Catholic Husband

A decade ago, at the height of the third-party mobile app ecosystem, I was trying tons of shiny new apps. One was a greeting card generator, that you could design in the app, and which would be printed and mailed to the recipient. It was fine, but I quickly moved on. I hadn’t given that app much thought until three weeks ago. They emailed me, letting me know that Father’s Day was around the corner, and that know that it could be a painful day for many. They wanted to give me the opportunity to opt-out from their Father’s Day marketing emails.

While Mother’s Day is all flowers, breakfast in bed, and late morning brunches, we’ve turned Father’s Day into a dour affair. In a way, it aligns perfectly with our collective attitudes and communication. For years now, the tides against men and fatherhood have risen to tsunami levels, unmooring men from the society expectations that, for millennia, held the basic building block of society, the family, together.

Undoubtedly, many men have abdicated their roles. We’ve lowered the bar so far on our expectations for men that their household responsibilities start and end with a regular income stream. Without the challenge that men instinctually crave, they become soft, lazy, and remote. They drift away, easily succumbing to base temptation.

It may be a convenient story to tell ourselves that fathers aren’t really necessary, but that’s not what the data shows. Single mother households are at an exponential risk of poverty. Children who come from homes without their father present are at a demonstrable disadvantage. Families without a father are like a plant that gets abundant sunshine, but no water; slowly, they wither.

There’s great wisdom in the fact that men share the title “father” with God. To be a father requires great sacrifice and heroic virtue. Sharing life with another person is a beautiful thing, but taking on the responsibility for another is something else. A father blazes a trail for his son to follow; he’s the first love of his daughter. He is not just a number on a bank statement, but an omnipresent force for good in the home.

Fatherlessness is the great scourge of our day, the predictable outcome of decades of anti-men rhetoric and attitudes. Instead of minimizing their importance, or treating them like feckless children, we should celebrate fathers who have laid down their lives in humble service of their families.

Halfway through my kids’ summer vacation, and I’ve hammered through my to-do list. Projects, tasks, and ideas from late 2022 are finally percolating to the top, and getting done. I’m eating great, working out, and watching movies in broad daylight. My schedule is my own, I am the Master & Commander of my schedule. My house is empty, and although I appear to be doing all the things that I desire, I, too, am empty.

It’s not a mistake for a father to share a piece of his identity with his family. My sense of emptiness comes not out of a dark place, but out of a place of truth. In a world where children are seen as an accessory, I sense my children’s essential nature.

There are plenty of stressors throughout my day, starting from basic safety and ratcheting all the way up to petty sibling rivalries and fake crying. But those moments of the day are incidental. They are part of what happens to a father, they are not what it is to be a father.

As the days tick down until I bring everyone home, and we settle back into the chaos and rigor of life, my mind drifts to their college and adult days. They will not always be this small, not always this willing to overlook my faults and failings. What kind of people do I want them to become? That is my work for today.

Summer vacation is finally here, and the kids are off with their grandparents for two weeks. Alison and I drove home yesterday and, for the first time in nearly three years, are home alone.

Although we slept in this morning, and were slow to start our day, we were unbelievably productive before lunch. I made it through my whole list for the day, and the house feels clean and refreshed.

Life with small children is never easy, but it’s always full of great meaning and beauty. I’ll enjoy the quiet time ahead, focusing on what needs to be done. But I’ll look forward to when my children return, and things are less quiet.

The cold days of winter are behind us as the days grow warmer and spring fills all of us with a sense of newness. As we near the end of the school year, in the midst of this newness, my thoughts are turning back to my family’s daily rhythm.

At the beginning of the school year, we were very dedicated to our routine. Although it was familiar each day, we checked things off our list in the same order each morning. Among those routines were clear opening and closings for our school day. As the year dragged on, and the workload increased, those routines faded away.

I’ve built a new routine, to carry us through the upcoming months, and I’ve designed it towards a rhythm of prayer. Not a burdensome schedule, but a monastic one adapted for our domestic life. I want to have checkpoints sprinkled throughout our day, with short opportunities for prayer. In a way, it’s like water stations along a race route. I never wanted us to be too far from prayer.

Real life is very normal, routine, and frankly boring. The same is true for the lives of the saints, including St. Joseph. He was an anonymous tradesman in a village of 200 people. But out of that ordinariness, something beautiful bloomed. I hope that our rhythm of prayer does the same for us.