Why being a dad is scary

Being a dad is not for the faint of heart. Frankly, it can be nerve-wracking. Even downright scary.

And I’m not really referring to the obviously scary baby stuff, when you literally have no idea what you’re doing. It’s a wonder that any first-born child survives their first-time father, because I can think of no more confounding and serious a job a person undertakes with so little practical training. Women come somehow prewired for motherhood and miraculously know what to do, but most fathers have never even held a baby before they hold their own, and within a day or two, they are abruptly promoted from a green intern to the company’s CEO, all with the world’s worst resume. It’s like that dream when you find yourself on stage with a trombone in your hands and are expected to play it having no clue of even how to correctly hold it.

But there you are, standing beside your car in that covered pick-up area of the hospital. A polite but clearly disapproving nurse makes sure the baby’s car seat is properly seat-belted in before handing you your tiny replicant of yourself and sending you on your way out into a world akin to a river full of hungry crocodiles. That drive home from the hospital is easily the slowest and most careful drive of your entire life, both before the arrival of the baby and after.

But no, I’m not talking about the baby fear, which is bad enough. I’m talking about the anxiety that begins to creep in when your child — especially if it’s a boy — manages to reach, say, middle-school age despite your many failings as his father. This is when you, the dad, begin teaching your son life skills. You know, things like how to change the oil in a car, or how to fix a fuse, or replace the string of a weed eater, or power-wash a sidewalk.

Why is this so scary? Because, number one, who the hell knows how to do those things?? And number two, your little boy, who holds you up as the Knower of All Things is watching.

There seems to be some collective notion that physiologically becoming a father automatically transforms one into Bob Villa, the guy from This Old House, or perhaps, Richard Proenneke, the famous Alaskan naturalist who we watch build his own cabin with traditional tools every year during the PBS fundraiser on TV. These men probably spent most of their lives learning and perfecting these amazing skills, but simply by successfully impregnating our wives, we normal dads are expected to be magically imbued with the same kind of manly knowledge and then, are pass this on to our sons and sometimes, daughters.

I mean, most of the time, I can’t even clearly SEE or REACH the item in question, let alone repair it. I mean, what exactly IS a carburetor or a deckplate or a duplex rabbet plane or a spackle??

Making matters worse is the fact that there is always a real-life handyman in our circle of friends, whether a relative or a neighbor or one of the Cub Scout dads who insists on building the campfire, who fits the bill and by comparison, makes you appear like the most unmanly man on the planet. This guy will waltz in with his giant tool bag, say something like “Oh, no problem. Glad to do it,” and perform some mechanical miracle while you stand by making lame conversation and checking your phone for imaginary important messages. This guy can always grow a better beard than you, too.

So what are us average, unskilled-but-good-at-getting-our-wives-pregnant dads supposed to do? We’re men, too, right?! We have testosterone!

Well, I’m here to give you the secret in one word, although it sounds like two. It’s a word that was unavailable to our fathers and grandfathers, much to their disappointment. It didn’t even exist then, but now it does. Ready? Here it is:

YouTube.

YouTube is your friend. YouTube is there in the wee hours of the night, when nobody is watching, to anonymously teach us everything from how to fix a leaky faucet to recharging the air-conditioner in our cars to correctly sharpening a chain saw to using white vinegar to kill mold and weeds and get the rust off the grates of the barbecue grill, and yes, those examples are very specific because I’ve used it for those exact things, among others. And I’m not all that ashamed to admit it.

Of course, to make all this YouTube magic work, you’ve got to happen to own all the correct tools and materials, and you never, never, ever, do, because if you did, you wouldn’t need YouTube to show you how to do things. So what happens? You inevitably end up drilling a 3/16-inch hole in the drywall for a wall anchor that is made to fit a 1/8-inch hole because your 1/8-inch drill bit has been lost for years in the bottom of some random drawer, so now you’re screwed because you can’t make a hole smaller, and before you can stop it, an F-bomb slips out. And all the while your very impressionable 12-year-old son is watching carefully and taking notes.

THIS is why being a father is so scary!