Here at The Aerogram, we’ve got so many reasons to appreciate fathers every day of the year. But Father’s Day is one of those times to speak up and let those special dads know why we love them. So today we round up for you, in no particular order, a few of the special things dads do that make us love them lots.
1. Caring About the Stuff We Care About
When Jennifer Lawrence visited Yahoo! last year, she took questions from the audience including one from a dad who made it clear that the question he was reading off his cell phone was from his daughter and not him! Props to this desi dad for standing up and getting JLaw’s take on body image because his daughter wanted to know.
2. Being Our Most Vocal Supporters
That was literally the case when Munfarid “Cradle Kid” Zaidi stepped on to the stage during American Idol’s Hollywood Week episode. In a lovable dad moment televised to an audience of millions, Zaidi’s dad yelled out “Blow them away like you did in the audition!”
http://youtu.be/DN9l1T-NO74
3. Believing In and Supporting Our Education
We love our dads for believing we could (and should!) get straight As, even if it was sometimes annoying too. That late night (or last-minute morning-of) help with homework means the world because it means you wanted us to succeed. For a dad like Malala Yousafzai’s father Ziauddin, a progressive who understood the importance of educating girls in northwest Pakistan, this kind of support meant going against society norms too.
4. Loving Us As We Are
Today is also a day to celebrate (yay!) the dads who support and love their LGBT children. Read “Coming Out and Everything After” and “Cities of Yesterday & Tomorrow” for personal accounts of South Asian Americans who came out to their families and found love and support from their dads in the end.
5. Having More Style & Panache Than We Give Them Credit For
Take another look at those old photos of dad before you were born or from when you were young. The distance in time might help you appreciate for the first time just how suave that dad in the photos is. The Rad Brown Dads project (whose creator we interviewed earlier this year) is celebrating moments like that all the time so we can appreciate the mad style and panache of rad dads every day.
