Fellow dads, I make this declaration on this immensely important holiday: “WE ROCK!”
Yes, it’s Father’s Day. Our day. When eating cheese puffs on the sofa and drinking beer at 9 a.m. is not only permitted, but actually required by law.
We are dads! We should celebrate.
Sure, we’re not perfect. We mess up our share of stuff. We have no idea how to use the washing machine (believe us, we just don’t understand!), we have shorter attention spans than fruit flies (high school biology taught us they only live .023 seconds,) and … wait a minute … what was I talking about?
Anyway, we certainly have our faults. But as fathers extraordinaire, we just as often take one for the team. Not to brag, but take me for instance. I was in the swimming pool with my daughter the other day. She was tossing a tennis ball around with a friend, only the depth made it hard for her to catch and throw.
So I figured I would let her stand on the front parts of my thighs as I crouched and steadied her by the waist.
It worked perfectly. In fact, it worked SO perfectly that after half an hour SHE WAS STILL GOING STRONG! Never mind that I had lost all feeling in my lower extremities. Or that I had swallowed half the pool. Or that, thanks to her constant squirming and lunging, I had dislodged two essential vertebrae in my back.
And then what? Well, she decided it would be even better if I dunked myself as she caught the ball and then propelled her into the air as she threw it.
“No … WHEEZE! – HACK! — GULP! … problem,” I said.
I watched as my kneecaps bobbed to the surface and floated away.
But this is what we dads do, right? This is why we get our own day each year? Because we’ll do this. We’ll do this until the lifeguards pull our nearly lifeless bodies out of the pool and perform CPR or the Heimlich or whatever they do with poor wretches like us. “Someone get this man a Barcalounger! He says he’s carried his daughter for the last 9 years without a single break!”
We do it and we don’t complain, and there are two reasons why, right? 1) Because we love our kids, and 2) because our dads did it for us. We did the same thing to them, and they just gritted their teeth while trying to smile. That’s why if your own father has ever gone to the pool with you, he laughs and yells, “Try not to inhale the H2O, boy!” He knows.
So eat your cheese puffs, comrades. Drink your 9 a.m. beer and get ready. Because by 1 p.m. someone will be dragging you into the pool. But before you go, toast your own dad. His vertebrae are still throbbing, too.
Happy Father’s Day.