Category Archives: Dad Duty

Dad Duty is a collection of thoughts on life with two kids, the Dad Life, “Dadly” duties like cooking in bulk for a family of four, and everything in between.

This is also where the adjective “Dadly” was born, a word meant to describe individuals who wholeheartedly embrace the Dad Life, consider it a vocation of some sorts, and use the limitations of parenting to concentrate fully on a selected set of options, tasks and routines rather than constantly craving “to be otherwise, to be elsewhere,” as the Buddhists describe.

Cicero once wrote that to be completely free, one must become “a slave to a set of laws”.  As discussed in “Life With Two”, accepting these limitations, especially when they are meaningful in and of themselves, can actually be very liberating, though modern society can sometimes promote the opposite.

Or, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points out in his book “Flow”, fully “clocking in” for Dad Duty on a daily basis frees you from the need to think about life pre-kids, without kids, or simply whether the grass might be greener somewhere else.  “As a result, a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”

Embracing the “Dad Life”, being “Dadly”, and “clocking in” for Dad Duty are just phrases meant to shed some perspective and humor on what is otherwise a serious, challenging, and all-consuming sacrifice and devotion to a fellow human (or humans).

I hope you find these discussions useful.