There's an episode of the TV show "The West Wing" and if you like the overly verbose writing of Aaron Sorkin - where 100 words are used to communicate 2, you would know this. It's about an Arabic phrase "Abu-el-banat" - which means a "Father of Daughters" which is shown in a funny way in a monologue by Martin Sheen - who plays The President and who is a father of three daughters - that a father of daughters needs all the help he can get - free cups of tea- in this case. If you google this phrase you would see the sheer number of ways that it can be interpreted given that we aren't native Arabic speakers. Pity, sympathy, joy, exasperation, resignation, condescension, and it's supposedly an insult as well.
My father had only daughters. Now, he is a typical man born in the late 1940's and raised in a typically patriarchal house in south Tamil Nadu. Guess what that means? His mother did all his and his brothers' chores, and he has seen women do all the household chores in every house in his village and in the town 20kms away as well. While his sister was taught the importance of house-keeping and cooking, he wasn't even taught to fend for himself when he had to live alone when he started working. After years of his college's hostel food, he survived on nearby messes for food as an adult, and guess what? Constant outside food takes a toll on the body. But that's a story for another day.
Back to my point - I doubt he even knew how to make himself a cup of coffee or tea. His job was putting the food on the table and nothing else. Because that is all he was shown and any instances where he saw men performing domestic tasks either did not compute in his head or he dismissed as an anomaly. So when he raised his daughters, got them educated and then eventually married, guess what? Remember the #Sharetheload advertisement that Ariel put out that had people oooh-ing and aaah-ing? That happened organically in my father as well within a few months of my marriage.
Men are a bit slow. And severely lack instinctive empathy compared to women. Also when it's your wife, it's still not your flesh and blood being overworked and loaded with household chores in addition to office work and taking care of the kids. The child that he raised with so much love and care was now the wife in another man's house. The bulb doesn't go off otherwise it appears. So, slowly my father began to take on some repetitive tasks that normally fell to my mother even though she was a working woman herself. He is not making full meals mind you, but still, even if he can make coffee and tea for himself, heat up his own meals, wash the vessels occasionally, that is a big load off my mother's back.
A father of daughters grows up eventually. He starts seeing things he never had before, even in his later years, he is capable of learning and changing. What about the fathers of only sons?
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