The Ease of Being a Dad to Girls

My wife typically transports the twins to and from their childcare locations – be it the school they attend three days a week or my in-laws’ house where they are lucky enough to hang out for two days each week.  Due to the fact that she’s the main transporter, she’s also acts as the person who gets them ready in the morning.  Actually, she gets them ready every morning.  It’s just the routine we’ve gotten into.  I don’t know if it’s because they’re girls or that I’m from kind of an old school family where that (getting the kids ready) was a female role or simply because I’m scared to death of her making fun of me for the outfits I might put them in.  Who knows.  Regardless, it’s very rare that I dress the girls in the morning and even rarer that I do their hair.

On the rare occasion when my wife has to get to work early or is in some other way unable to perform the morning duties, I’m responsible for getting the girls ready.  Getting them dressed is no big deal – fights over which socks they want to wear aside (it’s always the Halloween socks with the Christmas outfit or something asinine like that) – but their hair is another story.  Full disclosure – I have no idea how to attack long hair.  I’ve always had very short hair and, for the last twelve years or so, have either had a shaved head or a ‘buzzed’ haircut.  I don’t even comb my hair!

But, in an effort to make them presentable in public, I try and do their hair.  J has really fine, long hair.  I can somewhat get hers into a ponytail or, if I’m really ambitious, two ponytails.  M, on the other hand, has shorter, curly hair which is very tough to get into any kind of ponytail.  Fortunately, she sometimes like to have ‘crazy hair’ which basically means I run a brush through it once or twice and that’s it.  I do typically put her hair into some kind of ponytail though – ‘crazy hair’ just seems like a cop out to me.

The teachers at school can tell the mornings when I do the girls hair and say that it’s “cute” how I “try” and do their hair (Try?  I worked for thirty minutes on that already half-out ponytail lady!).  They smile an understanding smile and give me a little laugh…I guess it is kind of comical seeing a 6’2″, 240+lbs guy with a burly beard working a little Belle or Cinderella hair elastic.  Then they always tell me what a “good dad” I am for doing that.  Really?  A good dad just for doing my girls’ hair?  That seems pretty easy.  What a low barrier of entry into dad supremacy.  Moms aren’t considered great moms just because they do their daughters hair.  Hell, a mom can have two kids on her hip, one in the carriage while food shopping for a thirteen person dinner and be considered a bad mom just because she loses it a bit and yells at her kids to quiet down in the supermarket.  Being a good dad is a piece of cake apparently.

This whole idea of a good dad bothered me.  Where did this sliding scale come from?  And, more importantly, how do we fix it?  I’m not a good dad because I do my kids hair or bring them to school or make their lunch.  I’m doing my damn job!  The fact that other dads don’t do these kind of things on a regular basis does not make me a holier-than-thou dad.  I’m just a dad doing what I need to do to get by.  Really, I’m just doing what needs to be done and not shooting for any further accolades or extra credit.  And the rest of the world needs to understand that.  Being a dad is a responsibility, not a competition.  We are required to care for our children and, most of us anyways, find fulfillment in those tasks.  If doing my kids hair, making their lunch and bring them to school makes me Super Dad then I’ll begrudgingly take the title and accolades knowing the whole time that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing and nothing more.

After I got my thoughts on this topic down, I went searching on the interwebs to see if anyone else had written anything about this phenomenon.  That’s when I ran across the article that Stay at Home Dad PDX wrote about Clearing The Low Bar of Fatherhood.  It’s eerily identical to what I wrote.  I suppose that A) great minds think alike, B) I’ll need to start reading his blog since we seem to have similar mind sets and C) I’ll need to get my ideas down quicker so that it doesn’t look like I’m taking his ideas!