When Joaquin was born, my wife Janine and I were renting a small room in her mother’s house. Somehow we had crammed the belongings of our two-bedroom apartment into a space less than half the size. After her maternity leave expired, Janine opted not to return to her job for a multitude of reasons, leaving us to subsist on my nonprofit salary.

Two years and two months later, our real estate agent handed us the keys to a magnificent house with views of the San Francisco Bay; a home where Joaquin (and his soon-to-arrive baby brother) could grow up. It surpassed all of the criteria that Janine and I’d set when we brainstormed our ideal home.

What happened? Janine and I both got new jobs. We became more frugal. Most of all, my beliefs about money changed. Rather than seeing it as a tool of oppression, I started to view it as a means to freedom.

It never would have happened without Joaquin. When he was barely able to lift his head, I looked down at him in my arms and vowed to teach him that there were no limits to what he could do with his life. I swore to show him how to be fulfilled in all areas of human existence, simultaneously challenging myself to model fulfillment for him.

Does it cost more money to have kids? Of course it does. But becoming a parent could unleash a new-found abundance that you never knew existed. It did for me.

Image: Janine Macbeth

I do my best to keep a safe distance when Joaquin approaches strangers, while making sure he doesn’t cross any boundaries (a somewhat foreign concept for a toddler, I know). I feel a parental obligation to ensure that when he tries to grab someone’s attention, he does it in a way that isn’t overly forceful. I basically observe the attitude of the adult to determine their level of patience with a willful toddler, paying particular attention to fathers, partly because I have a belief that they will be less accepting than moms and partly because I’m generally interested in how dads interact with children. With very few exceptions, my concern has been unwarranted. Nearly every dad Joaquin has ever approached has engaged him with understanding and kindness.

This past weekend, while we were perusing one of the local farmer’s markets, Joaquin ran up to a father who was sitting cross-legged with his young daughter in his lap, put his hand on the sitting father’s thigh, tilted his head to left to make sure he was in the line of sight, and promptly launched into a protracted soliloquy about the grass he had just tossed into the nearby stream. The father listened intently and traced some tracks in the dirt beside him for the train that Joaquin was clutching in his hand. Joaquin stopped for a moment, peered down at the two parallel lines in the dirt and tested them out with his favorite black metal steam engine.

One of the great things about becoming a dad is that we don’t have to limit a parental outlook to our own children. We can start to see our child in every child. By embracing the universal aspect of fatherhood, we discover one of its unexpected treasures: that it opens us up to be loving, caring fathers in all of our personal interactions. Even the ones that only last a few moments by the side of a stream at a farmer’s market.

Image: Janine Macbeth

The mommy/daddy wars don’t make parenting choices easier. Just try to find an impartial viewpoint on any child-rearing topic. Hold versus put down. Family bed versus crib. Bottle versus breastfeed. Back versus tummy. Disposable versus cloth. Soothe versus let cry. The San Francisco Chronicle even recently dipped its institutional toe into the debate over sex in the presence of a co-sleeping child (as if co-sleeping itself wasn’t contentious enough).

The myriad disputes surrounding child-rearing (and how we feel about them) present a fantastic opportunity to do something parents aren’t typically known for: take a step back, put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and let go of any judgment. In fact, cultivating non-judgment  may be the best thing we glean from the mommy/daddy wars.

Not judging doesn’t mean we acquiesce to everything that someone else says or does. That would be foolish. It just means that we don’t see a person’s opinion or action as a final statement about their essential nature. It also means that we’re grown up enough to acknowledge the existence of multiple perspectives that merit consideration. We may not like what another person says about child-rearing, but we can still treat them with compassion. And isn’t that the way we want our kids to relate to others?

Image: Janine Macbeth

The most important relationship for a new dad, however, isn’t the one with our child. It isn’t even the partnership with our spouse or significant other.

The must crucial fatherhood relationship is with our own dad.

