From his campaign-trail call to fathers "to realize that responsibility does not end at conception ... that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child - it's the courage to raise one," Obama has made fatherhood a priority. The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership has launched a "national fatherhood tour, " as told by NPR, led by 27-year-old Joshua DuBois, and consisting of town hall meetings around the country that will address fatherhood, parenting, and policy. Says DuBois, "[Obama] grew up without a dad in his own home, but he also saw the impact of father absence when he was working in Chicago...So he started this national conversation about responsible fatherhood."

The speech that had the 1,500 women "a big weepy mess" at the BlogHer conference was by Mike Adamick, a writer and stay-at-home dad whose devotion to his young daughter is a running theme in his essays. In this talk, he expressed his fear that his daughter should inherit his shyness and social awkwardness, and the pain he felt when he saw her struggling with other children.

This is a lovely story, and a good illustration of the special bond that can exist between father and child. I was reminded, too, of Ta-Nehisi Coates' widely-read 2002 piece on being a SAHD, which as he points out is a far more loaded issue in the black community - and this was when Obama's sanction of the estate was but a gleam in Democrats' eyes. As Coates wrote wryly, "I am sure that even for this meager deed of fatherhood I am performing, I deserve a lot more than credit," even as he hopes it becomes quotidian ("Not only would the children be better off, but their fathers might actually discover what I already know: that fatherhood is fun, and that it really is the noble calling that I had envisioned, despite the crappy diapers.")

Coates writes that some of his moments of greatest satisfaction come from the silent approval of older African-American women he sees on the street - glad to see him assuming his role. Adamnick - or Aaron Traister, who also wrote a terrific piece about being a SAHD recently - has it easier: fewer people are going to question his choice, at least publicly, despite the continuing stigmas of perceived emasculation. But for them, too, the approval of women is clearly critical to maintaining their self-respect. I'm not talking in the sexual sense, and I don't mean that fathers should be given more credit for doing the same work mothers do routinely. But they need the same credit, the approving looks and, yes, the happy tears (because for many of the same reasons, they're not likely to get them from other men - and not just because a new study, as gleefully reported by the Daily Mail, finds that the average woman cries constantly.) I hope, for this reason amongst others that plenty of women are involved in the Fatherhood initiative - giving the support and approval that may seem obvious but that, frankly, I think we're better at.

White House Launches Fatherhood Initiative [NPR]
Confessions Of A Black Mr. Mom [Washington Monthly]
Dude, Man Up And Start Acting Like A Mom [Salon]
Video Mortified The Radio Star [Mike Adamick]
Crying Shame: Women Spend One Year And Four Months Of Their Lives In Tears [Daily Mail]

Steinem talked with Amy Richards, the author of Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself, about Sonia Sotomayor, Sarah Palin, affirmative action, the importance of equal parenting, and the future of feminism. The entire discussion is excellent, and well worth listening to, but for those who don't have the time, here are a few highlights.

On being a feminist icon:

I have problems with the icon part, because it raises images of iconoclast right away. And as they said in the suffragist era, a pedestal is as much a prison as any other small space.

On the media treatment of Sonia Sotomayor:

I think the attention to her qualifications, her words, her decisions, that's all been very appropriate. But to the extent that she's been treated very differently from, say, Clarence Thomas, you can see that her opponents are using affirmative action as if affirmative action lowers standards when in actual fact it raises standards, in a way that they did not with Clarence Thomas because they agreed with Clarence Thomas.

On the folly of ignoring America's second class citizens:

If we ever wanted to see what we had been missing all these years in terms of talent, look at the presidential election. Look at Obama, look at Hillary Clinton, look at the quality of those two individuals. And they are just a small view into the talent we've been missing and are just beginning to tap.

On Sarah Palin's recent resignation speech:

I think her statements were so opaque that anybody can read into them what ever they wish, and it remains to be seen. I don't want to see her written about in a sexist way either, and the Women's Media Center, of which I am a part, has on its website complaints about the specific kinds of sexist things that were said about her…What was interesting to me was the degree to which sexism was used against Hillary Clinton and for Sarah Palin, because Hillary Clinton's appearance was used against her. That her legs weren't good, that's why she was wearing pantsuits whereas Sarah Palin was a babe and had great legs. Again, if you look for the wizard of Oz person behind the curtain, it's about what they stand for, and therefore there is a differential way in which sexism is used, but it's important to look at how it is used.

