If you are not a father you can’t know what it is like. It can’t be imagined. What you’re imagining when you think you’re imagining fatherhood is not fatherhood, it’s just you sitting there, or driving along in your car, or taking a shower or shaving, imagining fatherhood.

Fatherhood is way different. It’s nothing you can imagine. Whatever you can imagine, that’s not it. It’s always a surprise, and it’s a different surprise for every one of us so what one man says about fatherhood, that’s not what it would or will be like for you, either.

For you, it will be different.

For you, it will be as follows:

Take Father’s Day, for example. It will find you exhausted from going to the opera the previous night with a bus load of parents and children, Magic Flute, at the Volksoper. So tired that you wake thinking, they ought to do a “Berenstain Bears and Too Much Opera” book. Where father bear, ahem, nods off during the first act and the kid bears are totally into it and mother bear too, and in the intermission father bear takes a quick leak in the men’s room and then spends the rest of the time waiting in the line for the ladies room, keeping mother bear and children bear company, because the lines for restrooms during intermissions are so much longer for women, so long in fact that the women are not done with the toilet by the time the show starts again and they have to find their way back to the seat in the dark with the usher criticizing them for being late instead of helping them, welcome to Vienna. And in the book, the opera would be very, very cool. The bears would all have great seats, way high up but with a great view of the orchestra pit, including the cellos, and the singers would all be grand, especially the Queen of the Night, thank god, since she has the most important piece to sing, and several other singers would be quite hot and easy on the eyes as well as ears, so father bear stays awake during the second half.

So tired, in fact, that you never really have the feeling that you wake up entirely for the rest of the day.

Father’s day catches you painting the living room, more of the cool paint job you are working on, pink undercoat, brown sponged over it. It will look better and better. Your wife will think, eh, maybe too much of a good thing, but when you put the furniture back in place and the houseplants it starts to look better, everything in perspective so you figure once the curtains are back on their rods, the curtains your wife washed, the huge yellow floral print curtains, then the room will look good and your wife will be reassured.

Father’s day will come and your wife will go to the bakery to bring you baked goodies in the morning.

She will also try to iron the curtains but will find it difficult so you will give it a try and discover a talent for patiently ironing gigantic curtains. Hours later you will hang them from the rods and the room will indeed look not only good, it will remind you of nothing more than a hotel room you can’t afford, which when you think about it etc etc.

Father’s day will find you eating an ice cream cone at the gelateria with your youngest daughter and walking around town, which except for the bakery and the gelateria is pretty much closed down for Sunday.

It will come, that day, and find you thinking, I ought to run but I’m too fucking tired. And it will find you helping your daughter to braid brightly-colored plastic cords, which she then hangs from her hair, because she likes the tight way you braid them. And it will also find you opening a card drawn by her, with several pages of drawings of dolphins (aha, you will think, remembering a week before when she had asked you what your favorite animal was) and “happy father’s day” in English and the rest in German, the list of things she loves that you do for her, including telling made up stories and making tiger pudding. And she will explain she wanted to make everything in English but didn’t know how to spell it and neither did her teacher.

Father’s Day will find your wife’s cellphone ringing while she’s away running and your youngest daughter will answer it and it will be your other daughter calling from France, just for the hell of it not because of Father’s Day, which she forgot. When you tell her what day it is, she will apologize and wish you a happy one. Her voice will seem higher and different and you will realize she’s not a little girl anymore and hasn’t, in fact, been one in a long time.

And you will think, eh. You will think the same thing all fathers think, except for maybe a couple at that end of the bell curve and a couple at the other end.

Father’s Day will find you playing cards with your youngest daughter, rummy, because rummy is a good introductory card game and you hope to have her playing p0ker by the time you visit relatives in the States next month.

Father’s Day will find you kissing her goodnight and missing the other one. And it will find you pretty much happy with the way things have turned out.