Yes.  Yes, for those of you wondering, yes, that’s me and The Pumpkin taking up half a page [or so I’m told, I haven’t seen the print edition yet] of the October 15 issue of Time Magazine, illustrating a story called “Fatherhood 2.0.”

And no.  No, I am not naked beneath that unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I’m still undecided) place pool float.  It just looks that way.

Yes, I am shirtless, in all my pale and flabby glory, in nationally distributed Time Frickin’ Magazine.  [Not to mention their website.]  Just, you know, don’t pay attention to that part.  Just look at The Pumpkin.  She’s cute.

How did this happen, you may be wondering?  Well, back in June, Time reporter and blogger (and hapa mom) Lisa Takeuchi Cullen left a comment on one of my Rice Daddies posts, and I wrote back to say hi.  She asked if I’d like to be interviewed for a story she was doing on modern fathers, and we ended up talking about things like being a SAHD and going “back” to work, family expectations, dadblogging, and what it means to be an Asian American dad.  And then she called back to see if it’d be okay if they sent a photographer to take some pictures of me and The Pumpkin.

And so, a couple weeks later, the photographer and his assistant knocked on our door at 8 a.m. on a bright, hot summer-in Bakersfield Saturday morning.  They didn’t leave until 1 p.m.  Let me just say that I discovered a newfound respect for models.  That shit ain’t easy.  Especially when your co-star is 2, tired, bored, and hot.

Lisa’s editors had asked if there were some activities that either The Pumpkin and I liked to do together or things that I had done in my pre-dad life that I still liked to do.  You know, manly things, like play sports and ride motorcycles.  Heh.  “Uh...well, we like to read together?”  Yeah, that ain’t the makings of an interesting visual.  But I told them that I liked to cook and that The Pumpkin was starting to show more interest in watching and helping, and that we took walks around the neighbhorhood with our dog, Waldo, and they seemed to like those ideas.

I don’t know how many times we had to make that circuit of a few hundred feet at a spot on our regular walk route that the photographer had chosen to set up his lights, tripod, camera, and computer [this was the opposite of a snapshot], me pushing The Pumpkin in her jogger stroller and holding Waldo’s leash.  I do know that it got hot fast, and my babygirl got bored and tired faster.  I think, though, that he got some good shots, but I don’t know, because they didn’t choose one of those—but more on that later.

Back at the house, we let The Pumpkin cool off and cool down sans clothes while we set up the next shot, in the kitchen.  I had set up the mise-en-place for a Japanese fresh cucumber pickle that would be easy for her to help me with—pouring, stirring.  More moving and setting up of cords and tripods and lights, and we were off.  I don’t know how many times I had to empty the bowl of cuke slices so that she could put them back in the bowl for the camera—she must’ve thought that this was some strange game that “daddy’s friend” the photographer was playing.  I think that he must’ve gotten some cute shots, but again, I don’t know, because they didn’t choose one of those.

Which brings us to the pool.  “Do you and The Pumpkin go swimming together,” he asked when he saw it in the backyard?  Uh, yeah.  Great—maybe we could get some shots in there if there was time.  Uh, okay.  Me?  In a swimsuit?  In pictures?  That other people would see?  Crapcrapcrap.

The Pumpkin, of course, loves the pool, and couldn’t care less about my self-consciousness.  The photographer did his best to put me at ease, and by one o’clock, they were packing up their copious cords and tripods and computers and lights and cases and asking how to get to a good taco shack for lunch [they were from New York and wanted a Mexican food fix before heading back—we were the last stop on a cross-country week-long shooting spree for this story].

And then we waited.  Months went by, with the story getting held back and pushed back until finally space opened up.  Unfortunately, they had to cut about half the text to make it fit—so my graf, along with those of a bunch of other dads, got cut, as did the dadblogroll Lisa had compiled.  But she is a blogger, after all, so she’s continuing the conversation over at Work in Progress.  I’m sure she’d love to hear my fellow dadbloggers’ complaints about the article’s reduction of issues of gender roles and the transformation of what it means to be a man and a father into false and stereotypical dichotomies like man/woman, mother/father, masculine/feminine, traditional/nontraditional.  I mean, Lisa, beer bongs and cave men?  Really?

In the end, it’s not about men “turning into” women or even fathers becoming more like mothers (or some societally proscribed idea of what mothers are supposed to be).  It’s not that involved fathers are “less” masculine, whatever that means, on previous generations’ scales, or even that we are challenging or transforming some definition of masculinity or manhood or fatherhood.

it is, simply, that this is our implicit definition:  to be a man is to be a good, involved, active father, and to be a father is to be a man.

Not that I speak for anyone but me, and hey, what do I know, I’m in a magazine with my shirt off.  [If you wanna do some more thinking and reading on this, go check out my bretheren in the dadblogosphere, or better yet, start with the Family Issue of Greater Good Magazine, edited by Daddy Dialectic’s Jeremy Adam Smith.]