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Fathers of the 21st century face new realities and new challenges, but also new joys. On Sunday, we honor our fathers, recognize their sacrifices, the example they set, the way they toil for their families and the often-thankless job that falls to them of pushing us up and out of the nest.
If we accept that fatherhood imbues men with certain characteristics, then fathers, especially with their sons, are the tough love to a mother’s nurturing, the kick in the butt to mom’s pat on the back.
The 19th-century French essayist Joseph Joubert put it this way: “Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.”
They also teach their sons many of the skills necessary to take on the world.
Former Minnesota Twins All-Star Harmon Killebrew summed up the role fathers play in their sons’ lives with this anecdote: “My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.’”
When it comes to daughters, fathers have a more complicated role, providing unconditional love and affection, strength and protection. British playwright Enid Bagnold explained it this way: “A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.”
The world portrayed in 1950s TV shows, in which dad is sole provider and dispenser of justice on the home front, is gone, if it ever existed. Today, dad shares child-rearing responsibilities with mom, since both work. That has allowed fathers to explore their softer side, to be the parent who makes the children’s lunches, drops them off at school with a hug and first hears of the triumphs and tragedies of the day.
The role of a father is to be an example, as writer Clarence Budington Kelland put it: “He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”
And to those fathers who have devolved from Superman to Homer Simpson in the eyes of their children, consider this from Mark Twain and take heart: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
Father’s Day was first celebrated 100 years ago, thanks to the efforts of Sonora Smart Dodd, who was inspired by her father, who raised her and her five younger brothers on a remote farm when his wife died when Sonora was just 16.
“His kindness and the sacrifices he made inspired me,” she said in 1936.
It is fitting to continue acknowledging both in our fathers.
