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Father’s Day comes in June, during the summer of laid back holidays. Do you know the main claim to fame of Father’s Day? Other holidays get more press than Father’s Day. Certainly, Mother’s Day is a bigger deal in most families I know than father’s day. Even Valentine’s Day sees 180 million cards go through the mail. http://fatherhood.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.census.gov/Press%2DRelease/www/releases/archives/facts%5Ffor%5Ffeatures%5Fspecial%5Feditions/006116.html

Do you know the main claim to fame of Father’s Day? Its main claim to fame is that more collect phone calls are made today than any other day of the year.

Some of you won’t be surprised that, according to Harper’s Magazine, the “average number of minutes an American father of a four-year-old spends alone with his child each day is: 42 minutes.” Each day. That’s certainly better than I expected. Yet, fatherhood is changing.

I heard a couple of new dads talking about the new model vehicle. It’s got fat all-terrain tires, special shock absorbers, “plush suspension for on-road comfort and performance.” Plus, it looks cool with a sleek design and colors like black & racing yellow.

It’s the kind of ride that makes men stop in the tracks when they see one in use and ask their owner testosterone-fueled questions like, “Are those 14- or 16-inch wheels?” and “How’s it handle off-road?”

The Ironman– that’s the model I’m talking about– , is no next-generation SUV. Truth is that it only seats one. And the occupant has to weigh less than 35 pounds.

That’s because it’s a baby stroller built with gadget-obsessed dads in mind.

The somewhat pedestrian (and, some would say, feminine) design of junior’s every-day ride has been pumped up with new features that have dads standing around talking about them like they used to talk about their mountain bikes.

The marketing blurb on Baby Universe, Inc. — one of the Internet’s biggest baby stuff suppliers– says: “All the new strollers have struts and shocks and big wheels,” Besides the Ironman, there is the Stokke Explorer, which features a higher than average seat with an adjustable handle bar, giving the baby more eye contact and taller dads a better grip for the big push. Stokke even offers “test strolls” at the company’s stores in major cities.

Trading up to the manliest of strollers isn’t cheap. The Bugaboo Frog, for example, comes in at $729 retail — more than twice as much as some of the rest. The big ticket price, however, hasn’t deterred the determined dads and moms who jog through the trendiest neighborhoods pushing baby in style.

One new dad discovered that his ultra-foldable Zapp stroller, which breaks down Jetson-style to almost nothing, caused lots of passersby to stop him in the street for a look. “We can’t make it more than a block,” he says.

Oh, and by the way, isn’t the baby cute?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not in the market for a stroller myself. But I do like to take the temperature of things that increase commitment and satisfaction of being a father.

The big thing about the super strollers is be the “cool” factor. The Frog even comes with its own maintenance kit. How cool is that?

Beyond the baby buggy, many companies are now pushing a wide range of products geared toward new dads. Diaperdude.com sells diaper bags that look like messenger pouches and come in colors like camouflage, or black with dragon or guitar designs. Another company offers wearable “bottle shorts” for dad with pockets that hold baby bottles, pacifiers and other infant gear.

All this gearing up has made it possible for Dad to hit the street with a lot of credibility and maybe, as a result, they’re willing to spend more time moving around in what used to be Mom’s exclusive territory.

But you know, if a trail-rated buggy is what it takes to help dads get out more with their kids, and if a hip diaper bag makes changing said diaper a more manly experience, well, so much the better.

Bottom line is that it’s cool to be a dad these days. Sources: Howard, Hilary. “Parents wheel babies around in $$!! status symbols.” USA Today, May 6, 2005, 3B; and, Stout, Hilary. “Dad’s new wheels are on the stroller.” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2005.

But our ideas of father hood come from many places.

In the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,”

Calvin says to his father: “Your new polls are in, Dad.”

“Mmm,” responds his father.

“A vast majority of household 6-year-olds say you’re not living up to their expectations of fatherhood.”

“What were their expectations?” inquires his dad.

“That you’d be more like an automatic teller machine.”

Uh huh. That’s when we start with weekly allowances. It’s about making choices. And when we’re young enough we think our parents have it all figured out. And when we get older, we get mad that they didn’t have it all figured out.

I think it was Lord Randolph who said, I used to have five theories about child raising. Now I have seven children, and no theories.

At my house, we have these huge honeysuckle bushes in the side yard, along the fence line. They were taking over the chain-link fence. They were going to block the sun from the rosebush. It also occurred to me, that I’d rather have Mulberry bushes. Because then you get the fruit. And you get the shade, too. And fantasies take off at that point: mulberry jam; mulberry wine, mulberry pie. Why not?

It was easy enough to cut down the bushes. But once they were down on the ground, I realized I couldn’t just leave them there. Some of the trunks of these bushes were 4-5 inches in diameter. I was going to have to chop all this stuff out. Some of these bushes were almost 15 feet high. What was I thinking?

Sometimes its like that with parenting. I set out to solve a problem with one of my kids, and: oops.

I like to think I’m a rational person. I like to think I spend quality time in the left brain and right brained world. There are things you do as a parent, things you do with your children, then later on – you are a bit at a loss to explain what happened.

We may read books on parenting, we may discuss it with our friends and coworkers, but our first ideas about parenthood, come from our own parents. When I was growing up, my father was hyper critical with me. Fortunately, I knew enough – or thought I did– to avoid this was my own children.

It can take a long time to cut through old bushes. And then, even when you cut them at their root, you still have to deal with the mess that they leave. But, when you really pay attention, and do the job right, you clear space.

You allow yourself a much better chance to see the landscape as it really is. And by pruning your own behaviors, you allow yourself a much better chance to be the parent you really want to be.