One of the first decisions I made upon learning of my wife’s pregnancy was to sell my fast, sexy Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo for a family-friendly car. It was a sensible decision, but practicality wasn’t my primary motivation. I wanted to prove that I would, unlike my dad, fully embrace the responsibilities of fatherhood from day one.

Early parenthood entails snap decisions based on little expertise under the duress of sleep deprivation. If we want to be emotionally present to make those decisions with clarity and confidence, we need to eliminate unnecessary volatility. Our judgment must be unhindered by outside influences.

Our father and his parenting choices have the potential to lord over our experience as a parent. Failure to reconcile our relationship with our dad puts at risk a golden opportunity to let go of an obstacle that keeps us from being totally ourselves. That doesn’t mean that we have to forget what our dad did, it just means we have to forgive it. If we don’t, we’re letting him run the show.

Image: Chloe Brubaker

Fear and anxiety dominated the first few months of my life as a father. The practicalities of trying to figure out how to do things I had never done before were a big part of it. You should have seen me and my wife trying to burp Joaquin for the first time. The four week baby care class we took had somehow managed to cover everything except proper burping technique. So Janine held Joaquin up in a sitting position on our bed while I patted him on the back with one hand and supported his head with the other. Our acrobatics didn’t quell his gas or our feelings of incompetence. Thankfully, my mother-in-law saved us all by demonstrating proper on-the-shoulder burping method.

Baby logistics aside, what I feared most was being a failure. As I surveyed my life, all I saw were the rotting carcasses of perceived mistakes and choices gone wrong. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to care for Joaquin on a practical or emotional level. I feared that I would pass along my feelings of low self-worth to him. I feared raising a son who wouldn’t be equipped to take advantage of all that being a human entails.

I wanted to show him how to be a fulfilled, happy, prosperous person, a task I felt woefully incapable of.

I came to realize that underneath my layer of fear was an emotion that I hadn’t ever experienced with quite the same intensity: love. Becoming a father introduced me to a love so bright and large that it couldn’t be contained in my previous way of thinking about myself or the world. It was like trying to capture starlight in a shotglass. In order to truly accept and be present with my love for Joaquin, I was going to have to tear down some pretty solid walls that I had relied on for a long time to keep me emotionally safe. I was going to have to (gulp) change.

Like most men, I wasn’t particularly well-equipped for the type of love that can transform. Up until then, I had plenty of practice parrying anything that had even the remote appearance of vulnerability. Luckily, something came along that obliterated my emotional defenses. It weighed less than 9 pounds and measured a hair under 2 feet. But it packed quite a wallop.

Image: Lome Aseron

Although I think some of the criticism surrounding Go the F*** to Sleep is overblown, I agree with Amy Sohn in her excellent Babble article that it exposes a double standard about what fathers and mothers, particularly those who write about parenting, can get away with. I love edgy mommy bloggers. I appreciate their honesty and willingness to share (sometimes unconventional) solutions to parenthood’s challenges. They represent a way of thinking that doesn’t fit within older paradigms of woman as the sacrificial lamb at the alter of “yes, dear” motherhood.

In addition to shedding light on the discrepancy in how mothers and fathers are treated, Go the F*** to Sleep does a disservice to dads. In the book’s world, it’s OK for dad’s frustration to boil over into profanity, even if it is out of his child’s earshot. This may not be father as disengaged wage earner, but is it really an upgrade? I keep rooting for the kid to tell his dad to go the f*** to work.

I have no doubt that many parents identify with Go the F*** to Sleep. I went through my own challenges with sleep deprivation. I begrudged getting up in the middle of the night to tend to my first son, not so much because I was losing precious rest, but because it reminded me of how much my life had changed.

I can also see how frustrated parents find the book funny. A sense of humor around the trials and tribulations of parenting is something we could definitely use more of. But I hope there will be a day when Go the F*** to sleep represents a bygone era of fatherhood and dads laugh at it rather than laugh with it.

