It is the solemn task of a parent to fret about the dystopian future that inexorably awaits his child. It is the task of us all to note with the daily headlines that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Of these two things you can be sure.

Except, suddenly I’m not so sure.

No, it’s not that I don’t see young people squandering their education funds on full body tattoos (and the eventual treatment for Hepatitis C) just as clearly as you do. And, yes, I see what’s in the clothing stores, from sexy toddler ensembles to slutty First Communion dresses. I read the same news stories you do about the growing social pressure on teens to share nude self portraits for the apparent purpose of giving the snottier kids something to sell to “revenge porn” web sites, thus ruining the duped kids’ once not-entirely-bleak futures.

I can totally understand why so many fairy tales involve parents locking up their teenage princesses in towers. It was the only sensible thing to do back then, and it seems all the more imperative in our age of accelerating dangers for the young.

Nevertheless, I can’t help being optimistic this morning. A big, fat ray of hope just floated into my email box. In the form of a junk email, no less. It was from Groupon. A daily deal — for tattoo removal.

You read that right. Not for a tattoo. The Groupon was for tattoo removal.

Good Lord! Is this a sign of things to come? It makes me wonder, What next? What kind of world are my daughters going to grow up in? One with no tattoos? Prim hemlines in girls’ dresses? Boys taunting each other when their droopy drawers are showing? A world where “sexting” means sending someone a picture of your naked ring finger?

Okay, it’s a lot to extrapolate from a single Groupon. But no good change ever happened without someone dreaming it first. So if you’ll excuse me, I have to go dream my day away.

La la la la laa…

…to all of you who gave us life. And then had the courage to let go.

Fridays are my most productive work days. I get an extra half hour while my preschooler gets to run around like a maniac for 30 minutes after school in what is loosely called an exercise class.

Half an hour may not sound like much, but it’s a significant percentage of my work day. So I can expect to get a lot more done on Fridays.

Except last Friday. There was no preschool because of a scheduled parent-child field trip in the afternoon. The Cubs versus the Dodgers at Wrigley field.

Now, I pretty much hung up my sports fan spikes a long time ago. It’s a bigger time investment than I can afford, and, especially for anyone on the North Side of Chicago, it’s more heartache than I care to bear. As a cartoonist, former actor, former ad man, former single guy until I was 43, routine rejection has given me all the heartache a guy could wish for.

At least, that’s how I rationalized it. But there’s no escaping the fact that even the most effete aesthete who denounces baseball as mass anesthesia will atavistically jolt to the crack of a bat. At least if he is genetically male. And probably if she’s not.

So, on the whole, I was not too put out about playing Littlest Pet Shop and Lego — the new kind, for girls — all morning instead of banging out some work down in my cave. I was going to a ballgame.

I was also buoyed by the talk at preschool pick-up the day before. A couple of the moms were conspiring to sit together because “it’s mostly gonna be dads.” They spotted me listening and added, “You can sit with us too.”

By every measure, I would have been well within my rights to take offense at such an emasculating inclusion, but what did I care? I was going to a ballgame with my little girl. And there’d be other guys to talk to. Better and better.

Friday morning was overcast but clearing. Getting close to noon it was mid-60s and only partly cloudy. An ideal spring day. I prepared us a light lunch, to make room for hot dogs at the ballpark. I had strategically dressed my daughter in something she could spill catsup on without worry.

It was noon. We had our parking strategy worked out, two tickets in hand, all we had to do was put on shoes and use the toilet. Especially use the toilet.

I was resigned to the fact that, in all likelihood, my four-year-old little girl would cry out, “I have to use the bathroom!” at the climax of some storybook inning. Murphy’s law. But I wanted to minimize that possibility.

Hauling her into the men’s room at Wrigley Field and having to explain that big trough with all the men standing by it was not a pretty prospect. So I asked her to use the toilet.

“But I don’t have to!”

I tried redirecting the conversation. Except, somehow in the next few seconds, there was no escaping a return to the subject.

