Sweetie, Is That Your Grandpa?

It shouldn’t be hard to be a good father.

I read frequently how mothers feel fathers

Get credit for the slightest accomplishments 

While mothers cope with relentless scrutiny,

Endless murmurings of inadequacies,

Rising waters lapping at their ears and thoughts.

And so many accounts of awful fathers!

Callous, cruel, indifferent, and abandoning—

Silent, wrathful, drunk, beating, and molesting—

Against such a backdrop, the mild-mannered man

Who fumbles with diapers and understanding

What his children want from him seems not half-bad.

But awful fathers, like wicked stepmothers

And looming storms, form a genre of their own,

The more dreadful for being more plausible,

And I find myself trembling with the terror

Of a priori stains, original sin

Similar to what my childhood faith believed,

The mark of Cain, engendered, the mark of man—

A Bayesian calculation that, given 

I‘m a father, I’m likely lesser parent,

That the best that can be expected of me

Is decency and an approximation 

Of the Hippocratic oath. Don’t do much harm.

I get vertigo when my child looks at me,

Seriously, and pleads—Papa, just don’t die.

It’s hard to be a good father, I won’t lie.