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Zen and The Art of Fatherhood
The Sound of One Dad Clapping By Johnathon Allen
For me, the secret to being a good father is not really being a "father" at all.
Throughout the course of a normal day with my kids, I may be called upon to act in any number of roles: cook, custodian, educator, coach, playmate, warden. But if someone said, "Now, be a father," I wouldn't quite know how to respond. Because my parents were members of the generation that set the world record for divorce rates, my pantheon of paternal role models can pretty much be summed up in two categories: "absent-but-generous landlord," and just plain "absent."
My dad wasn't a bad guy. It's just that in the '70s, when two people chose to dissolve their marriage, the mother was invariably given custody of the children and the father was given his "freedom" at the cost of a relatively low monthly payment. My parents moved to different states not long after they split up and, as a result, I didn't see much of my father after my fifth birthday. I grew up in a house devoid of the masculine football watching, baseball tossing, fly fishing energy most people associate with the word "dad." I knew my father only through the occasional yearly visit and holiday greeting card.
Another outcome of this familial fission was that I spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in front of the electronic baby sitter, which is where I acquired my other paternal role model: the generous but mostly absent landlord. Watching re-runs of shows like "Father Knows Best," I marveled at how, in each episode, Dad would come home from another long day at the office, take off his sport coat, put on his comfortable sweater and handily deal with the numerous challenges of raising a family. It seemed to me that this was the ideal father figure, until my moth