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“Who left first?”

It’s an interesting question, one posed to me by the father of a young lady I fancied, one that continues to pose a challenge for fathers everywhere.

The query was leveled over dinner in an elegant, Victorian farmstead on the edges of Perry, Iowa. I’d tagged along for Thanksgiving with a college chum in hopes of spending some quality time with his sister, a quiet, entrancing, golden-haired waif who studied literature at a small school in southeastern Tennessee.

I did my best impression of the gentleman caller amid the tumult of a rambling assembly of Dostoyevsky-quoting brothers and sisters headed by a mother who carried old-school American nobility and grace like a force field and a father who pastored an independent church and spent his spare time reading Locke and rebuilding a 1923 Model T Ford truck.

This family of blood hounds quickly sniffed out my mission to woo the oldest daughter, so I spent much of that day and the ensuring dinner — between tours of the truck engine and the requisite full-contact football game — parrying questions that all seemed to strangely revolve around my take on sex, marriage, careers and homemaking.

I was meat, really. They tore me apart. The 20-pound basted bird had it better than I did.

So at some point during bites of turkey and the few remaining tatters of my ego, the father asked me what I thought of feminism and they way it was characterized by some conservative Christians as an abandonment of traditional family values.

I mumbled something incoherent, but he was already answering his own question.

“They accuse mothers of leaving the home,” I recall the father saying. “But the real question is: Who left first? The fathers, of course. They left the family to pursue their careers in the corporate world.”

His point was that the deterioration of traditional, self-supporting American families began with the shift from an integrated rural society to an urban life that required separate spheres of work and home and play. Maybe, he argued, it’s men who are to blame for the so-called decline of family values.

As it turned out, the young lady wasn’t interested in me as anything more than a good friend, and so we drifted apart and I eventually found the love of my life and we had an amazing son together.

To quote Garth Brooks, I thank God for unanswered prayers.

But that Thanksgiving exchange came back to me the other day while I was at work and simultaneously trying to care for the Little Master during his recent break between first grade and summer school.

I make a fighting attempt at being a good, post-modern dad by covering my share of household and parental duties. I clean on Saturdays, pick up the LM from school in the afternoon and try to make a decent, healthy dinner when my wife comes home late from work three days a week.

I’m not practically perfect in every way, but I like to think that I mostly succeed.

I credit my stepfather for a lot of my attitudes about work and family. He stymied his own career as a mathematician in order to help my mom. I think back and am amazed that someone so young and so talented was willing to take on the responsibility of raising a child. He made some real sacrifices, and I’m better for it.

But my enlightened self was under duress at work with the LM. I tried to distract him with iCarly videos at an empty computer terminal, but every three minutes I’d feel tap on my right shoulder and hear “Dad, I’m bored.”

I gritted my teeth and found myself cursing the complexity of post-modern life. For those of us men who’ve committed ourselves to having healthy careers and being full parental partners, there are few models to follow when we’re feeling pulled apart by family and professional obligations.

In those times, the traditional nuclear family of doting moms and wise but largely absent fathers in 1950s TV shows appears very attractive.

I was pulled from my reverie when I felt another tap on my shoulder. This time, though, the LM handed me a yellow sticky note with “I (heart) you” scrawled on it in long, thin letters.

Not to be too maudlin, but I melted in that moment.

Despite all the difficulties, I recognize the deep value in caring for my son and in having a full stake in our family.

I also know that my wife has her own career and personal aspirations, and that she struggles with the same feelings of frustration when confronted with making choices between family and work.

Together, we make it work because it’s worth it.

I don’t know who left first, but I do know that I’m not going anywhere.

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