On her decision not to have children:

In my generation it was perceived as a choice: either you gave birth to someone else or you gave birth to yourself.

On her relationship with her father:

I've only in adult life come to realize how important that was, that I actually saw a nurturing male…Even those of us who intellectualize about it and know how important it is that men become equal parents of children, if you've never experienced it, it's hard to have faith in it. In retrospect, I probably should have thanked my father for this, that he showed me that.

On world peace:

Men raising children, as much as women do, is the key to world peace. The cult of masculinity, which is the major cause of violence on earth if the violence is not in self defense, will only humanize and dissipate and come to value life through nurturing and through fatherhood.

And finally, Gloria Steinem on contemporary feminism:

Ultimately we won't need a word like feminism or women's liberation because it will be, and should be, just life. Because there is still a power difference and a visibility difference, we need to have names that make us see things in a new way.

Feminism Across The Generations: A Conversation With Gloria Steinem And Amy Richards [KUOW]

Obama, who will also devote much of his day today to kicking off a White House initiative to promote fatherhood, says that growing up without his own father made him more committed to being a good dad himself. He writes,

In many ways, I came to understand the importance of fatherhood through its absence-both in my life and in the lives of others. I came to understand that the hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill. We can do everything possible to provide good jobs and good schools and safe streets for our kids, but it will never be enough to fully make up the difference.

The excerpt concludes with a sweet anecdote about driving Malia home from the hospital when she was a newborn. Obama says, "I think about the pledge I made to her that day: that I would give her what I never had-that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father." It's inspiring that we have a President who thinks of fatherhood as one of his most important jobs. But what does it mean to, as he says, "be a good father?"

In Time, Nancy Gibbs argues that a good dad is a laidback one — and that moms could learn something from dads. She writes,

when did you last read about the Daddy Wars? Men compete against one another in every arena except this one, maybe out of indifference, but more often out of humility. Most fathers I know make fun of themselves, and of the mystery of it all, as though content that being a parent is a skill you practice but never master. There is much doubt, but less guilt.

Gibbs also praises her husband's ability "to slide, with joy and mischief, into our children's world rather than drag them prematurely into ours," and suggests that women should learn to do the same. If it's true, as Gibbs implies, that men are less likely to define themselves through their children, and thus take a more relaxed, less "self-flagellating" approach to parenting, then maybe the current generation of moms, with their "Momoirs" and bad-mommy confessions, should try to be more like dads. However, fathers' perceived playfulness may result more from their rapidly changing roles than from any innate calm in the male nature. Jeremy Adam Smith, author of The Daddy Shift, says fathers are, "doing the dishes and taking care of the kids, but it doesn't match with that traditional male image, so they laugh about it. They giggle. They make jokes."

The best evidence that we are in a strange liminal period for fathers comes from writer/dads like Michael Lewis or Nick Duerden, author of The Reluctant Fathers' Club. Duerden tells the Times of London that for women, parenting is "much more instinctive." He adds,

I had to learn to love my child because my child was a stranger to me. I didn't feel that instant bond. I looked at the child and felt utter confusion and I was very much following my wife's lead. So I did feel the secondary caregiver while she was the primary one.

It seems like a convenient excuse for men to say that only women are hardwired with parenting instinct, while dads have to fumble around until they stumble on some love. It's especially convenient since we can't even begin testing whether this hypothesis is true until we sort out the cultural expectations of moms and dads. Women are still disproportionally expected to care for kids, and disproportionately blamed when things go wrong — until these proportions are equalized, we really won't know much about what comes "naturally" to moms and dads. Michael Kimmel, an author on "men and masculinity," believes this day of equalization will come soon. He writes,

Thirty years from now I think our children are going to be the kind of fathers that we are prescribing today. Our sons will grow up assuming that their wives are going to work, that they are going to be as equally committed to their careers as they are, that they are going to have families where they are equal partners.

We hope that's true, and that Barack Obama's efforts will mean that Sasha and Malia, if they so choose, can raise children in truly equal partnership with men.

