How I Became a Father (Reflections on Father’s Day Coming Up in a Week)
It is June 7, 2019, and we are about a week away from father’s day, so I wanted to take a moment and reflect on the strange, circuitous route that led to me becoming a father, and how I understand the meaning (a meaning?) of fatherhood.
When I was growing up, as a boy and then an adolescent, somewhere inside I harbored a sort of assumption that I would be a father someday. I don’t know why exactly. My own Dad, who was a very hard-working dermatologist, would make time to talk to his sons (I have two brothers), and his marriage to my Mom, which lasted for forty years, until her death last April, was a happy one. They had the sort of textbook romance that seems almost cliche — they met in high school, married in college, moved to the suburbs, raised three sons. etc.
The assumption that I would be a Dad probably came in part from the mythos that surrounded my parents’ relationship (happy couple, kids, suburbs, etc.). Still, my Dad to me, of course, was not just a husband — no, no way, he was my Dad. He was the person whose car I got to wash, with him, in the summer, with the huge beige sponges, that would soak up the soapy water and make great big messy arcs of white foam on the shiny metal surface of his Buick. (He hung his old blue and white Michigan license plates in our garage, above the shelves on the side where he kept salt for the driveway in the winter and other handy things.) My Dad would stand with me in his bathroom, and let me use his electric razor, with the cap on, to run over my face, sometimes as he himself stood in front of the mirror and actually shaved his own face, always finishing with what I remember as an Old Spice aftershave, whose smell I remember as kind of smoky sweet, a smell I of course associate forever with my Dad, and which came from a red bottle, which my Dad seemed to have an endless supply of. (Maybe he did have an endless supply of Old Spice; he certainly had an endless supply of soap and shampoo — various companies would send the good doctor large amounts of free samples, Dove and Head and Shoulders and what have you, and he he kept these like canned goods inside a closet in our basement, which I suppose was sort of like a bunker for hygienic products; this was also where he kept his Mom’s old coats, including a fur coat or two, hanging on a coat rack in the back.) I also have vivid memories of times when my Dad would come into my bedroom (my brothers and I each had our own bedroom, which was very lucky and great; mine was the only one with a lock on the door, which came in handy as an adolescent when I didn’t want to be bothered or wanted to assert myself somehow, assert my privacy); this would be at night, after school and dinner, when my Dad came home from work on certain nights. He would often visit each of our bedrooms to chat with us before we went to sleep. My twin brother, Garrett, and I had intense relationships with certain stuffed animals (my own sons do not, which I am perplexed by), and Garrett had a stuffed wombat, named “Wombly,” a sort of black fuzzy thing with four legs and a smushed-in, cute face. I remember certain times when my Dad would be chatting with me at night in my bedroom; we had set up a thing with Garrett, in the bedroom adjacent to mine, that, when we counted down, Garrett would launch Wombly out the door and into corridor, and maybe down the stairs. So my Dad and I would count down — 10,9,8,7,6,5… — and at 0 we’d watch this fuzzy stuffed wombat fly past the door like a strange funny rocket, and we’d all laugh hysterically and do it over and over again.
My point in all of these positive memories is that, because my Dad was in many ways a good father and, for the most part, a good role model, I assimilated this into my soul, my self, and just assumed this would be the route I would take as an adult.
Things Get Difficult and Weird
The gist of what I am saying is that, for the most part, I had a very happy childhood, and had my Dad (and Mom) to thank for much of it. I also went to a great Jewish day school in metropolitan Detroit, and I loved school, loved my friends, loved most of my teachers. Still, I was, by sixth or seventh grade, an overweight, rambunctious kid, who often was a rather obnoxious presence in class to my teachers. I distinctly remember once telling a teacher to “go fly a kite” in a rude way, and she sending me outside the class. One teacher I had, who was a friend of my Mom’s, told my parents at parent-teacher conferences that I was a “wise-ass.” I totally was.
