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Whatever Happened to "Daddy"?

© Richard Maffeo

"Nathan doesn't want to call me 'Mommy' anymore," my wife complained softly as she sat down next to me on the couch. "He says it's too baby-ish."

Baby-ish? At nine years old he's an adult already? But as I mused over this new ripple in our home I suddenly realized - Nathan doesn't call me daddy, any longer. In fact, our two teens rarely use that endearing term. And I wondered, When did "Dad," replace "daddy"? All at once I felt awash . . . as if something warm and fuzzy had been replaced with a wet and sticky.

Why is it I like "daddy" so well? Perhaps because it reminds me of an earlier day when my children needed me . . . really needed me. Not just to bring them to the park or to birthday parties; but to feed them, diaper them, to clothe them.

Intellectually I understand they still need me (though I would hesitate to offend them by suggesting it). I know they need me - desperately so - to do things like turn off the television and talk with them about their school work. Or their friends. Or their future plans. Or to just talk about nonsense. They need me to spend time with them - not just around them. They need me to monitor what they watch on TV, what they listen to on the radio and what they read. They need me to say "no" when I should say no - and stick to it. And "yes" when I can say yes - and stick to it. Yes, I understand these things with my intellect.

But my heart is not very smart.

Daddy. I sometimes ask myself, almost as if to check on my own progress, how does one really "daddy"? (I know I've used a noun as a verb). This question is more than academic for me because I have only one shot at being a daddy to each of my children. I don't want to blow it.

True, there is plenty of advice out there. Bookshelves overflow with how-tos written by people with alphabet-soup strings of credentials. But few will agree on all the various points of effective daddying.

There is a popular expression in the southwest Missouri Ozarks: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. A little folksy, perhaps, but there's a lot of wisdom tied up in those few short words. So because I can't afford to make a mess of my daddying, I concluded the best place to get my parenting advice ought to be where daddies have garnered advice for millennia, and with pretty good results: The Good Book.

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