'We Need Fathers To Step Up' [Parade]
Dads Are Dudes [Time]
The evolution of fatherhood [TimesOnline]
Obama to Promote Fatherhood on Friday [Time]
Fathers becoming more involved, playful [UPI]
Obama making responsible dads a priority [MSNBC]

Craig Kingsley and Kelly Lambert, whose research lead to Katherine Ellison's 2005 book The Mommy Brain, are studying fatherhood in both humans and other animals. They found that when male deer mice are exposed to baby deer mice (even if the babies aren't theirs), motivation and problem-solving areas of their brains grow. Male titi monkeys, which made for life and help care for babies, also experience such changes. In men, the researchers found that levels of prolactin — a hormone that in women influences lactation and in men may increase responsiveness to a baby's cry — increased after the birth of a child. Testosterone, which influences mate seeking and aggression, correspondingly decreased.

However, Michale Lewis's claim that he didn't love his children initially may not be so unusual. Susan Kuchinskas, writing about Kingsley and Lambert's research for Miller-McCune, says, "fatherly love may take time to grow. After all, mom's body and brain have enjoyed a nine-months-long stew of hormones to prepare her for this role, while the overhaul of dad's brain seems to begin only at the appearance of the child."

Kingsley and Lambert's findings suggest a model of parenthood that is different from the essentialist mommy-as-natural-nurturer, daddy-as-natural-dumbass stereotypes promulgated by traditional-family types. Their research indicates that childrearing, for both men and women, is a physical process, and that contact with children actually makes parents better at taking care of them. Kuchinskas writes,

To maximize the physical changes that support parenting, the best thing a prospective father can do is take an active role in birth preparations and be physically close to his partner and their child when the baby is born, snuggling close and inhaling that unique baby smell. Research by Jay Fagan, a professor of social work at Temple University, shows that fathers who get involved in pregnancy seem more committed to their partner and the child after it's born.

Lewis writes about the strangeness of being expected to change diapers, when his dad "didn't talk to him til he was 21." But all those dirty diapers — and the physical closeness that came with them — may have made him a better dad.

Benefits of the Daddy Brain [Miller-McCune]
Fatherhood Is Good for Your Brain [Utne Reader]

Earlier: Michael Lewis Says Dads Suck At Chores, Emotional Attachment

Lewis says in an interview with NPR that "you do get to a place, or I have certainly, where I feel completely naturally in love with my children." But he also says that with his first child, "Before I felt the beginnings of real attachment it was probably six months and before I felt and manifested feelings that my wife recognized with approval, it was two years, maybe longer." He compares the sleep deprivation of his daughter's infancy to techniques used to torture terrorists, and says "the conditions she created in our house were like Guantanamo." He also sees the work-sharing arrangement of modern fatherhood as somewhat unfair, because men are expected to help out at home while women can opt out of work. As a 21st century father, he says, "you are left with all the responsibility your father had — the business end of the household — plus you have all this other stuff."

Of course, plenty of women aren't financially able to quit working when they have kids, and those who keep their jobs frequently find themselves doing the lion's (or lioness's) share of housework and child-rearing anyway. Working women still do almost twice as much childcare as men, and the idea that women have more attractive options for balancing work and family than men do is pretty ridiculous. But more upsetting than Lewis's nostalgia for a notional time when men just patted their kids on the head every night before Mommy put them to bed (his father boasts, "I didn't talk to you until you were 21") is Lewis's assumption that this nostalgia — and its attendant dissatisfaction with the work of fatherhood — is natural for men.

When Ayelet Waldman said she loved her husband more than her kids, she was pilloried as an unnatural and horrible mother. But although Lewis tells NPR that he worried about being perceived as a horrible person for admitting he didn't love his kids right away, criticism of his book has been more along the lines of, "he overestimates how funny kid stories are." Even in the age of Bad Mothers Anonymous, it's transgressive for moms to admit their parenting lapses, and normal for dads to.

Dads are still expected to be incompetent, confused schmoes, and Lewis just perpetuates this stereotype. He tells NPR that he is "hardwired to avoid unpleasant chores." He also says that in fatherhood, for "most men [...] the problem is a lack of natural emotional attachment." This language — the "hardwired," the generalization — underscores the essentialist attitude that still pervades modern discussions of parenting. Women are naturally nurturing, the argument goes, whereas men are natural slackers, at least at home, who need to be carefully domesticated in order to function as halfway-decent dads. This is the same argument, taken a little further, that keeps women from achieving parity in the workplace or reasonable childcare accommodations — really, they're meant to be at home, and anything else is some kind of advanced social cheat. Even Reuters's Mark Egan perpetuates this thinking, calling Lewis "an author best known for writing about more manly topics, such as business (The New New Thing) and baseball (Moneyball)" — as though parenting, even in a book about fatherhood, is a "womanly topic."

