Being a father is hard. In honour of Father's Day this weekend, let's celebrate the good ones.

Even though there are 14 people in my first string of friends — the A-team of pals who circulate so tightly that a day or two of the flu or a week of sex-haze absenteeism is enough to send text-fingers flying — my best friend is a 68-year-old suburban cowboy who doesn’t approve of much of anything I do. My dad rules.

Dad and I are not the kind of cutesy father and daughter team who dance together at weddings or chat about life lessons over cocoa on the porch. Now that my sisters have produced six grandkids, he pays, and owes, more attention to them. He’s not the kind of protector dad who disapproves of my boyfriends (or, he does, but silently), or calls to see how I’m doing (he only calls to warn me about approaching storms or ask me questions about the internet).

Instead, we’re buddies, with a hero-worship element on my part that is maybe more typical of an adolescent boy just learning what adulthood means. Though I’m a lazily neurotic city kid who is waiting patiently for Starbucks to open shop at Bloor and Ossington so I don’t have to make my own coffee in the morning, and my dad is a halfway-stoic, marginally eccentric, farm-bred retired finance guy, we are “thick as thieves.” (That’s what my dad would say.)

Even though my mother is the most important person in my life, and I love her more than anybody, that mom-and-daughter stuff never really took. Cooking and knitting were a non-choice when there were atlases and ping-pong tables available. I never played “hospital” (my mom was a nurse), but constantly played “business” and created elaborate, entrepreneurial schemes using discarded graph paper and calculators from my dad’s downtown office, where he went to talk about “stocks” with “clients” and kept root beers in the mini-fridge.

While most women slowly become their mothers, reading my dad’s collection of plays, poetry and art books, and asking him obsessive, encouraged questions about money, the war in Yugoslavia, beagles and God ensured that I would grow up into something of a junior version of my father, albeit a super-girly version that’s also broke, not as smart, and presumably worrying to my parents, in the way that anyone who has gleaned the risk-tolerant benefits of a secure, middle-class childhood will be.

There are all kinds of good dads. Mine worked a lot, but showed up smiling to the endless series of piano recitals; the school production of Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat; the eighth-grade valedictory address (both of my parents were suspiciously thrilled by this non-honour); high school-band performances; Christmas concerts, whatever, with his arms crossed and a copy of the program rolled up into a crumpled paper cigar.

Last week, my friend’s dad gave a short, beautiful speech at her wedding, reminding me that some dads can actually communicate with their kids when it counts. Another friend’s father, who I always recoiled from on account of his non-stop grotesquerie of man-body functions (so much gas passing! So much discussion of various gases!), drives hours to see his son, so they can fix a sink or install a shelf and then go out for burgers. I know younger dads who are as completely invested in their children as their partner is, not just about grades or bed-times but in how their child feels, and dads who have given up everything to spend a little more time with their kid than their ex-girlfriend wants them to. These are good dads, dads like mine.

Bad dads, the ones that abandon or abuse or are just kind of assholes, the ones that drink the college fund, or spend more hours watching sports than with their kids, can fuck off and die, maybe of a brutal, panicked heart attack while white-hot visions of wasted fatherhood blind them. If mercy exists, kids of bad dads should at least have a decent mother.

Not that fatherhood is an easy pursuit: everything relative aside, being a good dad is harder than being a good mom. Moms are overworked and underappreciated, and the feeding/clothing/nurturing that usually falls to them constitutes the most crucial relationship between a child and a parent. But it’s an understood relationship, one that moms are told about and instructed on. To be a good dad, to do the consistent, low-to-the-ground parenting, to weather the emotional tides of having kids, to lead by example and lay down the heavy-but-thoughtful disciplinary tokes, isn’t something we always want or expect men to know how to do. Doing it well, or trying to, is what being a good dad is all about.

» This Sunday is Father’s Day. Twitter @katecarraway or email kcarraway@eyeweekly.com about your dad.