“But I don’t want to!” Didn’t she want to see her classmates? Didn’t she want to go to her first Cubs game after all the times she had taunted her uncle about how much better the Cubs are than the White Sox (okay, she’s four)? Didn’t she want a hot dog with buckets of catsup?

No, she wanted to stay home and play. No problem. We didn’t have to commit to a decision. Yet. There was still time to work this out. Back to the Lego’s. We let our Lego girls romp around on makeshift skis and bounce off the branches of their treehouse. Glance at the clock. We might miss the National Anthem, but we’d still see the first pitch.

Now it was My Little Pony unicorns. All of them princesses, even though only two had crowns. “Last chance if you want to go, sweetie.”

Nope. Dolls. I’m playing with dolls! But who cares? Nothing much happens in the first inning. There’s still time.

I get up off the floor because my middle-aged bones hurt from sitting that low for very long. She’s used to me doing this. “Hey, I’ve got an idea…” I look at the clock. “O-oh, say, can you see…?” I look down at the floor. She’s so happy with her dolls. Do I drag her kicking and screaming, assuming optimistically that she will be all right once she gets there among her classmates and the spectacle?

I hear her little voice, pitched up an octave so you know it’s the doll talking. “Hey, let’s ride our ponies over to the beauty shop!”

Game over.

I can only hope that, amid all the squeaky voiced pretend play and sincere voiced discussions of who we liked best, Rainbow Dazzle or Pinky Pie, we created some lasting memories. You know, something on the order of a trip to the ballpark with dad.

“God, grant me the grace to accept the messes that cannot be cleaned,
the courage to clean the ones that I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Fear itself, according to Franklin Roosevelt, is the only thing to fear. Clearly he took a very detached role in the raising of his children. Otherwise he would have learned that fear itself was but a footnote on the scrolling list of things to fear when you have kids.

Crack a newspaper or magazine, and something to fear leaps out and smacks you in the face (oh, great, yet another thing to fear!). You may be just checking the weather, but your eyes can’t avoid that blurb chastening you that the 100% organic, gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free sunblock you’ve been putting on your kid might just as well be labeled “Death Paste.”

So you do the only sensible thing. You close your newspaper or magazine and turn on the radio. But then comes the basso profundo rumble of a Serious Voice.

“It rots wood, crumbles stone, reduces forged steel into dust…”

You hear a whooshing sound; it’s the blood draining from your head.

“…and it’s in the air your children breathe!…”

The room starts to spin, your heart hammering against your ribs nearly drowns out the ghastly payoff.

“It’s moisture.” (PIANO CHORD OF DOOM GOES HERE)

You have been warned. Nothing is safe.

The scariest part of all is that you can never be totally sure which warnings are the imaginings of tin-foil-hatted wackos and which are the carefully crafted misinformation of corporate hacks. And which are, in actual fact and without gross exaggeration or misinterpretation, true.

I could patronize you and say that you pretty much have to trust your own intelligence, but I’ve seen some of the most intelligent people on earth fall for the craziest ideas because the constant pounding we get from the gloomsayers is enough to drive anyone crazy.

Add to the mix that raising kids predisposes you to insanity in the first place, and you’re guaranteed to get freaked out by the latest news alert that removing the antioxidant-rich crust from sandwich bread will make your children’s heads implode or cause their skin to fall off in sheets.

And you dare not let yourself get desensitized to these warnings, or you put yourself on the slippery slope to stuffing your kids with cigarettes and corn liquor.

On the whole, however, I suppose the legion modern childhood blights, from allergies and asthma to zits and zygomycosis (warning: don’t look it up — ew!), are probably preferable to the diphtheria and death that characterized what we call the good old days. But that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to worry.

I just worry sometimes that I worry too much. Or not enough. I’m not sure which.

The only thing I’m sure of is, either way, there’s a study out there that will tell me just how bad that really is.

I just wanted to raise a virtual glass to the woman who made me what I am. This week we crossed over into our tenth happy year of marriage — and I am excited to report that it was on our ninth anniversary.