Lewis does seem to love his children, and he's not some Promise Keeper who wants his wife to stay home barefoot and pregnant all the time. But Double X's Stephen Metcalf has it right when he identifies a stark contrast between Lewis's book and Waldman's: "Apparently, moms complain and cry a lot. Dads go to the Princess Park and have fun." With dads like Lewis perpetuating the view that men naturally suck at parenting, it's no wonder moms are crying.

"Liar's Poker" author likens fatherhood to trading [Reuters]
Pssst: Author Wants Dads To Know The Real Poop [NPR]
Why Are Moms Such a Bummer? [Double X]
Home Game: An Accidental Guide To Fatherhood [Amazon]

First there's "I'm A Better Dad Part-Time," by Richard Seely , who claims that from the moment his daughter was born, she and her mother were forming a bond "and I was, to some degree, excluding myself." As she grew older, Seely's daughter would go into "theatrics" in the absence of her mother. Seely writes:

I lost patience with this behaviour, and ultimately with many of her imperfections.

I became more and more of an ogre. I would snap at her. Tell her "no" sometimes for no other reason than to distinguish myself from her mother. If she got an A on a report card, I'd ask why it wasn't an A-plus. Unconsciously, I would intimidate her. Once - I can't even remember what she had done - all I had to do was look at her and my expression sent her running to her room, afraid of me. I never hit her, and have never contemplated any form of physical response toward her or anyone else, but what mattered was that I made her afraid of me.

And so, when he and his wife got divorced, he was fine with the mother getting custody of the child. He says of his daughter:

Because I don't see her every day, I have much more tolerance for the behaviours that used to frustrate me. I offer comfort instead of scorn if she misses her mother when she's away on a business trip. I celebrate the time we spend together, be it an hour or two after school or a weeklong camping trip in the summer.

I'm happier and more secure in my role as a parent than I ever was before.

But: Does any of this seem like a cop-out? Of course it's easier to be "tolerant" and happy when you've only got to deal with a kid part time; instead of being awakened in the night by fevers or managing tantrums, you're only there for ice cream and games and camping. Fun! But is that parenting, or is that just "hanging out" with a child, like an Aunt, Uncle or family friend would do?

The guy referenced in Strollerderby's post A Dad's Point of View: Am I Selfish? Or Just a Jerk? at least seems self-concious enough to realize he's selfish. Bruce Sallan writes about a ski trip taken with his wife and 12-year-old son. Blogger Keri summarizes his story thusly:

Son got a bad nosebleed. Dad tended to him, called the hospital, found out what to do, and sat with the boy until the blood stopped, almost 30 minutes later. Dad wanted to take turns with Step-mom going skiing, so that one would be with the kid and one on the slopes at all times. Step-mom volunteered to stay with the boy the whole time. After 45 minutes on the mountain, nosebleed recommences, Step-mom calls Dad, and Dad returns to Son. Son wants to go home.

Did the dad take the kid home? No. Sallan explains: "I gave him a relatively stern talk on being a man, learning to deal with some pain, as there will be some pain in life... I explained that running away would only teach him how not to deal with life's crises… We give in to our children's whims and complaints too easily. Sometimes, we as parents need to take care of our needs... [Step-mom] chose to be over-the-board careful and I chose to be, what some might say, selfish..." Beyond the fact that teaching your kid to "toughen up" is soooo 1950s and reinforces some nasty stereotypes about what it means to be a man, don't both of these stories make you wonder why these dads feel no shame about being so selfish? And don't you wonder what the mothers think of such behavior?

I'm A Better Dad Part-Time [Globe And Mail]
A Dad's Point of View: Am I Selfish? Or Just a Jerk? [Strollerderby]
Related: A DAD'S POINT OF VIEW: Am I A Selfish Parent? [HuntingtonNews.net]

Jessica Handler tells Newsweek that she's decided not to have kids because she has a 67% chance of passing on a rare blood disorder — and because children remind her of the sister she lost to that disease. It's a heart-wrenching article not just because of Handler's loss — another sister died in childhood of leukemia — but because she feels stigmatized by a decision that was obviously very difficult to make. She writes, "Our culture presumes that a grown woman's true responsibility is motherhood. We're obsessed with babies, even as we expect career success, hot sex and designer style. [...] While few can pull off parenthood with the glamour of Hollywood stars, the underlying message is hard to ignore: if you're not having a baby and enjoying it, something's wrong with you." It's sad that motherhood has become so fetishized that having kids is about proving your completeness as a person — not about raising complete, happy people.