Image: Janine Macbeth

The thought of having a daughter triggered questions about how I would treat a female child. Would I show affection for her in the same way as I did to Joaquin? Would I discipline her differently? Would I have the same expectations of her? Would I become the stereotypical dad who greets his daughter’s boyfriends at the door with a shotgun? As she got older, would I stifle her sexuality out of my own inability to accept her sexual development? Could I be a model of positive masculinity that would foster trust in men while at the same time instilling confidence that her worth was not dependent on male approval?

One question that kept recurring was how I would parent a girl in the context of society’s gender biases, particularly with regard to children. When Joaquin started watching TV, I noticed the imbalance between male and female characters on kids shows. Even my beloved Sesame Street, which was the subject of a piece I wrote for ColorLines Magazine, is dominated by male characters. Zoe, the most prominent female character on Sesame Street, didn’t make her appearance until 1993, nearly 25 years after the show first aired. It wasn’t until 2006 that Sesame Street introduced a leading female character, Abby Cadabby. Would I be more concerned about the impact of gender imbalance on children’s television if we had a daughter? At what age would it be appropriate to talk to her about gender identity? Should I attempt to transcend identification based on gender, as this preschool in Sweden is doing?

Like we did with Joaquin, we declined to learn the gender of our second child until the birth. When Mico was born, disappointment that he wasn’t a girl was the farthest thing from our minds. Though his entrance into the world was extremely gentle, we’ve decided that he will be the last baby that Janine births. The Panama dress, folded lovingly, remains in a storage container in our garage.

There’s always adoption.

Image: Janine Macbeth

When my wife, Janine, got pregnant for the second time, we both agreed that we wanted a daughter. We loved our son, Joaquin, but we wanted balance and the opportunity to parent a child of each gender. At least that’s what we jointly stated as our motivation. Secretly, I had my own reason.

I wanted to have a daughter to test the degree of my own sexism.

Children are great mirrors. Maybe it’s the innate knowledge that we’re consciously and unconsciously transmitting information to our kids, wide open receptacles that they are, that makes us reflect on our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. Or perhaps it’s just having another person around all the time, like the first time you lived with someone you were in a relationship with.

I consider myself a pretty good ally to women. I do my best to observe my thinking around gender and how I allow it to impact my choices. When a woman was running for mayor of the city I live in, for example, I realized that part of my resistance to voting for her was based on a mistaken belief that she wouldn’t be able to navigate the male-dominated political system as well as her male opponent would. There were other factors, but gender affected my thinking.

So a large part of my motivation for wanting a girl was to uncover any gender bias I might be carrying. Not that having a son doesn’t provide its own opportunity to work with gender roles. More people than I expected told me how lucky I was to have a son after Joaquin was born. I wondered what would they have said if he’d been a girl: there’s always next time?

Discovering my own gender bias wasn’t the only motivation for my desire for a daughter. When we were in Panama during our first pregnancy, Janine bought the cutest little baby dress. I fantasized about summer months when our future daughter could wear it to the park and be the envy of all the other parents. When a friend of mine told me how he loved to braid his daughter’s hair, I nodded knowingly. Visions of pig-tails and patent leather Mary Janes danced in my head.

Stayed tuned for Part 2…

Image: Janine Macbeth

With this shifting landscape comes great opportunity. Dads are free to define fatherhood on their own terms. We are taking on more parenting responsibilities and assuming duties that were previously designated for mothers only. In my father’s time, it was revolutionary to change a diaper. Nowadays, other than birthing and breastfeeding, everything is fair game.

Paradigm shifts often cause confusion, and fatherhood is no exception. It’s easier to tweak someone else’s work than to start with a blank canvass. We know we don’t want to parent the same way our fathers did, but we’re not quite sure what it’s supposed to look like for us. This uncertainty, as uncomfortable as it might be on a personal level, is also fertile ground for transformation. The blank canvass provides a great opportunity to find out who we are and paint our own picture of fatherhood with authenticity and integrity. In order to do that, though, we have to find out who we really are.

Check it out.