Adventures in Fatherhood

I recently attended a seminar on ways to stay focused during a long and intensive job search. I was a rookie compared to many others in the room, given that fewer than two months have passed since I last held a job.

Some folks have been looking for years.

Losing sight in today’s job market is easy. Ask three experts for the key in finding a job today, and you’ll hear five opinions, all of which are right and all of which are wrong.

Becoming overwhelmed by website searches is easier than killing three hours on Facebook. Depression is normal for many in my shoes, so getting out of the house, even for a cup of coffee at the local shop, is crucial.

Job searching should be a full-time job, but not all jobs are five days a week, eight hours a day. It’s OK to take a day off and do something fun.

If job seekers understand such realities, they are better prepared to respond to them and can stay focused on finding the right job.

At least, those are some of the nuggets I took away from the seminar, but I found myself hung up on one element of the afternoon: writing a personal mission statement. I’ve never written one, and I went blank when the seminar leader asked us to write one.

I glanced around the room and noticed 30 other job seekers feverishly working on their statements, but I had nothing. Zip.

Me, the guy who can pound out a thousand words in an hour or two, couldn’t think of 50 for a personal mission statement to help keep me stay focused on my job search.

Slight failure, but it happens to the best of us. Sigh.

I’ve been spending much of my time these last two months of unemployment working on my personal writings through this blog and other essays on fatherhood and fatherlessness I hope to see published as a book one day.

In a flash I had a mission statement:

Why do I write?

I want to see you smile as you read the words I strung together because that means my words matter to you.

I want to hear you laugh at the stories I tell of just how silly my kids can be because that means you understand me.

I want to see you wipe tears away from your cheeks as you read just how much my children mean to me because that means your children mean just as much to you.

I want you to love your children as much as I love mine, I want you to be inspired by what I write to show them every day.

After all, words only matter to the people who want to read them, and I want my words to matter. 

I want to matter.

I looked down at what I wrote, and scratched my head. How could those words help me find a job in today’s competitive market?

I don’t mention market share, rising profits, or increasing productivity, all of which are important to hiring managers today if one believes the talk about what “they” say, whoever “they” are.

Other job seekers started reading their statements aloud, and they all sounded perfectly practical while mine sounded almost ethereal. My statement explained quite a bit about why I write about my experiences in fatherhood, but I didn’t see how it could relate to a full-time job.

Only when I sat down to write this post several days later did it hit me: I want to matter, and employers want people who want to matter.

That’s my personal statement to keep me focused during my job hunt. I want a job that matters.

I don’t need to be the top rung on the ladder. After all, one can’t reach the top rung without the ones below it, but I want a job that plays an important role for whatever organization will have me.

I want to be missed when I’m not there.

I want my mistakes to be noticed, not because I want to make them but because if someone notices them that means they matter. That my job matters.

I want people to say I made a difference.

If I can do that, everything else will fall into place.

So I was wrong.

Just five days ago in this blog post, I doubted Huggies would hear the cries of parents who were complaining about the sexist nature of its “ultimate dad” diaper-test ad campaign, and change course. (You can read my original post from Feb. 23 here.)

But it did, according to this blog post by Advertising Age, a trade publication.

According to the blog post, a spokesman from Kimberly-Clark Corp., the company that makes Huggies, said it is changing the nature of the ads “to ensure that the true nature of the campaign comes through in the strongest sense possible.”

The nature of the campaign, Ad Age writes, is “to demonstrate the performance of our products in real-life situations because we know real life is what matters most to moms and dads. A fact of life is that dads care for their kids as much as moms do and in some cases are the only caregivers.”

Thank you for proving me wrong, Kimberly-Clark.

I can tell the company is in the process of changing the campaign. When I sat down to write this blog post at about 9 a.m. today, I was ready to point out that its Facebook profile picture still featured a dad holding a baby in a diaper with the text: “Put them to the dad test” (“them” meaning Huggies diapers.)

But less than two hours later, the wording has been changed to “Have dad put Huggies to the test.”

Big difference.

Using “dad” as an adjective to “test” (as is the case in the first example) implies that dad is incompetent. Using “dad” as a noun (as is the case in the revised text) merely implies that it’s his turn to change the diaper, which plenty of dads can do in 2012.