The funny thing is, I think it is my own children who are teaching me to be a better father. And they are still young enough to believe I am powerful. They believe in the me I’d like to be, and that helps motivate me to do greater good.

It is an understatement to say it is a different world today than the one we grew up as children in. In my own generation– a mere 30 years ago– 4 out of 5 children lived with Mom and Dad. Today 2 out of 5 children live in a household without their father. From 80% to 40%. That’s a big jump.

According to some studies, living without a father “may lead boys, in particular, to become hyper-masculine and violence prone.” (Why More Dads Are Drifting Away, San Jose Mercury News, 6/14/92).

Certainly for those of us with few resources, those of us with few connections of empowering intimacy— having a family, having someone fill the role of father— is even more important than for those of us blessed with several supportive connections. Some of us have done well with surrogate fathers, that is non-biological fathers. Step-fathers, uncles, older cousins or brothers of friends— these men have made good fathers to some of us.

Margaret Mead and others have observed that the supreme test of any civilization is whether that civilization can socialize men by teaching them to nurture their offspring” (Life Without Father, USA Weekend, 2/24/95). Tribes where fathers are most loosely connected to the family tend to be the tribes who are most violent.

Indeed, some of us have had father’s who never made it past civilization’s threshold, who found the model of fatherhood too smothering, too claustrophobic for their tastes or capabilities. Some fathers are simply never there. Some only show up occasionally. I often felt that way about my own father when I was growing up: that he was rarely there.

Of course, some people lost their fathers when they were quite young: to war, to drunk driving, to an accident, to illness, to one of the many dangers of being a man in this world.

And some fathers seemed to be possessed by the demon rum or something similar. In her poem Saturn, Sharon Olds writes:

He lay on the couch night after night,
mouth open, the darkness of the room
filling his mouth, and no one knew
my father was eating his children. He seemed to
rest so quietly, vast body
inert on the sofa, big hand
fallen away from the glass.
What could be more passive than a man passed out every night— and yet as he lay
on his back, snoring, our lives slowly
disappeared down the hole of his life.

Some fathers, caught in a tangled web of drugs and alcohol are much worse. Instead of claiming responsibility to their children or family, instead of treasuring intimacy and blessing their children, they curse them, they become tyrants, they beat their children, they beat their wives, they beat their lovers or otherwise abuse or violate the ones they are supposed to empower.

These are the men caught in a burning house and rather than yell for help they throw others in harms way to keep themselves from being consumed.

But the more father hood is studied, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, the more researchers learn how important the fathering role is. Women who rise to great heights in success in the world invariably have a strong supportive father behind them. Boys & girls who grow up in bleak circumstances have better chances for success with a mature masculine presence in their lives.

This raises a question for religious liberals who promote– among other things– various concepts of family. What about a household two good mothers but no father? What about single moms? What about them?

The idea of a god-father may be an excellent one for families without fathers. In other words, if by chance or design, a father is unavailable, we ought to promote the idea of encouraging those families to enlist the support and help of men they trust and admire.

I believe that particularly for boys, good male role models are important. Men we trust and look up to need to be available to boys and girls, not only at key moments, during adolescence, and during the passages that make up what we later celebrate as rites of passage, but in general, all the time.

We are fortunate in this church, to have men who teach Sunday School. They demonstrate their concern and acknowledgment for the gift of fathering.

Good parents know that sometimes they are unable to be all things to their children, that sometimes it can be very useful and helpful to say, why don’t you go talk with Uncle Bob? or— what would you think about talking with Reverend so-and-so? This can be helpful to a parent and to a kid.

In my own childhood, as an adolescent, I had several long talks with my Unitarian minister. He gave me a valuable perspective on being an emerging adult male in the world.

The bottom line is that even if we live in a family without a father, we can look to other men to help us out. In fact, I would say that this is one of the reasons for religious community— to have a community of people we can call on when we need to. If we have a real community like this, with real fathers in it, I believe this can mitigate the lack of a live-in father to some degree.

“How far could you swim, Daddy, in such a storm?”
“As far as was needed,” I said,
and as I talked, I swam.

To me, that is an enduring image of fatherhood– of the necessity of sacrifice.

But what of us sons & daughters? Do we who have living fathers we talk to, do we act appropriately toward the men who have given over some part of themselves to us? Now here I am wondering about those of us who would say we have “good fathers.” W.S. Merwin writes in his poem, Yesterday:

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand/
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or even less
I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me
oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time
he says and my father turned in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me
oh yes I say
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don’t want to keep you/
I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know
though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do.

I am sure that there are men in this room right now who have felt that sting: of being superfluous to their children. There are men and women in this room, including myself I’m sorry to say, who have done this to their parents.

Now I am going to ask some of you to stand up. I would like to ask now, for all the fathers over the age of 50 to stand up. Please stand right where you are sitting. Thank-you. To you I say:

Elder fathers— you are men we look up to. We whose lives you have touched in some way, want to thank you and express our appreciation to you for your part in keeping your community and family alive, well, and whole.

I ask the congregation now to look at these men and repeat the words thank-you in unison with me. Ready? Thank-you.

Please remain standing. Now I ask for all the fathers 50 and younger to stand. Thank-you. Younger Fathers— you are men we look up to. You may be looking around at men you hardly even know, yet there is a connection among you and among all of us— in this room, at this moment. We want you to know that we support you and thank you for your part in keeping your community and family alive, well, and whole.

I ask the congregation now to look at these men and repeat the words thank-you in unison with me. Ready? Thank-you. Please be seated.

Fathers, whether they want to or not, provide all of us— men and women— with role models about how to be men, how to be fathers. May we keep them and bless them and do what we can to help them. So let it be, Amen.