Writing in a similar vein, Anna Quindlen takes aim at the notion that parenting is "easy." She reports the results of several studies showing that parents who receive training in such skills as discipline and positive reinforcement have healthier, better-adjusted kids. Quindlen argues that good child-rearing is a learned skill, not an instinct, and that our ignorance of this as a culture has warped our ideas of parenthood. She writes,

The prevailing ethos about being a parent is that it's mostly intuitive and uniformly joyful, even though the news, and our own lives, are full of those who found it so conspicuously otherwise that they made an utter mess of actual human beings. This mythology has two effects. One is that parents who don't feel happy or competent are made to feel like freaks-and to just keep quiet about the fact. The other is that this makes everyone believe not only that anyone can be a parent, but also that everyone ought to do it, even those who seem by character or inclination to be ill equipped.

Of course, even the "ill equipped" can learn — but the idea that having kids is a necessary part of a fulfilled life may be persuading people to breed before they're ready. And some people — because of personal tragedy or genetics, like Handler, or because of their desire for independence or the fact that they just don't want kids all that much — may never be ready at all.

But we know what you're all thinking — how does this affect men? Nirpal Dhaliwal of the Times of London has the answer. Men want kids too, he says, but they're often ashamed to say so. So far, so good — the desire to be a dad is nothing to be ashamed of (though Dhaliwal's term "throbbing balls" might not be the best way to describe it), and it's certainly worthwhile to bust the stereotype that women all want babies while men just want to drink beer, slap high-fives, and look at women's butts. It's when Dhaliwal describes how he discovered his desire to procreate that things get a little annoying:

I realised how bereft I am of children while spending the second half of last year in India - a country that is teeming with them. I'd watch young Indian families sitting on railway platforms, the fathers beaming as they cradled their perfectly formed, serenely quiet babies. Seeing people who earn a pittance, whose daily lives are a grinding struggle, take such genuine, uncomplicated delight in their children made me appreciate what a real and uniquely powerful experience parenthood is. It made me want to be a father.

Obviously he didn't run into this guy. But seriously, if your idea of offspring is a bunch of "perfectly formed, serenely quiet babies," you may be in for a shock. Babies get sick — sometimes, as in Handler's family — they get very, very sick. And they are rarely "serenely quiet." Actually, this brings us to a quibble with Quindlen's piece. Most of us know motherhood isn't easy — we have all of pop culture's frazzled moms to tell us that, at the very least, it involves a lot of laundry and yelling. But fatherhood, to the non-father, can sometimes seem kind of simple.

Take a look at the ads for the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse — from these, it looks like "taking time to be a dad" means playing with your kid. And while getting out the Super Soaker is important, a lot of being a parent isn't strictly fun. But because many fathers are still absent from their kids' lives, the bar for dads is still set lower than for moms. Motherhood is frequently described as a full-time job, but you can "take time [presumably out of your busy life] to be a dad." We don't want to rag on dads too much, or to challenge Dhaliwal's basic point that men can have parenting urges too, but let's be honest about what parenting entails. Along with the fun comes a lot of worry, conflict, and heartache, and in a just world (with some exceptions) these would fall equally on the shoulders of moms and dads.

I Won't Roll the Biological Dice [Newsweek]
A Teachable Moment [Newsweek]
The men who are desperate for kids [TimesOnline]

In an interview taped yesterday for The Oprah Winfrey Show Nadya Suleman's father, Ed Doud, said that his daughter's actions were "absolutely irresponsible" and added, "Now I'm no psychiatrist, but I question her mental situation," according to the Associated Press.

Doud is however, asking the public to help his family, saying:

You know what? She needs help. I say to everybody now - people - we do need help... Do not punish my daughter for what she had done and do not punish the babies, because they were given by God.

