the first father's day

Watch enough Maury and you know that it doesn't take much to become a father. You don't even have to intend to become a father! And some bitter women, some rightfully so, will refer to men as "sperm donors" as if there is some special connotation to being called a father. There isn't. Even when women do horrible things to their children, they are still referred to as "bad moms." Nobody seems as eager to take away the title of "mother" as they do "father," as if it is earned.

"Any man can be a father. It takes someone special to be a dad." ~Author Unknown

And therein lies the difference. Today is the hub's first Father's Day, and it's not a "kind of" or "sorta" thing. He is a father by virtue of having made a baby. A baby that's still baking, but a baby nonetheless. And I celebrate that because he'll be a great daddy. Anyone who has ever attended high school knows that the girls who give it all up to strangers, the girls who think that by trading sex for love someone will think they are special, are the girls who never had a daddy. There is no more an important relationship in a daughter's life than the one she has with her dad - it shapes, in whatever small way, the relationships she will have with men for the rest of her life. And it is this special relationship Baby B and the hub will have that is so important, because I will teach her to be a woman and he will teach her to never settle for less than a real man. Or no man at all. Sense of self is taught and must be practiced.

So, congrats to my hub on this, his first of many Father's Days. He will become a daddy, whether it be upon hearing her first cry, or feeling her hand grip his finger, or one of the other thousands of things she will do to grab onto his heart. And once you become a daddy, that is it. You are done.

Happy Father's Day to my dad, catching marlin in the sky, and my hub, and all the wonderful daddies out there in real land.