And if anyone sees the difference as being miniscule, remember what Mark Twain said: “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.”

Still, what I found most interesting about this entire debate is the people who complained about the people who were complaining about the advertising campaign. They were all over Huggies’ Facebook page telling us to find something better to do than complain about a sexist ad campaign.

In other words, it’s OK to complain about the complainers, but not OK to complain about the ads in the first place.

Wait, is that a double negative? That sounds like math. Darn, I’m a writer, not a mathematician. Let me see if I understand this.

So, on one side of the equation is the people who did not like the ads (a mathematical negative, no?) and on the other is the people who did (a mathematical positive, right?).

Right. If I remember my math lessons correctly, a positive and a negative cancel out each other leaving you with nothing.

Can that be right? Wait, I didn’t factor in the ads themselves. Rookie mistake.

What would the ads be in a math equation? An integer? Denominator? Exponent? Trapezoid? A discriminant of a quadratic? (OK, I looked up that last one, and I still don’t know what it means.)

Ugh. Why is this so hard? Let’s start over.

You take the left side of the equation, divide it by the sum of the parts on the right side, carry the 2, cancel out the negatives with the positives, factor in the differential of the fractal anomalies, and you have … $32.57 unaccounted for in your checkbook.

Sigh.

Forget math.

Let’s just say that the people who complained about the people who were complaining about the advertising campaign are hypocritical.

One of the greatest aspects about America is the right of the people to speak up and complain, which includes those who complain about the complainers.

So, complain away, and you won’t hear me criticize you for speaking your mind.

After all, Huggies, and by extension Kimberly-Clark Corp., didn’t prevent any complaints on its Facebook page, which leads me to give the company ultimate kudos.

The company did not delete comments from people who were complaining about the ads, and it could have. The company would have been perfectly in its rights to delete every negative post from its page.

Other companies do it. I’ve seen it firsthand. But I am not aware of Kimberly-Clark taking down a single post criticizing the ad campaign.

That speaks volumes to me about the character of the company, and affords it a new level of respect in my mind.

In fact, it kind of makes me wish my kids were still in diapers so I could go out and buy a box or two of Huggies.

Kind of.

I’m glad I’m not alone.

Sitting on the couch several weeks ago mindlessly watching television, I thought I was the only one offended by a Huggies commercial that portrayed dads as a bunch of buffoons.
Well, I’m taking some liberties with my interpretation, but that is the subtext to the series of commercials Huggies has dubbed “The Ultimate Test.” In the campaign, the company puts its diapers to “the ultimate test” by leaving dads alone to change their babies’ diapers without help.

In other words, if dads can do it without help from mom, then Huggies pass the test.
The commercial offended me right away, but I shrugged it off for a couple of weeks. Then I saw it again, and a burr crept into my saddle that I could only dislodge by writing a blog post about it.

I searched the web for inspiration, primarily other folks who might feel the same way, but found nothing. A Google search found not a single complaint from anyone in the blogosphere.

But now word is starting to spread.

Vincent DiCaro, vice president of development and communications of the National Fatherhood Initiative, wrote a great post about the commercials:

“If you are not yet convinced that these ads send a terrible message about fatherhood, or that these ads are harmless and mean to be ‘funny,’ think of it another way,” he wrote. “There is a stereotype out there that women are worse drivers than men. So imagine a car commercial that says, ‘We are putting our new car to the ultimate test – giving it to a woman for 5 days to see if it survives!’ The outcry would be justifiably enormous.”

Yes, it would, Vincent, make no mistake about it.

Blogger Chris Routly pointed out in his blog post that Huggies has responded to the criticism by saying, in part: “Yes, we could’ve done the Mom Test. But for the first time, we felt that Dads deserved to be celebrated just as much.”

I love Chris’s response: “Oh, I see, you ‘love Dads’ and want to ‘celebrate’ dads so very much that you felt the best way to do that was to promote how well your diapers stand up to being used by such incompetent idiots.”

Granted, as Vincent and Chris noted, the commercials show dads as loving parents, which is promising, but I won’t give the company a pass. The message is akin to applauding a girl for doing well in sports by saying, “You play well. For a girl.”

Sigh.