A nonprofit group called Angels in Waiting has offered the Sulemans round-the-clock assistance and housing for their 14 children. But, the 12 caretakers necessary would cost $135,000 per month and that money would have to come from public donations.

We'll learn more about what Doud has to say when the interview airs on Tuesday's Oprah, but why is this the first time we're hearing from the father, when his wife has already given several interviews? And this morning, Kay Hymowitz asks in the Wall Street Journal, "Where is the OctoDad?"

The details we do have on David Solomon, Nadya Suleman's "friend" who she says donated sperm for all 14 of her children, are murky at best. According to media reports he begged Nadya to stop having children before she became pregnant with the octuplets and she has said that he is not currently a part of her children's lives and has no legal claim to them. But, at some point it seems he was involved enough to sign their birth certificates. TMZ released the birth certificates of all 14 children yesterday and Solomon's signature is on the birth certificates of four of her first six children (why he gave a different birthday on each of the four documents is still unclear).

But despite these mysterious details, Solomon's role is barely mentioned, and Hymowitz says that is reflective of our cultural ambivalence about fathers, which is fed partly by the fertility industry. After being paid for their services by the sperm bank, she writes, men usually "sign contracts that assure them, contrary to Father's Day rhetoric, that responsibility really does end at conception."

But does allowing and encouraging sperm donors to relinquish their parenting rights so easily contradict the argument that a father is as much a parent as a mother? Hymowitz writes:

Clearly, donors themselves happily agree to their downgraded status. Their nonchalance is in line with the widespread assumption that we should expand the rubric of "a woman's right to choose" to include not just abortion — where a woman's decision understandably carries more moral weight than a man's — to the care of and responsibility for actual children, where it's not at all clear why that should be the case.

She says that statistics show that we can't afford to ignore the importance of paternity any longer:

Out-of-wedlock birth rates in the U.S. are now 38%; among African-Americans the figure is 70%. Fathers of children living with single mothers are far less involved with their children than are married fathers; about a third of all children in single-mother families have not seen their father in the previous year. Yet decades of social science have made it clear: Children who grow up without their fathers experience more poverty, have more problems at school, more trouble with the law — and more single motherhood in the next generation.

While it does seem that there is much less of a frenzy surrounding the men in the octuplets' lives than the women, should David Solomon be dragged into a media circus that he clearly wanted no part of? While it is biologically easier for men to donate sperm and walk away, if Nadya had used an anonymous egg donor as well as a sperm donor, would we expect the woman to have more of a role in the children's lives? While she would probably be the subject of some media speculation, it's more likely that like Solomon, people would accept that she had given up her parenting rights when she donated her genetic material.

Octuplets' Grandfather: Daughter `Irresponsible' [The Associated Press]
OctoBabies' Birth Certificates [TMZ]
Where in the World Is Octodad? [The Wall Street Journal]

Alfie and girlfriend Chantelle Stedman's families have already been paid tens of thousands of dollars to sell their story to the British tabloids. Ten film companies are reportedly bidding to make a movie about them, and one former News of the World editor estimates that the families stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in the coming years by selling photos of milestones in Maisie's life, like her first birthday or first day at school. Of course, these offers are dependent on the paternity test, which social services has agreed to pay for, proving that Alfie is the baby's father. For now, all the media attention has caused Alfie's school to report that he is often truant. His mother Nicola Patten will appear in court next week to explain why Alfie didn't attend school regularly during a five-month period last year. [The Washington Post, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail]

In the clip at left, Jon shows how his son, Nathan, tries to make secret plans with dad during his little sister's nap time, and explains that little Nathan is going to grow up thinking it's normal to sit with The View's Whoopi Goldberg at Knicks games.

I don't generally address very young women on this site, preferring I suppose to assume that my readership shares the same broad demographic of beaten-down ambivalently suspended adolescent reflexive self-deprecators as myself, but a story about Malia Obama feeling embarrassed by the way her dad likes to greet her fellow ten-year-olds with a firm handshake struck a nerve. My dad totally did that too! So younger readers, if you are here, take note: you're not alone if your dad embarrasses you, in fact, you are so goddamn lucky, which is good to remember when terrible things happen to you. My father used to embarrass me relentlessly, and to be quite honest, at the time the discovery that everyone else's fathers embarrassed them only made this worse. Other people had the luxury of being embarrassed by dads who played the Beach Boys when they drove carpool and maybe yelled antiquated cheers at their soccer matches.

