Dumb Ol’ Dad.
Our beloved caricature, defiantly unembarrassed, singing out of key on purpose.
We buy him a grilling spatula shaped like a golfing wedge and proudly give him a “Kiss My Bass” baseball cap that’s about as funny as all the bad jokes he tells over and over and over.
We scale his shoulders, punch his belly, roll our eyes at his incessantly long stories and needle him as he suffers to fix the toilet.
We treat him like we’d never treat our mom (who herself seems to enjoy getting her licks in).
We aim our arrows at him because we know he is impervious (or at least he is committed to thinking he is): After all, he tells us, if we think the pun is bad, it’s only because we didn’t think of it first.
He revels in his Dadness, for he is a member of a distinguished tribe: secure enough to be the butt of jokes, willing to take the blame whether guilty or not, OK with Father’s Day cards that point out just how over the hill he is, etc., etc. …
We love him more than we feel comfortable telling him.
And he, well, loves us back … and all that stuff.
* * * * *
Bobby White is splashing water on his 4-year-old grandson, Luke Hebert, as the two sit at the edge of the fountain at Falls Park at the Reedy.
Bobby is visiting from New Orleans. He’s in town for the Father’s Day weekend to keep his grandson while his daughter, Wendy Hebert, and her husband spend the weekend at a music festival.
The dutiful grandfather and father just got his Father’s Day present early A<3> a T-shirt from Mast General Store that reads, “I’m Not Right In My Left Brain And I’ve Got Nothing Left In My Right Brain.”
He saw it in the store and liked it. Wendy hadn’t bought him a gift yet, so she bummed some money off her Dad and bought him his Father’s Day present with his own money.
How sooo Dumb Ol’ Dad.
“That’s about right, really,” Bobby says of the shirt’s message.
It would have been OK if he hadn’t gotten anything for Father’s Day, he says. You know, it’s just a day when greeting card companies and cologne makers get rich, anyway.
Sure Dad wouldn’t make a big deal if he were forgotten, Wendy says, but be careful scratching too close to the surface.
“He’s not like all dads,” she explains. “He’s hypersensitive.”
“Wellll …”
“No, you are. Real sentimental.”
“I don’t know, I guess I am.”
* * * * *
These days, a brave new world awaits each man thrust into the duty of fatherhood.
As the flood of women entering the workforce redefined the structure of the World War II-era nuclear family, the definition of being a father took on a new meaning, says Dr. Paul Kooistra, a Furman University sociology professor versed in family sociology.
Enter the birth of Dumb Ol’ Dad, spawn of the modern-day economy.
The notion of the stoic, distant father returning after a day of bread-winning separated from his children has faded over the past handful of decades, Kooistra says.
Fathers play a more intimate role in child-rearing as more mothers venture outside the home. Duties once reserved for a housewife are now shared — and dads are left to feel their way into a role they have little experience in.
And even if the father works and the mother stays home, the expectations of what it means to be a father have entered into a new realm.
“Almost by necessity there’s become a forced closeness between fathers and their kids,” Kooistra says. “There’s kind of an awkwardness.”
The notion of Dad as a loveable, bumbling, ever-culpable buffoon is ubiquitous in American culture.
Call it the Homer Simpson Syndrome.
Never on Mother’s Day would newspaper ads market a Superman T-shirt for both child and mother as they did for dads this week leading up to Father’s Day.
There’s the ever-present “Dad at Leisure” (pictures of a khakied man baiting a fishing pole and resting his golf-gloved hand against a shade tree) and “Dad the Fixer” (obscenely bright flashlight, sleek air compressor, big hammer).
“Go to a store and look at what kind of greeting cards there are for mothers versus fathers,” Kooistra says. “Maybe that has to do with a little bit of hesitance about showing emotion to fathers. Whereas you might gush your love for your mother, you may feel this emotion for your father but it just seems goofy to express it. So it gets expressed in humor.”
* * * * *
“Madison, why do you girls always pick on Daddy so much?” Matt Jerabek asks his oldest daughter, 6-year-old Madison, as his family of four skips rocks along the Reedy River.
“Becaaaause. …” she answers.
And there it is. Simply … because.
“What’s your favorite toy?” Elise Jerabek asks the couple’s youngest daughter, 4-year-old Karli.
“Daddeeee.”
This dad is the one who puts the girls’ clothes on backwards — who, the couple agrees, teaches all the bad habits.
“It’s quite entertaining,” Elise says. “I’ll go put them in bed, we’ll say our prayers — and his idea of putting them in bed is to shake them up, throw them around, toss them up and then they’re ready for bed.”
And for this, he gets what he deserves. A father under siege.
“They say, ‘When in doubt, blame Daddy,’” Matt says. “They gang up on me all the time. ‘Mommy’s No. 1.’ You know.”
John Eric Sullivan has earned his Dumb Ol’ Dad I.D. card through years of hard work.
John is here at the Cleveland Park playground with his 4-year-old daughter, Chinnesey, who normally would be in preschool if it weren’t for her father’s insistence on spending as much time with her as he can.
She’s been with him all afternoon and won’t let him leave. John has been doing this dad thing for two decades now. His two other children are much older (he has a 22-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter).
John’s oldest daughter, Nora, refuses to go out with him to the grocery store when he wears his sandals with socks (a classic Dumb Ol’ Dad fashion statement). Her Father’s Day card for him this year is titled “Old Fart.”
“A mom would never get that card,” he says.
And somehow, he knows why.
He’s a second-generation dad with gray-sprinkled hair who builds tents on the bed and when he puts his preschooler down for the night lets her paint lipstick and eye shadow on his face and tie bows in his hair.
Nora captured the Dumb Ol’ Dad moment for posterity.
“I’m on video,” he says, “and I can’t wait until she grows up so she can see what she did to me. My wife thinks I’m crazy. But a child’s only going to be around you so long.”
ou’re right, Dumb Ol’ Dad.
But don’t worry: Long after we’ve left your home and your bear hugs, we’ll remember your sacrifice.
With a tie, a bottle of cologne and one of those bouncing-ball thingies that are supposed to relax you.
We know you’ll like it, whether you do or not.