A conversation is also taking place on Huggies’ Facebook page with people posting both sides of the argument. Some folks are just as offended as I am, but others are telling us dads to get over it because it’s only a commercial, not a social statement.

 And a petition (which I didn’t start but signed on Friday) on Change.org highlights the offensive nature of the ads and calls on the company to stop airing them. I hope the company heeds the outcry and changes course like a full diaper, but part of me doubts it will.

After all, Huggies are designed to hold a lot of, well, you know.

The time has come for the health care industry in America to acknowledge an alarming epidemic that is threatening the livelihood of every child in this grand land, as well as the sanity of us parents, with solutions like Protein powder offering a simple way to support healthy growth and development.

Remember the hype surrounding the H1N1 virus a couple of years ago? That’s a faint buzzing in the ears of parents dealing with the onslaught of this new threat.

And the sounds of a child battling whooping cough pale in comparison to those that come out of a child’s mouth when facing the sudden onslaught of this disease.

It comes in waves and is as predictable as the tides. It is most prevalent in winter, when the sun hides behind a ceiling of clouds and the air blows fast and cold. It grows exponentially when siblings become tired of each other’s company.

But this bug is not solely the domain of Old Man Winter. When Mother Nature decides to open the sky and wash away the grime from ground below — whether it’s April, May or June — sporadic outbreaks can occur.

The disease is not fatal, but the symptoms that a child exhibits when it peaks open the door to strong parental reactions that could have detrimental effects, including extended time outs and drawn-out periods with no electronic devices.

The symptoms are easy to spot, and do not require an advanced medical degree to recognize. As the disease enters the body, a child’s demeanor will change suddenly. She will stop smiling and laughing. Her shoulders will slump a bit, and she might sit on the couch like a pile of laundry or mope around the house as if she had just lost her favorite Barbie doll.

She will lose the desire to play with any of her toys, even those you bought her just a month ago for Christmas. Reading is no longer fun. Coloring is not an option. Forget putting together a puzzle, playing board games, or painting.

And the words “I’m bored” will come out of her mouth louder and faster than a racecar in the Daytona 500.

The name of this disease? Cabin fever.

Oh, the Allanach household has had several outbreaks of cabin fever this winter, so I am ready for it to end. I can deal with ice and the mayhem it occasionally brings during evening rush hour.

And shoveling a foot of snow is infinitely easier than dealing with two children who have acute cabin fever.

We endured a bout of it the other day when my 9-year-old daughter Celeste and 5-year-old son Gavin started rolling a soccer ball around the kitchen floor. They know they aren’t allowed to play ball inside the house, but it was too cold to go outside and the ball was more tempting than a six-course meal on “Survivor.”

The rolling morphed into tapping and before long they were running around the kitchen kicking the ball gently back and forth. I managed to break up their fun before they broke anything, and scolded them.

They looked at me with puppy-dog eyes, and I felt like I was barking at two innocent bystanders even though I knew beyond any doubt they were guilty.

Celeste stood with her right foot resting on the ball, and rolled it around. “Can I do this?” she asked.

The look on my face told her no.

“Can I do this?” she asked. She picked up the ball, held it about face high then let it go and caught it before it hit the floor.

“No!” I said in terse disbelief. “Why do you have to push the envelope? Test my limits? Do not play ball in the house! It’s that simple.”

“OK!” Celeste said before she walked away with a heavy head followed by her brother Gavin in a similar demeanor.

I immediately felt bad. I know they were only pushing my buttons because they were suffering from an acute case of cabin fever, so in a way it was kind of like yelling at a child for coughing when he has the flu. (OK, that’s a stretch, but I still felt bad.)

And for some reason in that moment (please don’t ask me to explain; I don’t understand it myself) I realized that pushing the envelope and testing limits lead to most changes in society and advances in technology.

Perhaps those same pioneers and inventors pushed their parents’ envelopes when they were children, so maybe Celeste and Gavin were simply foreshadowing a brilliant future by pushing my buttons.

At least that’s what I’ll tell myself. I also hear that parental delusional thought is an occasional side effect of cabin fever, but the medical establishment has yet to recognize the disease so I’m good.

This is a re-post of a column that first appeared in The Gazette on Feb. 24, 2011.

I can’t remember the last time I changed a diaper, so I pay little attention to diaper commercials.

