#fun dad

Help??

But also Billy doesn’t need a spare key he’s just picking the lock or climbing the window. He cannot be kept out of the Macher house.

“Yes,” Marvin said with a chuckle.

“It’s one or the other, not both,” Chase explained, pointing at the list of rules.

“Boo.” Marvin chewed the inside of his cheek. “I can’t pick.”

“Same.” Chase lifted his hat a little to scratch the top of his head. 

“Just think, if the other was in a different room right now and you wanted to tell them that you wanted some fun, which one would you send to get them?” Anti asked, getting a look from Dark that told a thousand stories of what Anti has done.

I don't need your help

with taking the kids to the playground

with buying them ice cream

with movie nights

and all the other fun things.

I need your fucking help

with keeping track of their shoe sizes

with the paperwork for their therapy

with deciding on what's for dinner tonight

After an appointment

I don’t claim the other FUN DADS and weekend warriors whose parental pageantry is performed from a distance. I’m not imbued with paternal power that’s merely symbolic. I’m not scolded at the annual ex- change for being late or feeding her microwaved macaroni.

I don’t identify as FUN DAD even when clinicians call me FUN DAD to my face—me, the keeper of batteries uninvited from birthdays, the boy who barely beat being TEEN DAD with good intentions, whose brief, painful marriage left him with- out a permanent address along her bus route, who’s not consulted for the social security number or date of birth, sitting an entire hour away in yet another zoom room, clinging to the soft fabric of family life, wondering at the paradox of patriarchy—of not doing enough while encouraged to do less.

After an appointment, I just want to put out her favorite sprinkler, the same sprinkler as all other Saturdays that floods the backyard and keeps us from planting pretty tufts of grass. She loves prancing in the cold droplets iridescent with sunlight. I love how she laughs—in the face of absence, relative time—with a mouth full of adult teeth.