the morning and comes home in the evening most days.
But he’s not a typical “Mr. Mom,” as so many articles facetiously dub stay-at-home dads. While the movement to have dad stay home and assume primary responsibility for child care has gathered enough steam to become a trend, he’s the last one looking to network with other dads or commiserate about the frustrations of child care with the moms at the playground.
He owns his own business, operated mostly out of our home, although he sometimes works at other sites. Then we get help from his parents, or, if the job permits, the kids tag along.
Even before we had kids, he did more of the housework than most husbands I know—laundry was, and is, his job, not mine. Now he does a lot more of it, along with picking up toys, going to the park, making lunch and snacks.
But none of that is what makes him Father of the Year in my eyes. What does it is the example he sets, caring about people, starting with family but extending to a network of close friends. Our home is always open to those who want to stop by for coffee, or a summer barbecue, or just a talk. He joined the Knights of Columbus not for the funny hat and sword, but because he saw it as a way to help people beyond our family, beyond our parish boundaries.
Once asked to be a deacon, he turned it down because, he said, he was not comfortable setting a spiritual example. But he is with us at 8 a.m. Mass nearly every Sunday, working as an usher, and likes to take our 7-year-old to Stations of the Cross on Fridays during Lent.
He doesn’t want to be a spiritual leader, but he knows he’s good at organizing people and details, so he’s become the one the parish and my daughter’s school go to when they want to get things done. As a father, he knows the word “No,” but when someone asks for help, he seems to forget how to say it.
On top of all that, he loves me. He says it often, and shows it in enough ways that I have never doubted it. Even when we’re angry at each other—even when he forces me to fight when I’d rather crawl under a rock to nurse my anger—I’ve never questioned that he loves me.
Neither do my kids doubt he loves them. When he says no, when he makes them pick up their toys on pain of having them removed from the house for a while, when he insists on an attitude adjustment, they know he loves them just as much as when he cuddles them and reads to them and sings them to sleep.
My kids see the love that their father and I share, and feel the love we have for them and even, mostly, share that love with each other. That’s why, in my eyes, he’s the Father of the Year.