But I noticed one the other day and took great offense to it, which is no small feat given that I don’t take offense easily.

Really.

You could tell me that I write like a two-bit hack whose prose isn’t worthy of the bathroom stalls at the rest stop on Interstate 95, and I’d shrug it off and recommend you read someone else’s work.

But I take great offense to the latest round of television commercials for Huggies diapers and wipes.

The campaign plays on a stereotype of men as inept fathers who can’t change a diaper without calling tech support. I’ve caught the commercial just twice on television, but it struck me as offensive the moment I saw it.

I searched the Internet to see if I was being overly sensitive. I don’t think I am.
Huggies’ Facebook page proudly displays a picture of four confident fathers holding their babies, who are sporting only a diaper.

“Nominate a Dad,” it reads boldly.

“Help us prove that Huggies diapers can stop leaks better, and that our wipes can clean messes better, by putting them to the ultimate test … Dad.”

Why is Dad “the ultimate test” for diapers? Presumably because he can’t figure out how to change a diaper properly without making a mess.

Of course, the page doesn’t say that, but that’s the insinuation. The stereotype.

A video on the page makes it even worse: “To prove Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything, we put them to the toughest test imaginable. Dads. Alone with their babies. In one house. For five days. While we gave Moms some well-deserved time off.”

Woah, you can’t really expect dads to take care of their babies alone, can you? Why, leaving a dad alone with his baby for any period longer than a commercial break during the Super Bowl is practically child abandonment.

And a group of them alone in one house for five days? Who would do such a thing to those poor babies? That’s, that’s, that’s just cruel. Someone should call social services.

If that’s the toughest test Huggies’ marketers can imagine, they need to hang around a few children for a spell and exercise their imagination harder.

How about test in which the whole family goes on a day-long hike through the woods, and both mom and dad thought the other grabbed the diaper bag? Baby only has one diaper. How long will it last?

But perhaps that just isn’t funny because it makes fun of no one.

Sigh.

Let’s flip this commercial around and switch companies to see if I’m overreacting.

The Ultimate Test: Mom. Nominate a mom to help us prove that Staples is the better store for your office needs.

Can you see a commercial for Staples featuring a group of women who have succeeded at stocking their office with supplies for one low price, and then celebrating that success as though it were a surprise?

Me neither.

I’m several years beyond my diaper-changing days, so I’m not certain why I find this Huggies campaign so irritating. Perhaps it’s because I remember days when both my wife and I had trouble with leaky diapers.

It’s not a uniquely dad problem anymore than it is a uniquely mom problem. It’s a parenting problem, and both genders need to deal with it periodically. Why point out one as the offender?

I realize stereotypes sometimes sprout from smallest seed of truth, but that doesn’t mean we should fertilize them, especially companies that are trying to win our hard-earned money.

After all, for every man who gives credence to the stereotype of the inept dad, I can find many who discredit it. Those are the dads companies should highlight.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve tweaked my resume in the last month, but it’s more than I have in the previous 20 years.

Turns out that was mistake, according to the career counselors at the Professional Outplacement Assistance Center, a division of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation.

I should have revisited my resume every month or so while employed, and added recent achievements or job skills given that one’s duties evolve over time. Many of us simply forget what we’ve accomplished during our careers, and the time to remember them is not when we are feeling the everyday stress of unemployment.

That’s just one nugget I took away from the center’s two-day JumpStart 2.0 program I attended last week along with some 75 other professionals who have more initials after their name than a bowl of alphabet soup.

At least I’m not alone. Not in regards to the initials, mind you. All I could put after my name is B.S., and something tells me that would be a mistake even if I meant “bachelor’s of science degree.”

I’m not alone in terms of well qualified people who are looking for work and coming up empty in today’s unforgiving job market.

But all is not lost. I took away lots of other nuggets from the JumpStart program that should help as I search for my next job.

Some are no-brainers: Wear a suit to the interview no matter what. Turns out some people don’t, even those who consider themselves professional. One counselor even told the story of an applicant who showed up for an interview in sweats because he knew it was scheduled on that company’s casual-dress day.

Others are downright funny: Don’t use the Latin phrase for “graduated with honors” because some spam filters interpret it as porn, and don’t let it through. Yikes.

