by Joe Flowers

Created on: June 15, 2008

How To Be The Best Father and Husband You Can Be

I don't pretend to be an expert on being a great husband or a great father. I have only been doing it all for two years and nine months. I've been married for that long, and father for only the last four of those months. So, if you're looking for the key to being a great husband or father in these words, look again. My thoughts are simple, and can be offensive, since I mention God, which has apparently become a curse word along with many four-letter words as I have noticed it "bleeped" out on television a few times as of late.

My wife understands that the ego of a man, particularly her man, needs to be stroked from time to time. She always tells me what a great father I am, and I tell her that she has to say that because she's my wife, and that she probably dislikes me even more as her husband. She screws up her face and replies, "You're a great husband. If you didn't treat me well, I would have been out of here a long time ago. My mother taught me more self-respect than that. And if I thought you weren't a good father, I would let you know. You should know me well enough by now to know that." And she is right.

In reflecting on what has made me the best father and husband I can be, I can honestly come up with only two factors:

1) Observation. Since getting married almost three years ago, and since having a child four months ago, I have become keenly aware of the way in which my father treats my mother as a husband, and how my father treats myself and my siblings as a father. I also know, and have known, for as long as I can remember, what kind of a husband and father I want to be. Therefore, by observing my father and other husbands and fathers around me, I can incorporate the best of all of them into who I am in those roles. Rather than "taking what I like, and leaving the rest," as the 12-steppers are so fond of saying, I take what I know is good and virtuous out of the husbandly and fatherly behaviors I see, assimilate them into my life, and leave the rest far, far behind. I do not, for example, want to adopt my father's point of view that women belong in the kitchen, which is exactly what he is teaching my little brother, who is sixteen years my junior and still living at home. Perhaps my father is just tired of being a father, maybe even tired of being a husband because I was certainly never raised to think like that. I do what I can to help my little brother understand the chivalry that I still hold in the

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