My father played The Messiah in carpool. He called me my Chinese nickname, "Ting Ting," long past my eighth birthday. He used the proper tones when he did so: Ting Ting, because he was a pronunciation dogmatist: Solzhenitsyn, Saint Augustine, the Vaymar Republic. When dinner was ready — and we ate dinner every night together as a family, with candles, and grace, and sometimes the Messiah, although my mom would usually get sick of it and request Vivaldi or Bach and occasionally I could convince him to play something altogether radical, such as the Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo, which was a handy gateway to Miles Davis's 'Sketches of Spain' — he would summon my siblings and I with a baritone, "Chilldren! Dinner is on the table." He wore almost exclusively bow ties. Sometimes in tandem with suspenders that stretched over what was not even a customary dad beer gut but something somehow less cool.

I've never asked where my father ripped off the pompous Victorian patriarch persona. The other night we watched a DVD of one of his favorite old BBC shows Yes, Minister and I thought he maybe learned it from that. But my father is so uncool I doubt he would feel shame owning up to it if he ripped the act off Henry Higgins. He was so uncool he unabashedly loved musicals. Musicals as cheesy as South Pacific…so uncool he didn't even realize that was gay. In my father's favorite knock-knock joke, he announces it is Sam and Janet, which is to say, SamandJanet Evening, ha ha ha EYEROLL.

In early adolescence I blamed my dad and my mother's tolerance of - affection for, even! — his ridiculous personality for the fact I was genetically uncool. That is how uncool I was. I cannot overstate it. I must have been sixteen before it dawned on me that his near-ideological indifference to popular opinion was actually the coolest fucking thing to which I could ever be exposed. I imagine he got it from his mom, the day after whose birthday her first of seven children was born; she always was a kind of headstrong reactionary — both Tauruses, btw — but the cool thing is that, like with Barack Obama, he took the things he enjoyed and respected about his parents (and there were a few things they could have pulled off a lot better) and improved upon them. Namely: Catholicism and patriotism. (This is super Noonan of me, I know, but indulge?)

My grandfather came over in a ship from Turzovka, Czechoslovakia at the age of eleven or fourteen or something. I do not know much about the logistics of the voyage, only that it involved mediocre spaghetti and a pledge to himself never to look back. He told everyone to pronounce his surname "Tass-ick." He made it to West Point, married my grandmother, enlisted in the Army and proceeded to subject what would eventually be a nine-member family to the transient lifestyle Army brats are made of.

My dad could never join the Army on account of asthma, which was a good fucking thing. He joined the foreign service instead, where his language aptitude scores landed him in China training, and it was as a kid in China where it first was impressed upon me why, other than the whole "reactionary" thing, he'd stayed Catholic. There were no churches in China — well there was one Cantonese mass at the crack of dawn but his belief in trans-substantiation was not so ironclad that he did not feel we were better-served learning the Bible's important messages from his layman self. So every other Sunday for a few years of my life we'd sit around and talk the Testaments. I forgot most of it. But roughly the takeaway was: Love God above all things, love your neighbor as you love yourself, help Samaritans because they are people too, never cast stones and don't deny knowing the guy they're casting stones at, forgive your prodigal sons, ETC. ETC.

They are simple lessons, sure. But to impress such lessons onto someone as forgetful and intellectual lazy and impatient and generally badly-behaved as me, he must have infused them with a sort of deep emotion, because I cannot write or even talk about this without starting to cry. I can only tell you this: one night after his return a business trip to Guilin or Xiamen or somewhere I heard him crying in the living room as he told my mom a story. I caught only the end, about a beggar child who'd asked him for money — pretty common in third-tier cities that saw, at most, a couple hundred white guys a year — but the thing was, his arm was badly burned and blistering. Then he saw the child's mother, and deduced she had burned him herself, in hopes he'd elicit more sympathy that way.

The real tragedy was that my father had within his heart enough sympathy for the whole fucking country; of course he did, and we did too now that he'd moved us out there and shown us how that other billion or so got to live. (Very close together, sans A/C or much in the way of modern plumbing.) But surely this beggar lady was not accustomed to people like my father; he could imagine the past few decades of only-then-just-gradually-receding totalitarian rule had beaten her down, infected her with that contagious distrust for her fellow man that eventually begets the all-out societal disregard for human life that yields things like war and racism and the rational burning of one's own child.

