The best hardest job in the world

Father's Day is tomorrow and it made me stop and think about all the kinds of fathers there are.  For all the bad ones, there are so many more good ones. and today I am thinking about the most modern.

Imagine growing up, going to school, getting the most advanced degree and thinking that fatherhood is not for you.  You are a thinker, an analyzer, you know who you are and you know being a father requires a lifetime of love, patience and sacrifice.  You doubt you have enough of any of those so you opt out of the designation, "father."

Then, because of an ultimatum and your huge love for another human being,  you decide to take up the challenge of being a daddy and like everything else you do, you want to do it right.

That means being the stay at home dad, because she makes more money.  Done right it is a real job, the hardest, most time consuming, job in the world and if there are two children close together, which there really should be for their sake, it starts out with years of diapers, cloth diapers that need washing, sunning folding for little bottoms that need wiping cleaning and kept dry.

Your world revolves around unreasonable little people who have no sense of anything but self for the next three years.  The television stays turned off, the electronic gadgets are not unpaid babysitters, you are the first teacher your children will ever have and you take it very seriously.  The programming of their brains, the way they will think and learn depends on you.

The job of raising your kids falls exclusively on you.  A trained nanny gets money for doing this.  A stay at home dad doesn't even get credit, because so many people think it is perfectly fine to farm children out to under educated people who look upon them the way others do writing contracts.  It's a job.

It is just a job and maybe not even that for many people.  It is also the biggest sacrifice anyone can make if it's done right.

Hooray for the stay at home parents and especially dads, because they are forging new ground against incredible odds.