Here’s the real secret to being a successful dad. Have an amazing wife!

And thank God for it every day. (Oh, and be sure to thank your wife too.)

Recent political events reignited the so-called Mommy Wars which pit the Stay-at-Home Moms against the Working Moms in an ideological cage match, not that I can imagine many real moms of either stripe having much time for ideology.

But let me say one thing about this debate — for the record:

I’m staying out of it.

It’s a no-win situation for anyone who opens his fool mouth. Right or wrong or both or neither, you’re going to get pounded whatever you say. Probably not by the average stay-at-home mom or average working mom. They’re too busy or too tired to care what anybody says, let alone raise more than an eyebrow in protest.

But, as for the Daddy Wars,… I’m all “Bombs away!”

You may not be consciously aware of the Daddy Wars. Or should I call it the War On Dads? That’s how one-sided it has become.

It is so one-sided, in fact, that it is literally a joke. A whole sitcom, in fact. In fact, every sitcom. Yes, since Al Bundy (the anti-Dr. Huxtable), the entire institution of pop culture has sold dads down the river and tossed gas on the flames of the feeding frenzy. And if you think that is an embarrassing packet of clichés, just flick on the tube for another episode of “Father Knows Squat.”

The average TV dad these days has about as much general competence as Shemp.* Any dad who even tries to be competent with children has to atone for it with insecurities about becoming overly feminized (“Parenthood”) or for being that way to begin with (“Modern Family”).

Why?

Are non-Homer Simpson dads somehow offensive to our culture? Are they intimidating to women? Other men? To single young nitwits who were raised by TV and can only regurgitate fictional stereotypes in the scripts they write? What? Who?

How? How do they come up with such lunacy?

But they do, and they’re not alone. The image of the goofus-aloofus-dad has permeated our culture.

When I started writing Captain Dad, I was advised to portray myself as a boob, a bungler, a stumblebum. Otherwise, I was sternly informed, no woman would ever read what I wrote.

Seriously?

Call me crazy (yet again), but I kind of imagine that a woman would want a man to be competent, responsible and trustworthy with kids. Especially her own. Whether he stays home with them all day or not. The ideal man, after all, is the guy who can do anything, is he not? Well, isn’t taking care of the kids something?

Take the dad I saw with his daughter in the food court last Friday. He didn’t strike me as the type you’d cast as a stay-at-home, but he kept pace with his girl, step for step, as she ran on about the off-brand fairies in her coloring book. He didn’t even break a sweat. He couldn’t have been more comfortable if he were talking about industrial fasteners or the likelihood of the Sox pitching a perfect game in two days’ time.

In other words, he was a guy. A real guy. Better than that. A dad. Not just a guy playing one on TV.

______________

* Note to my female readers: Shemp was the original third Stooge, before Curly. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to exclude you from my remarks as much as I meant to score a direct hit with the male readers, who have a genetically encoded knowledge of, and affinity for, all things Stooges. You can look it up; it’s on the y-I-oughta chromosome.

This coming Monday is Mother’s Day for Captain Dad. Nearly three weeks early!

That is, there will be a staged reading of “My Dead Irish Mother,” a new musical. It’s something I wrote with the absolutely amazing composer Rich Prezioso, but most of it was written before my time was consumed with motherly — er, fatherly duties of my own.

So it’s perspective is the inverse of my current one. To give you a sense of what that might be, the opening line is lifted from a cartoon I did several years ago:

From there it’s a rocky road to eternal peace — for both mother and son. But they do get there, and that’s where it differs from a lot of shows about parents.

If you live in the Chicago area, I invite you to come see it. You’ll laugh hard, you’ll cry harder, you’ll go home and call your mother. Or wish to God you could.

Monday, April 23, at 7:30 pm

LIGHT OPERA WORKS Second Stage
(McGaw YMCA Children’s Center Auditorium)
1420 Maple Avenue, Evanston

General admission is $15 at the door, or by calling (847) 920-5360.