{"id":2348,"date":"2014-07-25T05:01:41","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T10:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stories.daddytales.com\/?p=2348"},"modified":"2025-02-25T19:28:12","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T00:28:12","slug":"retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2014\/07\/25\/retrospective\/","title":{"rendered":"Retrospective"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Today’s tale is in the Chronicle. Typically, this is where I would put a link<\/a>\u00a0to the Chronicle article. H<\/em>owever, the Seminole Chronicle is closing its doors, and I doubt that link will work for much longer… So here is the entire tale. Enjoy!]<\/em><\/p>\n

Prior to becoming a dad, I knew absolutely nothing about little kids. I didn\u2019t know how to hold them. I didn\u2019t know how to sing to them. I didn\u2019t even know how to talk to them. As far as I was concerned, a baby was just something you tried to convince your sister not to hand to you.<\/p>\n

\n

When I became a dad, I figured things would just work themselves out. I mean, how tough could it be?<\/p>\n

My wake-up call came the very first day of being a parent. Some of my wife\u2019s friends were visiting us in the hospital, and my son was crying his eyes out.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor goodness sakes,\u201d a lady said, taking the little guy out of my arms. She held my son close and did a grandmotherly rocking sort of motion. He quieted down almost immediately, and a general relieved sort of chuckle ran through the room.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t join in the chuckling, though, because I was too busy trying not to explode.<\/p>\n

It took me several days to figure out why I got so angry, but I finally did: she\u2019d put herself between me and my son. Worse, I\u2019d let her.<\/p>\n

That was my wake-up call. It wasn\u2019t about being unprepared, but about being passive and about assuming things would work out. No more.<\/p>\n

Yes, I didn\u2019t know anything about being a dad. Yes, I had none of the skills that I was supposed to have. So what? I wasn\u2019t interested in being generically good at parenting. I didn\u2019t care about being able to quiet someone else\u2019s baby. I wanted to be my son\u2019s dad and to build a specific relationship between him and me.<\/p>\n

What happened next ended up being pretty funny. My wife would gently sing our son to sleep with classic lullabies, while I\u2019d do a whispered rendition of the Spiderman theme song: \u201cSpiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can …\u201d<\/p>\n

After baths with her, the little guy would get toweled dry with hugs and tickles. After baths with me, he\u2019d get wrapped up in the towel so tight he couldn\u2019t see, and then I\u2019d fly him around the house, pretending to go through doors and windows and out over the neighborhood.<\/p>\n

She\u2019d walk the neighborhood with him in a stroller, talking and chatting with neighbors. I\u2019d walk with him on my shoulders, tripping and stumbling and pretending to fall while he laughed and held tightly to my hands.<\/p>\n

My friends would get nervous at the prospect of being alone with their kids. I looked forward to the one-on-one time.<\/p>\n

In 2005, a friend at work pointed out that I was the strangest dad she\u2019d ever seen. Shortly after that, I started writing Daddy Tales \u2014 stories about my life as a dad.<\/p>\n

The newspaper column started about a year later. At first, I was worried about it distracting me from my family, but just the opposite happened.<\/p>\n

I was determined never to write anything that would embarrass them or make them feel bad. Instead, I was going to celebrate the quirkiness of our life and write about lessons I learned and celebrate moments we shared.<\/p>\n

Looking at my life through that lens has had a wonderful effect and added a shading to my days that I hadn\u2019t anticipated.<\/p>\n

Where is this long and winding tale leading? To a rare piece of Daddy Tales advice: Whether you\u2019re a parent, a grandparent or none of the above, throw out the standard approaches. Actively pursue the relationships you want. Make them individual. Celebrate their weirdness and recognize your mistakes.<\/p>\n

I guess that\u2019s not a typical dad lesson, but let\u2019s face it \u2014 if it were, it probably wouldn\u2019t be coming from me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Seminole Chronicle is closing its doors, which means the newspaper article that I’ve been writing for the past eight years is coming to an end. This is something of a retrospective. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-BS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33312,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348\/revisions\/33312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}