Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Father's Day


Who is tired of all the dead beat dads? Let me see those hands!

Who out there is even more tired of hearing about the dead beat dad "epidemic?"

Yeah, me too.

I'm not sure when it started exactly, but the dead beat parent is almost automatically assumed to be the male figure of the parent-child relationship, sometimes it even boils down to the male-female relationship. There are SOME of you ("some" meaning not all) single mothers, who bash a man's ability to effectively raise the child(ren) you share together, simply due to the fact that HE doesn't want anything to do with YOU! Why is that? I mean, I know several fathers who are phenomenal at what they do...pause...and the scariest part of that characteristic is...they're only going to get better at the whole parenting thing.



Getting personal: my brother, my cousin, and more than 50% of the dudes that I call my homies, have that father role down packed. And honestly, it seems to come natural to them. No struggling, no gray hairs (well, maybe a little), and as I am sure that there may be some form of baby mama drama present, not enough to allow them to short change their j.r.s. These dudes make it look easy...even more dangerous for me, one of the "Last of the Mohicans," they actually make it look fun.

As I write this article, as a matter of fact, I'm holding a text conversation with my brother. See, my nephew, for the first time ever, is supposed to be spending the night at my crib tonight; His pop, my brother, the one who was an absolutely horrible child, I'm talking...who do you know that has ever seen the rooftop of West Philly High...keeps hitting me via text: "Yo pizzle, do you even know how to change a diaper, just curious?" "Don't forget the pacifier from mom's." "I'm going to come pick him up at 9." "Make that 7." I laugh them off, because I know It's not a trust issue. It's a good dad issue, and that, I can live with. I spoke to another one of my homies, while I tried to make sense of this post. He was telling me how he just booked some spot right outside of Philly for his daughters' 1st birthday party. Now he could have called me about booking a local club for his own birthday party, right? I would have been forced to check him for that. But my man frequently posts twitpics of him and his shorty out and about. It's not a surprise when I hear that he's with her. Another scenario: My cousin has purposefully groomed his youngbol to a point where, I would rather hold a conversation with his 2 year old then most of my peers on any given day. Real rap. Those are the types of parents, the kind of dads more specifically, that I watch and take note of and the ones we should be talking about.

Now, sometimes when you give a person, or group, a compliment, especially one as big as the one I just spent 3,178 characters on, the receiver allows it to go to their head. But I have some advice for that: pops, don't let this post do that for you. It's actually kind of embarrassing that I even feel the need to publicly show love to good parenting. Because bottom line is, this type of fatherhood used to be the standard.

My intention is simply to shed light on the fact that there are good dads out here...the same is true for shitty mothers. Yup, you exist too. You're out here PYTing, Sugar House casino-ing, and tweeting the hell out of your daily adventures, while you just so happen to be missing the biggest party you could ever attend...you're child's life.

Now, where are all my GREAT parents? The ones that might miss that barbershop/hair salon weekend appointment because you had to plan an impromptu outing with [insert random baby name here]. OR the parents that have ever had the "I can't fuck with that MiXX party cause I'm chilling with [insert Indianapolis Colts' Manning brother's name here]" thought. I think they should be the new epidemic. #BigUps y'all...show em how to do this.

Thought this fit here...






SCREAM @ ME!!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

#BigUps to my other homie who spends his whole Saturday in the park with his youngbol everyweek too...

SCREAM @ ME!!!

Anonymous said...

damn dawg dis jawn real right here

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