A couple of years ago I was in this class with a bunch of women and two men. Both of the men were English teachers like me. One wrote an essay about his emotionally distant father, who was not an intellectual type.

As I recall, this father was sort of a stereotypical hardware guy: simple and practical. He held a steady but unrewarding job which he went to without question or complaint, and he was basically completely incapable of making emotional statements, declarations, or connections of any kind. He was one of those people who just want to come home from work, drink a beer, watch TV, and then get up and repeat the exact same thing the following day. I imagined that for this man, life was not about personal growth or making the world a better place. He had given up on such ideas long ago, if he’d ever had them. No, this father understood that if he just kept a roof over the kid’s head and food on the table, that was all anyone could really expect. After all, that’s more than a lot of fathers do.

As a result, this other English teacher who wrote the essay about his father grew up occupying himself by living in a world of comic book superheroes, video games, and later, music. His father never shared any of these interests, and the boy was lonely at times. The essay was about how loneliness, isolation, and fixations on superheroes both real and imaginary eventually helped form the boy’s character and shape his values.

Everyone in the class loved his essay and everything else he wrote and shared. I asked him what his father thought about his writing.

“My father has never read anything I have written,” was his response.

It was one of those moments when I realized how fundamentally different I was from someone who seemed to have so much in common with me, all because of my parents.

I’ve had a lot of those revelations, and not all were pleasant. My upbringing does not always compare favorably to those of my peers and colleagues, but in that moment I was speechless because I could not imagine having parents who were so uninterested in my life that they never read a single thing I wrote.

For six years I have had a blog and written more than 100 posts. Most of them are read by approximately three people: 1) My father 2) My mother’s best friend 3) One of my aunts. My mother, who doesn’t have internet access, sometimes reads them if someone prints a copy and mails it to her.

My point is that my parents have been generally supportive of all my creative endeavors even though they were often neither practical nor lucrative.

A lot of parents don’t have time to go to every school assembly or play, and many fathers are completely absent from the start.

One thing I’ve learned from reading essays by students for the past five years is that many people are angry or disappointed with their fathers. Their fathers abandoned their families, or they have all the time in the world for their girlfriends but never call their kids, they are addicts and alcoholics, they’ve left their children to be raised by ex-wives or ex-girlfriends, aunts, grandparents. The father figure is the most likely creator of conflict in the true personal stories I have read.

Yet I know even the connotation of the word father has come a long way.

Men don’t get a pass to play golf or sit in the waiting room now when their wives are delivering babies. They are right there, covered in someone else’s bodily fluids, reminding themselves to breathe, too.

The most profound part of the human experience for most women was always motherhood. We weren’t respected when we walked into a room, nor were we remembered for what we said or wrote the way men were.  Women were described first by appearance, second by character. The prettier you were, the more you were worth. You weren’t respected if you were attractive, but at least you were valued because your attractiveness was an indicator of your fertility. After all, only a woman can give birth to a male. And for most of human history, women had few choices related to their own fertility. If you had sex, you got pregnant and you became a mother. And then, willing or not, you understood this thing that can’t be taught. You understood that you no longer mattered, which is a beautiful and painful thing to learn and keep learning. It is a form of grace.

For men the most profound aspect of the human experience was war. It was expected that at some point you would sacrifice yourself in this way. What you did mattered immensely because of how many people you could save in the process – not just one child or human, but hundreds or thousands. To be a hero was not grace, but it was glory, even if you didn’t live to enjoy it.

The most meaningful aspects of being a human used to be exclusively defined by gender, but they aren’t anymore. Men make sandwiches, bake cookies, and trim their daughters’ hair. Women catch fish, carry guns, and caulk bathtubs. And while it’s true that more men are doing the work of parenting now and not just reaping the rewards of having a family without ever changing a diaper, it is also true that you can still be a deeply flawed human and have value as a parent. You can be a petty tyrant who rants about the evils of society and makes your kid go to bed at 9 p.m. every night. He’ll resent you for it and love you at the same time. You can be a drug addict who can’t afford groceries and your child may still know that she is better off and more loved with you than she would be in foster care.

And our children will promise themselves that they will do better than we did when they grow up, and they will make good on those promises.

And we will be glad.