DadGrind/#GradGrind - Observations on Modern Black Fatherhood

Behold my first BFJ post since starting graduate school. ?Wasn't sure it would happen. Don't know when it will happen again.

I considered naming this post something like #dadgrad, but as you will see, my goal is to keep these two roles as separate as possible.?I am, of course, also a husband but #husbandgrind, #hubbygrind, and #spousegrind all suck.

It?s 1:30pm on a Sunday. I write this, having just retired The Tyrant to his mid-day slumber. Before that we had playtime with the neighbors. Before that, from 7am to 12pm, as our babysitter watched Zo, I put the finishing touches on a paper, arguing that Marx?s methodology of historical materialism posed a fundamental challenge to the capitalist concept of the commodity as exchange value.

The Good Doctor is away, working a shift of indecent duration. By the time she gets home, if all goes according to plan, The Tyrant will have had all the times: dinnertime, bathtime, storytime, and blessed be the bedtime. What follows is time for me to revise my paper.

I'm four weeks into the first year of my doctoral program; the year that, as department legend has it, is the most difficult. Since time is of the essence, efficiency is the name of the game. Whatever it is that I am doing I make sure that I am doing the damnedest out of the damn thang.

During family time we talk, play, and do things together. If I?m at the library I'm fully engrossed in my work, not surfing the web, not chatting, but diligently working. At the gym?I don't saunter around hoping to bump into an acquaintance or fiddle with my playlist. I do rapid-fire pull-ups.

At this moment I doubt I could hold a coherent conversation about a single current event because for the past month I haven?t read anything more recent than one hundred years old. Superfluous text messages and emails go unanswered. And I have all but committed social media seppuku.

My mantra goes something like this:?if Frederick Douglass could be born a slave, teach himself to read, escape from slavery, and become a hugely influential abolitionist, orator, and advisor to the President, yo ass can raise a child and do well in school at the same time.

So when I?m not dadgrinding, I?m gradgrinding. Each affords a different type of rest. During the Dadgrind I can relax my mind and be silly. When I'm gradgrinding I can rest my body and the recesses of my soul. If I?m on neither grind I?m usually on my bike, and likely headed toward one or the other. I do both at the same time only when one does not come at the expense of the other.

So when Lil Zo and I take our long walks I use the dictation program on my phone to outline my papers. And when it?s time for nite nite, social theorists like Emile Durkheim and Jean-Jacques Rousseau lull my lil man to sleep (as they often do for me).

That is all. More to come. I hope to update once per month.

Source: http://www.burtonfamilyjewels.com/2012/09/dadgrindgradgrind.html

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