A Waffle Making Dad

Darwin Catholic makes waffles for the family and muses about fatherhood and ... of course ... waffle making. Being Darwin, he gets to some interesting places. Here's some:

I've read compelling writing by women writers about the emotional labor they do to keep a family going. I wouldn't claim that for my tribe, we waffle making dads. We're not particularly emotional. But we try to do our labor. We make weekend breakfasts and dinner once or twice a week when we're around in time do to the prep. We do the "you'll have to talk to your father when he gets home" conversations, and the careful diffusing conversations with daughters entering their teens who at times decide that their mothers don't understand them at all and Dad is the only person they will listen to. We mow the lawn and take the trash out and get the oil changed more or less on time. We pay the bills and track the finances and deal with a host of practical issues while having the unfortunate tendency to assume that everything is okay in people's emotional lives unless they actually tell us otherwise.

The waffle making dad can seem like a pretty out-dated archetype these days. The up to the moment guy is a sensitive feminist ally who admires kick-ass women and decries male privilege ...

I'm not sure how to address that whole set of ideals and concerns, the people who snappily say that women are giving up a lot to teach a young man to make waffles, so I'll just leave that to one side. My words are to the young men of the world. And I'll say: being a waffle making dad is not a bad aspiration. In a world that can't seem to make up its mind what, if anything, it wants from masculinity, many of the archetypes available out there are not great. ...

Now go read the whole thing!