Lucas’s cousin Tya dressed me up as Princess Penelope for Father’s Day
Krista was sick with a stomach flu over the weekend so Lucas and I got to spend a lot of time together. I couldn’t have asked for a better father’s day gift than getting to spend extra time with Lucas (though I could have done without the calls of “daddy, daddy!” in the middle of the night and the multiple trips back and forth to his room when he couldn’t get back to sleep at 4 am.)
I don’t put a lot of stock in holiday’s like Father’s Day so I was all ready to do my usual downplaying… and then I saw the challenge from two inspiring dads, Chris Crass and Tomas Moniz, “to make this Father’s Day a Feminist Fathers’ Day and for dads, papas, bapas and all parents along the masculine gender spectrum to embrace feminism and resist misogyny in our families and society.” 
I encourage you to read their whole article in Truthout and think about the list of 50 ideas/actions at the end of the article (compiled from lots of different people) to help bring feminism to the heart of our families. Some of these apply more to kids that are older than Lucas, and some our hard to imagine in the context of Lucas’s disability. But a lot of it resonates. As you can see from a couple pictures in this post, I was particularly inspired by #4.
There’s no doubt that feminism has brought profound, positive change to our society, and then men/dads have also benefited greatly from those changes. There’s also still urgency around combating the worst aspects of patriarchy, highlighted by the viscous misogyny of the Isla Vista killings, and the defensive response by men to the justifiable rage of #yesallwomen.
I’ve long considered myself a feminist but it was actually a good challenge to think about how I apply that political stance to my parenting. Partly it’s a challenge because when it comes to Lucas I can’t imagine doing things any other way. Of course I want to be engaged in my son’s life, and I do my best to be an equal parent in all aspects of our family: from providing care to doing housework to staying on top of appointments to playing games in the park. This is not to say Krista and I always managed to avoid taking on more gendered parent roles; for example, I tend to be more involved in our finances while Krista has been more engaged in getting everything in order for Lucas’s school transition… and, she’s more into shopping for his clothes :) But we talk about it all together and try to even things out if it gets too skewed. I remember a couple years ago when it got really hot outside and I went to the thrift store to by Lucas some tank tops, acknowledging that it wasn’t my favorite thing. I came away with some sweet, frilly, flowered shirts that I was quite proud of — thereby encouraging Lucas to mess with gender norms at the same time!
Challenging the rigid gender binary seems like an important aspect being a feminist dad. I’m down with dressing Lucas in pink or putting flowers in our hair or going grocery shopping (the latter has become one of our favorite things to do together of late) in part because I want to show him that it ok for guys to do all that stuff. It’s better than ok! Perhaps most importantly, I like to give Lucas kisses and demonstrate my love for him. In some ways, the fact that he has a disability makes this piece more pronounced — I can be very protective of Lucas and when we’re public places and I feel alienated at how he’s being excluded because of his disability my reaction is to cuddle him close to me and show the world how much I love this wonderful little boy.
If some of this feels a little self-promoting or self-important… well, it probably is. And as Tomas and others have pointed out in the pages of Rad Dad magazine, there is a certain contradiction in constantly celebrating our efforts to be good, feminist fathers even as we try to undermine the tendency of men to dominate. So let me say too that I realize that I have a lot of work to do around this. Part of the reason I wanted to write something about feminist Father’s Day is because I still struggle being more open and in touch with my feelings when it comes to being part of a family… indeed, like many cis-gendered men I’ve been conditioned to be emotionally aloof and it’s a lot of work to unlearn that. But I’ve had some good role models… like my own dad, who found ways to be very engaged despite a grueling job, and then also worked hard to unlearn aspects patriarchy and sexism that were ingrained in him by our society.
My family (minus a sick Krista) on Father’s Day 2014
As Chris Hayes lays out in his Father’s Day commentary from a year ago, “this is the great gift of feminism to men: it took a sledge hammer to the most stultifying parts of patriarchy including a vision of fatherhood in which dads were expected to be distant, stoic, removed creatures from their kids’ lives.”
(Note: I can’t believe I just wrote about my dad “unlearning patriarchy” on Lucas’s blog. He’ll get a kick out of it, though, especially since I followed it up with a quote from Chris Hayes, his favorite progressive commentator.)
In the end, I decided not to participate in the #feministfathersday social media frenzy yesterday, in part because I pledged that as part of my commitment to be a radical dad, I would stay off of email and social media for a whole day (!) But Krista posted the picture of me wearing a tiara and earrings with my arm around Lucas (at the top of the post) and whatya know, it got lots of likes on Facebook. Alas, I fared better than others who tweeted powerful feminist messages about parenting throughout the day and were slammed but the sexist, misogynist Twitter trolls, who only managed to reinforce our point. I guess I should be grateful that Lucas’s blog doesn’t have any haters who post rude comments…
Anyway, here are some tweets from a few stellar feminist dads I know. Happy late feminist Father’s Day!
After quite a bit of hype, summer camp started today. It was a very warm day by Seattle June standards (upper 70s!), and the campers were ready. As soon as we got to camp, Lucas answered the counselors’ sweet “What’s your name?” with “you want to feed the bunnies!” With a little translation we explained what Lucas was saying (and coaxed him into saying his name). One of the many great things about the Seattle Children’s Playgarden is that they are very into kids being self-directed in play. So if Lucas wanted to feed the bunny, a counselor was going to help him find bunny food and locate a bunny. Lucas was thrilled.
school day, and all outside. I expected to find him lying alone in the grass. But no! He had rested, but he was up, sitting with two counselors and one kid. One of the guys was strumming a guitar softly, while the other one read a story about a bat to Lucas and the other camper. These counselors and so young and sweet, I almost burst into tears again as the guy reading held the book up so Lucas could see the pictures. He held the book way too low for Lucas to actually see, but I resisted jumping in immediately because Lucas looked so pleased. (I learned later that Lucas had insisted that the counselor keep reading.)
