Tag Archives: fathers

December 21, 2012 · 6:17 pm

The “Idiot Dad” Trope

It’s not new, the Idiot Dad TV trope. Remember Tim Allen in Home Improvement? Lately, I feel like we’re making leaps and bounds forward on the portrayal of fatherhood on screen (see Google ads and Up All Night), and simultaneously reverting to the most insulting, egregious examples (see Scott Baio in See Dad Run).

Check out my new piece for Role/Reboot on Baio, the shortcomings of focus groups, Huggies, and why you “can’t be what you can’t see.”

scott baio

Related Post: There’s no wrong way to make a family.

Related Post: How to accidentally raise a feminist daughter.

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October 25, 2012 · 5:17 pm

How to Accidentally Raise a Feminist Daughter

My piece this week for Role/Reboot is about my dad. I’ve written about him before, but this is the first time I ever directly asked him if he had intended to have a feminist daughter.

The conversation started because I found a postcard he had sent from a business trip in 1998. On the front, Rosie the Riveter (You see? It all started so young!) with Hillary Clinton’s face, and on the back, well, just look right →

Here’s the essay:

Related Post: Massachusetts reconsiders custody bias.

Related Post: On joint custody

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May 30, 2012 · 3:43 pm

This is what happens to a solo cup caught in a roof fire

So our apartment building caught on fire over the weekend.

File that under sentences I thought I’d never say. It was early evening, a hot and sticky Memorial Day weekend, and I was standing in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts while a handful of fire trucks circled my building. I stood in the parking lot with my boyfriend and my neighbors and my  neighbor’s quaking bunny rabbit, watching fire fighters shimmy into the sky on extendable ladders, stomping around our roof, shooing gawkers away from the action, and all I could think was, “So this is why I pay taxes.”

When we got the all clear to go assess, I sat in the doorway to the deck and surveyed the damage. It looked bad. Our lackadaisical descent and the calm, measured movements of the fire department had suggested that this was perhaps merely a safety drill, but seeing the evidence so artfully displayed reassured me that, minutes before, this deck had actually been on fire.

Carefully picking past charred boards and our overturned grilled, we looked for souvenirs. Well, I looked for souvenirs. This is what  I’m keeping:

When I later presented my finding to my roommate, she laughed and called me a hoarder. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that guarding a piece of melted trash to commemorate the event was unreasonable, or even unusual in the slightest.

On a bookshelf in my childhood home sits a black plastic rotary dial phone from the mid-70s. Straight out of a Dali painting, the headpieces is welded to the frame, the dial is dripping plastic pearls over the base, and the box is caved in, pocked and pitted like you’d taken to it with a bb gun. My dad rescued this melted relic from the remains of his cabin after it burned down in the Canadian woods thirty five years ago. He’s been hauling it from house to house across the continent ever since.

When I called him from the Dunkin’ parking lot on Saturday, he retold the story of that house and that phone for perhaps the tenth or twelfth or hundredth time. So of course I’m keeping the twisted solo cup and of course I’ll drag it from apartment to apartment. What is it they say about apples and trees?

Related Post: Why I talk to strangers.

Related Post: Small world.

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June 21, 2011 · 1:52 pm

A Different Kind of Writing

I didn’t write anything about fathers on Father’s Day.

I’ve written about my dad before, “My dad taught me a lot of things: how to find the North Star, how to make a perfect grilled cheese sandwich, how todrive in a New England winter. He taught me to value diversity of opinion and honesty of expression, to choose good, smart people to be in my life, to believe that I can do and be anything I want.”

Do I call my parents enough? Of course not; I’m in my twenties and epically self-involved. When I do, it takes half an hour of rambling about work drama or explaining why they must read this blog or that blog (they obviously don’t read blogs) before I get around to asking about them, at which point, I inevitably need to get on a bus, or talk to my roommate, or make a sandwich.

But I try. I really do. I show them pictures of my friends and draw them maps of my neighborhood. I throw links and clips their way to try to bridge a 1,000-mile, five-state gap that I created and solidified. Calling with good news, or bad news, or just to tell them about a book I’m reading and eventually ask about their homes and work and friends and activities, that’s what I can do right now.

I don’t mean that that’s all I can do right now. Rather, I mean that I am lucky enough to be able to do that, and so I should. More.

Also learned from my Dad: be unabashedly dorky

My friend Kate wrote an amazing essay about her first Father’s Day since her dad passed away in November. “For those who have lost a father, Father’s Day is a day for everyone else to remember what you think about every day.” It’s about the luxury of taking one’s father for granted.

Yesterday, I wrote a short obituary for my uncle, who I admired and respected with all my heart. He was the definition of a family man, and his warmth, good cheer and sincerity were such beacons of optimism in an increasingly cynical and sarcastic world. How does one even begin to encapsulate a life’s worth of children and homes and golf and love and laughter and talk in something a newspaper charges you $8 a line to print?

One word at a time, I learned. Just like you write anything else.

Related Post: Hometowns are hard to let go of, even when you put 5 states between you and it.

Related Post: Dads in advertising.

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December 23, 2010 · 7:25 pm

Dads in Ads

This is what most advertising has to say about dads. They are the fun parent, the messy parent, the down-in-the-dirt, don’t-worry-about-the-stains-let’s-just-have-fun parent. This dad looks like he’s having a blast. Who’s responsible for cleaning up? Mom, duh! While this ad doesn’t spell it out as clearly as some, Dad is clearly too busy having fun to worry about the mundane details of household management. This is from Parenting Magazine, by the way.

So accustomed to the above depiction of parental duty-dividing, I almost choked on my latte (toffee nut, if you were wondering) when I turned the page and found this:

Is that a dad? Holding a baby? In the middle of the night? But where’s his wife? Isn’t this her job? For all we know, Mom got up the last 14 times, and Dad is just “taking one for the team,” but even so, this is the angle that Orajel chooses to take. I can tell you that any brand worth it’s salt (or that has enough dough to advertise nationally) is going to test the crap out of anything they publish, which suggests that Daddy doing his duty probably hit a jackpot with the moms. So maybe this is all just another cynical marketing ploy (let’s be honest, of course it is), but it’s working! The job of advertising is not to disrupt or rearrange societal mores, but the ads we see do reinforce what we witness everyday. Orajel’s ad is not made in a vacuum; they are reinforcing messaging they received in focus groups held in some mirrored room somewhere in the country, and that’s encouraging.

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