My beloved partner, soon to be husband, Mikey, is the best father I know. He is loving and attentive, honest and devoted, and never makes a single decision without weighing the impact it will have on his children. These qualities are what prompted him, misguidedly, to stay in a marriage with an abusive and controlling woman, for 12 years. They are the same qualities that fuel his fight to preserve the meager vestiges of status the family court system relegates to fathers these days. They are also the qualities that have served to insulate the loving and trusting relationship he has with his children, through many attempts by court and ex to undermine it.
It is one of the primary reasons I love him so dearly.
Children will initially trust very easily. Keeping that trust though, and building upon it is a challenge that requires many sleepless nights calming fevers and bad dreams, leaving work for sick days, endless journeys back and forth to baseball games and school plays and trips to the park.
What makes a good parent, is the willingness to do all these things, and countless others, in thankless pursuit of what is best and most desired for their children. Filling a child's heart with the certainty of a parent's devotion, is the only reward worth having. Getting it, requires what is often hardest to give in a life filled with so many distractions -- time and attention.
In this way, Michael Coren and I agree. Where we part ways, is in the asinine assertion that such a relationship is solely the entitlement of mothers, as in "A mother's place..."
Yes, I know people will say the father can do the job just as well and that it's all about quality time but this is nonsense and denial. Real parenting is about the time that isn't quality.
The quality stuff, the fun stuff, is easy. It's the driving to soccer yet again, the sitting with them when life is awful, the meetings with the teachers, the helping with the homework, the being there stuff that makes you a good parent.
As for dad, the hypocrisy is stifling.
On the one hand the feminist-influenced courts have ruled the mother is the primary caregiver and the media and culture has told us men are largely irrelevant and single-parents families are absolutely fine.
On the other we are told to believe that dad at home is just the same as mum at home. It's not. I say this as a dad who loves his children but taught them -- important this -- not to lie!
Perhaps Michael really should just speak for himself. Because there are plenty of dads out there who aren't busy writing newspaper columns and hosting tv shows to actually do these things with their children, and they don't deserve to be short-changed by someone who makes sweeping value judgments based on genital orientation. And that's before even addressing the condescending, misogynistic opinion that a woman is less of a mother if she chooses to work for a living, totally discounting the value of providing her daughter with a valuable example to follow -- that of contributing to public life in a meaningful way, successfully. GAWD KNOWS, we wouldn't want too many girls thinking they could actually leave the house and participate in a life other than wiping noses. What kind of example would that set?
I applaud Lisa MacLeod and her husband, for making the choice to have at least one parent stay home with their child. They are very fortunate that circumstances afford them the ability to do so. And from my own experiences, I know that fathers are just as capable -- and often more so -- as many mothers, of successfully raising children in a loving environment.
And if Michael Coren thinks ovaries are the genetic prerequisite for effective nose-wiping, maybe he should get in a little more practice and stop projecting his guilt onto the dads out there who pull their weight in the household, in a society that apparently looks down on them for it.