So I do not tell you all this because I worry my father does not have within his heart the sympathy to forgive his prodigal, slutty, sinful, coarse-mouthed daughter's innumerable sins. I only tell you this so that you might begin to see me as a little bit more of a person, and understand that my only real interests lie in the pursuit of truth. (Okay, that and beer and telling jokes, but like, see, that's just me trying to keep me/you coming back every day for more Truth and celebrity photos.)The truth is complex, and I believe it is in accepting that complexity that we learn to put down our stones and empathize with one another as fellow humans.

Which is to say, please accept as part of the picture of the identity behind these posts that I have been handicapped since birth by the privilege of a highly eccentric, independent-minded, selfless (and while we're at it: uxorious pronounced uh-xorious) father. Who exposed me firsthand to the Beatles and Jesus and the failure of communism and Tang Dynasty poetry but never, among other things, the violence and misogyny and inhumanity to woman so often associated with his gender and the institutions (the country, church etc.) it founded. Perhaps, because of this, my feminism comes from a different perspective from yours. But I'll respect where you're coming from so long and hope that you can do the same.

(I should point out here that this dad in question is a big Republican. I'm sure this was one of those things that embarrassed me at some point, but it wasn't until I got over that and started truly trying to apply the honesty and sincerity and idealism my parents both tried to instill in me that I became the socialist heathen who does her part to make family gatherings so fun much fun these days.)

My father still calls us "children," but the truth is he never really tried to see us as anything less than future grownups, which I think is why the handshake thing got to me. Five years from now, see, Malia will realize how cool it was that her dad greeted ten year olds with a firm handshake, since what a firm handshake really says to a ten-year-old is one day, kid, you'll be an adult, and this is what adults do, they shake hands and bump fists and touch miscellaneous other body parts to a lot of people, and hopefully they're not carrying viruses or guns or whatever, but in the end you've got an immune system and a brain and passing a few germs back and forth in good faith is just a way to acknowledge that you're in the presence of another person, and sometimes that person, for whatever reason, is going to take the opportunity to hurt you, but as our fathers would probably quote their favorite cinematic hero Lawrence of Arabia as saying, the trick is not minding that part so much.

Maybe they're just still caught up trying to look cool. We've all been there.

Malia Finds Her Father "Embarrassing" [Sydney Morning Herald]
Obama's Picks? "Godfather," "Lawrence" [Chicago Sun-Times]

[New York, December 13. Images via Splash.]

• Porn is everywhere, and, not surprisingly, it's largely to blame for the rise in female exhibitionism and self-objectification (think MySpace, celebrity vagina shots, Paris Hilton). [CNN]
  
• Black women with breast cancer have much lower survival rates than white women with the disease. [USAToday]
  
• Fathers who take off their shirts before holding their babies apparently bond with them more. What's next, nursing? [Telegraph]
  
• The terms "size zero" and "muffin top" have officially entered the lexicon. [Telegraph]
  
• Palestinian, female TV anchors are being threatened with death unless they cover up while on camera. [Telegraph]
  
• MeMe Roth, who famously called American Idol winner Jordin Sparks fat, is getting death threats now. [MSNBC]

We can't decide if 'super papa' Jurgen Hass is a saint, a madman or a creep.

"Spanish is not Jürgen Hass's strong point. But he has his ice-breaker almost down to a T. "Estoy loco, soy alckolico y impotente," ("I'm crazy, an alcoholic and impotent") he scribbles on a piece of paper in dodgy Spanish. In the shantytowns of Paraguay, he says, it is the first line he uses when trying to convince women to let him father their children.

It works. Hass, 56, does not have sex with the women he meets, but he is now legally father to 350 boys and girls from three continents, and aiming to make it 1,000. Because he is German, the children he recognises automatically gain rights to child benefits and citizenship in his homeland. It is a form of social work, he says, a crusade to rescue youngsters from the developing world from poverty. The Paraguayan media have dubbed him "Superpapá".

Forget Paraguay, we should book him on the Maury show. He could claim fatherhood for all those 13-year-old girls who turn up six episodes in a row, burning through 30 different candidates for their babydaddy. As the last paternally exonerated statutory rapist is led cheering from the stage, we wheel out Jurgen, make the baby a German and everyone's happy.