DADWAGON

Last night, around five o’clock, I left the house. I had some reading to do, and I knew I’d be distracted by the activity at home, so I went out to a bar for a couple of hours and made some progress in “A Time of Gifts.” Still, it felt weird: Meanwhile, Jean was feeding Sasha, changing her, playing with her—bearing all those babycare responsibilities that I feel compelled to share, and indeed enjoy sharing.

Oh, to be a dad like, say, for instance, one Barack Hussein Obama, who breaks at 6 p.m. every day for dinner with his family, health-care talks be damned! Says a certain local paper:

He squeezes in parent-teacher conferences, soccer and basketball games, and broke away from an economics briefing to call his younger daughter, Sasha [Obama, not Gross—Ed.], on her eighth birthday. (She was in London with her mother.) And when the White House announced that Mr. Obama would be traveling next month to Indonesia and Australia, the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was not shy about confirming that the trip was timed to coincide with the girls’ spring break.

On the one hand, good for him! On the other, how can I—how can we—how can anyone who’s not rich—live up to that example? (Trust me, I’ve tried issuing executive orders to my daytime editors. It doesn’t work.)

And in fact, I often feel myself pulled in the opposite direction. My work involves travel, often for long-ish periods of time, and when I’m not on the road, it’s best for me to be hermetically sealed in a room with a desk. Not modes conducive to modern fatherhood. And yet—I love those things, too, and am in a way much more comfortable with them than with raising a family. Which means that maybe I’m actually… a traditional Indian dad!

Yup, according to a recent op-ed in the Times of India, traditional Indian fathers remain quite distant from their kids, including their sons, until later in life:

The reasons for a traditional father not taking a demonstratively active role in the upbringing of his infant children are not difficult to fathom. A traditional father operates under the logic of a joint family even when his own family is a nuclear one. This ideology demands that in order to preserve family cohesion, a father be restrained in the presence of his own child and divide his interest and support equally among his own and his brothers’ children. Moreover, many a young father was embarrassed to hold his infant child in front of older family members since this fruit of his loins was clear evidence of activity in that particular region.

Okay, I can’t claim to fathom all of that (um, yeah there’s been loinal activity—duh!), and since my brother as yet has no children, I don’t have to divide my interest and support at all. What I’m saying is, we should probably move to Mumbai, where my frequent trips abroad and days of subsequent sequestration will be looked upon as upholding the rigid traditions of a millennia-old society, rather than as the whims of an underpaid wanderer. Sucks for Jean and Sasha, but I’d feel better about myself, and my neighbors the Balasubramanians would have my back.

Of course, there is one downside to this strategy: My kids could turn out like Benicio del Toro in “The Wolfman,” who—according to this review in the Huffington Post—is “haunted by his father’s distant behavior” and, after his brother’s murder, returns to London to confront his father and learn the truth. (Spoiler: They are wolfmen!) So, if I interact with my kid only once in a blue moon, we’ll eventually only hang out during full moons? I think I can live with that.

From our fiddling, fire-lighting friends up north, comes this sex ed website created for teens by the Ontario government. The best part is a Flash video game where you can play one of four superheroes:

• • Wonder Vag the virgin, who can tell if you’re lying (is that a power I lost when I turned in my V-card?)
• • Willy the Kid, a short sidekick-type whose superpower is “massive rock hard strength”
• • Power Pap, a righteous babe who “believes in getting tested”
• • Captain Condom, a scientist who was turned into half-man, half-condom by a lab accident

The villain is the Sperminator, who wears a Lucha Libre mask and has two massive, rippling penis arms. Answer one of their sex-ed questions about chlamydia, condoms, etc., wrong, and the Sperminator splooges your character with an angry-looking sperm. “Aagh, right in the face,” says Wonder Vag.

So blogger Karen Sugarpants thinks this is all a horrible idea to introduce in the schools. I am tempted to defer to her because 1) she’s Canadian and 2) she has done groundbreaking work in the field of full-body itchwear. (Really, you have to click that link. Those pictures are ridiculous.)

But I am going to disagree with Sugarpants. I’m wildly pro-sex-ed, if only because I don’t have to squirm through it any more. And as ludicrous and raunchy as those characters are, I actually missed a couple questions and saw what the right answer was. (Who knew that a chlamydia test only involves peeing in a cup? Not me.) That process is called learning. And yes, for a 30-something father of small children in a blissfully clap-free marriage, it’s a little creepy to be learning that way. But it makes sense for teens.

That bit of discomfort you’re feeling? Don’t make your kids suffer because of it. The stakes are much higher for them right now.

[Thanks to DadWagon friend TheZeroBoss for Tweeting this along.]

Maybe we at Dadwagon went a little stir-crazy owing to this week’s snowstorm, because exasperation was in the air.

Consider Nathan: taking a gimlet-eyed view of V-day, griping about federal bureaucracy, proposing that a few minor injuries to his kid wouldn’t be so bad.

Or Matt, who mused on teen suicide, confronted an epic case of the runs, and decided that if his daughter wants to join him and blow some stuff up, that’d be just dandy.

Theodore — who is (and we say this with affection) shaping up as our Correspondent Most Likely to Machine-Gun the Rest of Us Any Day Now — offered his views on Suri Cruise’s evidently bizarre upbringing and the anal phase as it relates to the Super Bowl. And, on a more serious note, he addressed the frustrations of blogging about parenthood while negotiating a divorce.

As for me, I get crabby in cold and damp weather, and it showed. Another tirade about inoculations; a rant about the lack of paid paternal leave in this country; a gripe about people who think Google’s algorithms are out to get them.

At least a ray of warmth came through after the storm.

Wishing you all a warmer, drier next week, and a mood to match.