Wait Until Your Father Gets Home
The most terrifying words a child of the baby boom generation ever heard: “I’m going to tell your father about this when he gets home.”
Or, “Your father is not going to like it when I tell him what you’ve done.”
Or, “I can only imagine what your father is going to do when he hears about this.”
My ongoing unscientific poll tells me nearly every individual raised in the 1950s and early 1960s remembers the sinking feeling in the stomach that struck upon hearing one of those variations on the “wait until your father gets home” theme. The speaker, needless to say, was one’s mother who – take note, mothers of 2024 – HAD NO PROBLEM UNLEASHING HER HUSBAND’S DISCIPLINARY INCLINATIONS ON THEIR CHILDREN.
And he, furthermore, had no problem occupying the role of the “heavy” when one of the kids required correction. As a 1950s dad once told me, “I looked at it as my obligation to [my wife].”
Read that sentence again, slowly. The father in question was first and foremost a husband. His first obligation was not to the children but to his wife. One of the kids had pushed her a tad too far and was going to pay the price for having done so.
Woe is America that since 1970, only the rare child has experienced the mind-numbing terror of waiting for dad to come home. The terror was so consuming that nothing Dad did even mattered much at that point. If he only looked at you, shook his head ruefully and walked away (which wasn’t unusual), the dread of the last several hours had done the job.
Today’s parents – not all, but entirely too many and probably a majority – do not act as if their primary obligation is to one another. They are in more of a relationship with their children than they are with one another. They want to be seen by their children as friends. They even sleep with their children which is a metaphor if there ever was one. In many of the families in question, the parent-child relationship, I’m absolutely convinced beyond a shred of doubt, substitutes for a marriage that is on paper only.
Today’s mom doesn’t threaten her children with the Wrath of Dad the Enforcer. She doesn’t want to be seen by the kids as a snitch. Furthermore, today’s dad doesn’t want to be The Enforcer. He doesn’t want to be the heavy because he wants the kids to like him. I just burst out laughing, by the way.
The kids like him all right. They like him because he’s a pushover. They can, and do, manipulate him. They intuitively know that he poses no threat whatsoever to their supremacy in the home.
At this very moment, a very real and very tragic actual conversation comes to mind. It involved a father – I call guys like him HINOs, which you’re going to have to figure out – and myself.
JR: “What do you do when you come home from work?”
HINO: “I play with my three kids.”
JR: “Why do you do that?”
HINO: “Huh? Why do I do what?”
JR: “Why, when you come home from being gone all day, do you, first thing, play with your kids?”
HINO: “I haven’t seen ‘em all day, John.”
JR: “That’s interesting.”
HINO: “Why?”
JR: “Because you haven’t seen your wife all day either. I wonder why you feel that your first obligation, when you come home from work, is to your children and not your wife.”
HINO: [He stares at me like I’ve just altered his state of consciousness, which I hope I did.] “Uh, um, well, uh, I mean, uh, well, um, uh, well, I mean….”
That conversation just about sums it up.
Copyright 2024, John K. Rosemond
Just the title of this made my stomach tighten 😆. That was such a powerful phrase growing up. You knew mom was serious and you had to spend the rest of the day dreading it. I was an 80s/90s kid and from my memory ours was not the only household where that was the situation.
My mom uttered those words in the early 1970's quite a few times. And, we FEARED my dad. Funny story, I'm in my 50's. I few years ago, my brother and I took my dad on a guy's weekend. While we were sharing sentimental anecdotes, I related, "Dad, I just wanted to be like you and be on your team so much. Whenever my brother and I fought over sitting behind you in the car, that was why I was fighting for the seat." You can likely guess how my older brother replied, "I wanted to be behind dad because he couldn't reach me as easily." And, here's a follow up anecdote. My parents divorced when I was 11. When my father's second marriage started to fail, he agreed to go to marital counseling. Soon thereafter I remember this very clear change of priorities. One morning, I said, "Come on dad, let's go play some tennis." He told me no and said, that his first priority was getting time with his wife and getting to all the things on her to do list. Putting her first was weird, a shock, but we knew it was right. And, those changes which he made while we were at formative ages in our early teen years and have made such a lasting impact on my brother and me and set the tone for our 30+ year marriages. The Judeo-Christian home structure, complete with its patriarchal (saying this with a wink and a grin) albeit sacrificial headship is critical for the development of young people, imho.