Dad’s real job is to help kids find mom

Santa showed up recently with a sack full of electronic tablets for the kids. Since Christmas, we’ve had fun finding apps for games and apps for education. There have been books downloaded as well, and curiosity sated.

My children have questions. Questions about how the world works and why, what a trillion-dollar coin might look like, upcoming “Doctor Who” plot lines and who the 8th president of the United States was.

Their main question, though, is “Where is Mom?” There is no app for that; I looked. What there is for that is a dad.

I’m going to let you brand new fathers in on a secret of the brotherhood. I know you’re changing diapers and waking up at 2 a.m. for a feeding, whether needed or not, to show your wife some solidarity. That’s all very commendable. And I know that in the most primitive of your genes, you just want to provide for your new little family — hunting and gathering, small engine repair, and all of that.

But here’s what your real duty will be: Your sole responsibility as a father is to know where your child’s mother is at all times and to be ready with that information at a moment’s notice.

They can’t be bothered to look, yet they will ask whenever she is not sitting within their field of vision. I’ve had a kid walk into the kitchen where I’m cooking dinner (hunting, gathering, et al), ask “where’s Mom?” and then ask her what’s for dinner.

We’ve seen those documentaries with the penguins and the way a chick can find its mother among a throng of similarly dressed penguins. I have a sneaking suspicion that within that group are the fathers, and if we understood penguin-speak, we’d hear them sighing and saying, “Third ice floe on the left.”

Santa managed to find our house out of millions of houses all the way from the North Pole, yet my kids can’t find their own mother where she sits reading a book a room away. I am the GPS — the Global Parenting System — and it’s gotten to the point where I answer before the question is even asked. My 6-year-old daughter walks into the room where I am and I say, “Bathroom.” Is she in the bathroom? I have no idea, but maybe Genevieve will find her on the way to look (and she will look).

Where’s Mom? There is most certainly no app for that. I just asked Google where she is, and it gave me a list of cookbooks. I’m not touching that one.

With their new electronic devices, information is readily had, and the world, as they say, is at my kids’ fingertips. I’m proud to report that they can find Chile on a map, yet embarrassed that they can’t find their mother, who is, as I write this, in this house somewhere.

This is our lot in life, guys. We are but a signpost within our own homes. You know it, I know it, Santa knows it, and so did the 8th president of the United States, Martin Van Buren.

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