Quality Time - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/26/fathers-day-96

This episode was supposed to be all about how important dad's are, how family relationships are, and spending time with your dad on fathers day, the only problem with that, is that I never spent any "quality" time with my dad.

There isn't a moment that I can remember of my dad and I doing anything together.

Playing games, doing chores, doing anything at all with my dad doesn't come to mind. I can remember doing things with my mom, spending time with her, playing tennis, talking about books, talking about shows, and doing a slew of things with her, but there isn't a single time that I can remember of my dad willingly spending time with me doing something with me.

There were things like fathers and sons outings with the church that we would go on, but those quickly became I'd be with my friends doing anything but hanging out with our dads and so there'd be no interaction.

The thing that I wonder the most about now that I sit back and think about this, is I wonder if my dad can come up with anything that we did together. You can't count going to my performances or watching me at a sports event, because sure, he was supportive of me doing things like that, but his actual involvement in those activities were just as a spectator.

The weird one that I'm thinking back to, and I just can't remember ANY experience with, is my dad ever doing typical father/son things with me. Fishing, wrestling, football, baseball, soccer, none of that in my mind has any relationship to my father because we never did it together. I guess we played softball in the backyard as a family a few times, but there's never a time that I can think of that it was just me and Dad throwing the ball back and forth. Even atypical things that a father could do with their son, never happened.

I get it in a way, he was busy. He had his job, he worked extra hours to pay the bills and had long days, but I'm not quite sure if that's enough of an excuse now that I think about it.


Word to the wise, or at least a goal for myself; no matter how weird or how atypical I might be, I'm going to spend time, quality, one on one, time, with my kid(s). Even if it is just sitting down and playing a game with them that they like, or trying to learn something new that they love, I'm going to do it.

I think back and remember in middle school my dad showing half an interest in MtG and trying to teach him for one night what it was all about and what was happening in it, and that it was, in fact, not devil worshiping. He didn't need to start going over the top, but a showing a simple interest in what I liked and doing something as simple as asking more questions and wanting to occasionally play with me would have changed a lot. Or at least I think it would have changed a lot.

Either way, there's a very big difference between just being a supportive parent in the audience, and a parent who is involved with their kid's life. Although I love my dad for always being in the back of concerts with his tripod set up ready to record the entire thing, I can't really remember ever having a quality moment of time where we did something together.

Quick edit-
I was thinking about this one a lot lately becuase I didn't want to believe that my dad and I had never really done anything together. Then came to my mind that in high school we would do monthly baptisms for the dead at the temple. I almost want to believe that this was "quality" time with my dad, but considering we never talked, we never really had any discussions at all, because it's the temple and you're quiet or you don't talk at all, I don't know if it really counts towards the quality time. It's an activity that we did together, on a somewhat normal schedule, but at the same time, we never actually were together when we did it. He was either stuck doing baptisms or confirmations, or I was off in a different area doing something else. It wasn't so much as father and son together doing the same thing actively together, but more father and son using each other for an excuse to do a solo activity without really interacting with the other except for the car pool.