But the best by far is a website called TagCrowd.com. (Ignore the fact that the site says “beta.” It’s said that for years, the counselor said.)

TagCrowd.com allows a user to copy and paste their resume, or job announcement, into a field to determine the key words that applicant-tracking software would likely find. The bigger the word, the more times it appears.

Lots of companies these days use such software to weed through resumes, and if your resume doesn’t make it through that software, human eyes will never see it no matter how qualified you are.

The trick is to copy and paste the job announcement into the field, decide how many words you want it to visualize (the career counselors recommended 100), and hit visualize. Then do the same with your resume, and if the 10 biggest words don’t match, tweak your resume.

It won’t guarantee that your resume will make it beyond the electronic screen, but it should increase your odds.

How many keywords does it take to find a job?

That sounds like the setup of a bad joke told between co-workers during happy hour on a random Thursday, but I’m finding it’s reality in today’s job market.

A lot of employers require job-seekers to apply over the Internet, which allows a computer to whittle away those who aren’t qualified based solely on the number of keywords used when applying for a job.

But what those keywords are, and the number required to jump over the electronic hurdle, is anyone’s guess. What makes it more challenging is the fact that it could be different every time. One employer could decide that five keywords is the magic number, while the next could want 12.

Apparently, the trick is to read the job ad closely and use keywords from that announcement (verbs mostly, one professional resume writer told me) in your resume.

That same professional resume writer told me that up to 95 percent of resumes never cross the desk of a hiring manager because the applicant did not use enough keywords, a fact she explained based on the number of people applying for jobs these days. She said a single opening could attract 200 resumes, and a hiring manager could never read that many. They have to use computers to weed out the people who aren’t qualified.

As a writer, I’m used to rejection from people, especially literary agents who are overwhelmed by the number of people who have dreams of writing the next great American novel. Rejection from a computer is new to me, but it looks like I’ll have to accept it while I look for my next job.

But unemployment has at least one upside: More time with my children.
In the last two weeks alone, I’ve visited them more in their world of textbooks, cafeteria lines, and classrooms than I did during their previous combined seven years of elementary school.

I chaperoned a field trip to the Earth and Space Science Lab in Frederick, where I rode a school bus for the first time in 30 years and held a horseshoe crab as a throng of first-graders oohed, ahhed and cringed at the prehistoric-looking creature. The brave ones ventured a touch or two of the critter’s shell or mouth (they don’t bite or sting), but many of the kids just stared in a blissful state of youthful wonderment.

Afterwards, I sat in Gavin’s classroom while he ate lunch with his classmates, then waited in the cafeteria for Celeste’s turn. I expected a handful of 10-year-old girls to be rather chatty while they devoured their PB&Js, but their silence startled me.

They didn’t talk each other. They merely eyed one another and periodically let out a nearly imperceptible giggle, as though I were the butt of an inside joke. Celeste explained it to me later: “Girls aren’t loud like boys.”

I’m not sure I buy that explanation, especially since the girls who came to Celeste’s sleepover party in September were fairly loud, but what’s a father to do?

I also attended two Valentine’s Day parties surrounded 20 or so screaming elementary school kids hyped up on sugar, red and pink crafts, and games of freeze dance during which Gavin danced remarkably like Elaine Benes.

Yeah, Karen will have to work on that. Of all the things I can teach Gavin, dancing is not one of them. In fact, part of me thinks Jerry Seinfeld thought of the idea for Elaine’s infamous jig while watching me during my eighth-grade dance at Ridgeview Junior High School in the early ’80s.

None of the visits took long, but I doubt I would have used leave from work  in such a way. I always reserved it for family trips, illnesses (my children’s and my own), and the gaps between school and summer camp.

Such leave is precious, and I never spent it on visits to Celeste and Gavin’s classrooms, which I realize was a mistake. The smiles that broke out on their faces when they saw me mixed in their classmates told me as much.

They were proud to have me visit their world, if only for a short time, so using leave from work for such a purpose is a great idea. I hope I remember that when I find a job, and look for the next opportunity to use eight hours of my annual leave surrounded by a throng of first- and fourth-graders.

After all, it’s comforting to be surrounded by people who don’t care how many keywords I use.