Portraits of the Patriarchy
Father Time examines the progressive shift in modern fatherhood
Part 9
He’s a father of two boys who are always making messes, and so what’s he to do, but turn to the latest laundry detergent pod to get his sons’ clothes clean! Does this sound like you? It certainly sounds like me. Said father appears in a current TV ad, and it’s evident the manufacturer (and their ad agency) made a deliberate decision not to feature a woman as the consumer.
Were they targeting the single father demo? The SAHD? The same-sex domestic? Or maybe giving a nod to the modern age? Probably a bit of all of these things.
Whatever their angle, the spot spoke to me. It said, “Hey, you’re not alone. Men do the laundry, too. Buy this detergent.”
When I saw it on TV, it was late, and I was up either putting toys away or folding, a month into a household full of sick campers. My wife had been quarantined in our bedroom for most of the month of February fighting what began as a viral infection, followed by a secondary bacterial infection, which turned into suspected pneumonia with a light case of the flu. Both of my sons were down with respiratory infections, which called for multiple trips to Urgent Care. Everyone was on a combination of antibiotics, cough medicine, anti-virals, and pain relief. Miraculously, I was the only one healthy enough to keep everyone else alive.
So, yeah, that ad made me want to cry a little.
That’s what marketing does to you. It finds your vulnerabilities, then exploits them. Bravo to the makers of that commercial for pitching to the those last-man-standing dads.
It’s like my good friend and neighbor, Brett. His wife was hospitalized most of 2017 after being diagnosed with leukemia. As the owner of a dental practice and a father himself, Brett had to manage the house, his work, his daughter, and try to keep himself from despair, all at the same time. We’d occasionally drink a few beers in the evening and talk about dad stuff, while his little girl played with my boys. We’d end up drinking a little bit more than we should on a work night, but he said it was better he did with someone else than alone at home.
That’s real life. That’s stepping up when everyone else is down. It’s an awful, terrible feeling to bring breakfast in bed to your wife with all her meds on the tray instead of flowers. It’s gut wrenching to wake up to your child screaming in the middle of the night after they choke on their sputum. It’s not so much fun washing load after load of laundry, soiled in vomit and virus.
But we’ve all been there. We all survive. We get better and stronger because of it. And heck, maybe they’ll make a commercial about us in the afterlife, immortalizing us next to the best brand of soap known to man.
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Photo by Jayden Yoon on Unsplash
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