From tyrants and totalitarians to tender Ted Lasso types: Here's how fatherhood is changing, and for the better, writes Cathrin Bradbury. FathersDay
, the famous son of a famous dad. Partly because of what he had to say about fatherhood in his final book, “Inside Story.” And partly because he’s a writer I carry around in my head, even more so since his death last month at 73.
Kingsley and Martin’s public sparring often sounded like a contest over which writer could come out with the zingiest line about the other. Kingsley, who rarely finished his son’s books, called Martin’s left-leaning politics “howling nonsense.” Martin, whose memoir “Experience” is about his father, called Kingsley “the laureate of the hangover.
On one terrifying sleepover, age seven, I watched a real-life version of Jonathan Franzen’s fictional scene in “Corrections,” when the father of the household made his four-year-old son sit over a plate of cold and wrinkled fish long after everyone went to bed. I remember a father up the street putting his face right up in the mother’s face and telling her toand being frightened not just by what he had said but that no one seemed surprised.
I’m not saying he didn’t have his despot moments. Pointing down at the single dandelion I’d missed in my centuries-long weeding of the backyard. Refusing to let me get into his brown Chevy sedan in my spectacularly threadbare jeans that he seemed to find as threatening as communism or atheism; and I suppose that was the point. I found my father’s fastidiousness, a trait I sometimes now share, ridiculous and irritating, but never frightening.
I see it in my own son. I never saw a better dad, and he’s not the only devoted millennial father, speaking of raising the bar magnificently high. He walks his son every morning. He plays with him for hours in the park, phone off. He has visible, expressed emotions. He defers to the needs of his wife as often as he thinks of his own. And he works mostly from home, the better to be closer to his family. Each of those things was uncommon a generation ago, and unthinkable in my father’s generation.
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