It’s an all-thumbs mix of shun and sun when I take my girls out in public. Depending on my mood alone the stares of strangers alternately fill me with pride and make me want to hide in a dark hole. And they do stare, let me tell you. The only times they don’t is when I am with a woman, then they just stare at my gorgeous kids.

Last August Lyli and Scarleht and I went on a road trip with my friends Brendan and Eamon. Three mid-twenties young men driving around the San Juan Islands with two little toe-headed twin two year olds? A sight unseen by most eyes, judging by the variety of reactions we received, especially at ferry landings where the nuclear gape of families in air-conditioned SUVs permeated us with its fallout of fascination. I must admit, at times I find it entertaining when someone looks at my girls, then at me, then around their field of vision for someone approximating a mother.

It’s especially strange when I’m out with my girls with a lady friend and everyone thinks that she’s their ma. Usually they pick up on this phenomenon and mention something about how “awkward” or “interesting” it feels. Sometimes this makes me smile and look away. Sometimes it makes me sink into my shell. Rarely it makes me hold eye contact and blush and sweat.

On Olympia’s streets even, some of the most diverse I’ve wandered in my sheltered Pacific Northwest existence, my little rag-tag group of thrift-clad toddlers and hairy hippy papa me garners gazes from all ages, genders, classes, ethnicities, etcetera. Personally I find it unnerving to be the needle in the haystack but, as my roommate Eamon wisely put it: “better than a needle in a box of needles.”

No surprise then I seek solace and solitude instead with my girls in the woods around our farmhouse outside the city of Olympia. Most of my social tendencies are counterfeit anyway, set in place to compensate for the quietudes of my youth, having grown up detached from general society in the foothills of the blue mountains amidst ponderosa pines and stacks of books instead of televisions and those scrapers of the sky. Plus I enjoy the time I get utterly alone with my children in a

For the most part, I can trace the qualities I like about myself back to that secluded, natural setting, and can only wish something of the sort for my progeny. Hence why I jumped at the chance to live on an old farm in Mason County, only slightly removed from the main drag of Western Wash where I get my urban fixes, society style and business done.

As I slowly force myself to broach my shyness and begin to hang out at public playgrounds with my kids every now and then (I try for twice a month) I begin to realize that I’m not alone, even in my own community, and meeting fathers I haven’t met before bolsters those emotions. Most of my papa parties have been mostly close to failures, though I suppose I should give myself and us a bit more credit than that and admit that “these things take time” as folks are so apt to aphorize.

But gradually I come around, learning to deal with these nervous bouts that strike at the most inopportune of moments. I fondly dub it paternagoraphobia, the fear of being a father in public beacuse, for some reason or another, your society eschews your right to paternity. Solve this problem and we solve so many myriad problems by ripple effect that it will make the politicians smile for once and the philosophers and poets drink and make love (as usual).