Why was I a wise-ass? I’m not sure — I guess I really craved attention. But why? Wasn’t I getting enough attention at home? Here is where I think my parents could have been better somehow, though hindsight is always 20/20, as people like to say, with a lot (I think) truth — we never really talked about feelings in our family, we were fairly zipped up, even almost WAPSish in a way. I had many positive experiences with my Mom and Dad — my Mom was a journalist, so she took my brothers and I to a lot of fun arts events around metropolitan Detroit — but when it came to talking about the more awkward or painful things, we (or at least I, my brothers might feel differently) were often left somewhat alone, to make sense of what we were feeling, even if we didn’t have the words, the skills, the psychological or mental health repertoire, the ability, to really know how to think about or manage feelings that were more intense, harder to manage, embarrassing, confusing, etc. Maybe this is more commonplace? (This is why, when I started therapy much later, when I was in college, after having some panic and anxiety attacks in my early 20s, and my therapist asked me reasonably enough to describe my parents (“what were your parents like?”), I had a really difficult time coming up with words to describe them. I’m not sure I had really separated from them — was this my responsibility? my parents? — so I didn’t have the words to put distance between me and them, to see them as adults (and, consequently, myself as an adult).
Separation, from what I understand of it, seems to come to some degree from the ability to express authentic anger and assert one’s agency; this is something — the expression of anger — that just did not often happen in our family. I have zero memories whatsoever of my parents fighting; if they did, it was behind closed doors. Maybe this is a good thing — in some ways — but I think it’s important for children to see their parents in real ways, honest ways, if hopefully not dysfunctional, but most importantly, not always through rose-colored lenses, even if they at first, of course, as young children do idealize them (at that age they can’t really help it)). For example, I do not remember my father being really angry with any of us, nor do I remember my parents disciplining us for anything. This seems really odd — I really was a wise-ass in grade school, and in high school I was experimenting a lot with drugs and alcohol. I have a very vivid memory later on, when I was in high school, when my Mom found a bag of marijuana in our family room, buried underneath a pillow on the couch. Her first question, which I’ll never forget, was: “which of your friends is smoking pot?” She just did not (could not?), admit to herself that we were using pot. (Why? That’s another story for another day.)
By the time I started high school — I went to a public school, after attending the private Jewish day school from k-8 — I wasn’t really…I don’t know, equipped for managing my feelings? I had a large social circle, and I enjoyed spending time with my friends; I covered sports for my high school, and fell deeply in love with a girl friend a year younger than me —but at the same time, at a deep level inside, I was struggling with a sort of machismo, a toxic masculinity, a mask I often wore that, in my more anguished and honest moments, I felt alienated from, which is to say that I felt deeply alienated from myself. And the worst part about this was that I didn’t know why. I knew something was wrong, of that I was sure, but I did not have the awareness — verbal, cognitive, emotional, whatever — to really understand this, let alone articulate it. I had no way of understanding myself, my environment, my parents, my culture, nothing. It wasn’t a good situation. And so I remember myself being pretty quiet a lot of the time. One night I remember vividly — I went to a party at my friend’s sister-in-law’s house; I was sitting in a chair in a living room with my friend and another adolescent boy who I thought was cool and wanted him to like me. We were smoking pot in a bowl, and for some reason I was actually unable to speak. I don’t think it was the pot exactly, though this might have exacerbated my own issues. But the point was that I was silent when I didn’t want to be silent. I felt very uneasy with being silent, but I was scared of talking, I was possessed by a very intense form of self-consciousness and hyper-vigilance. My super-ego was running rampant, I guess we could put it that way; another way was that in many ways I was really a repressed person then, despite or because of acting out when I was drunk or being obnoxious to certain teachers in class. (I am horrified by my behavior towards one teacher I had, for a psychology class; when I think about my own issues student-teaching later in my life, it’s hard not to conclude that the saying “karma is a bitch” is, well, apt.)
This repression isn’t really the whole story. Sometime, around certain friends, I did really feel more like myself. I enjoyed writing, and I got good grades. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling, at a deep level of my self, that something was wrong, and I didn’t know what, and I didn’t know what to do or how to deal with it. I couldn’t really talk to my parents about this — I didn’t know how to talk about it to them. My Mom and Dad had prepared me for a lot of things, but this really wasn’t one of them.
College and London Abroad
My experience as an undergraduate was as a kind of further iteration of this dynamic I’m talking about — feeling like myself around certain friends, in certain contexts; beginning to get more into reading and writing as an English major; but also often feeling like something was wrong, and being quiet when I didn’t want to be quiet, and experiencing anxiety and depression. My brother and I both joined a fraternity, and there was a lot of drug and alcohol abuse. The apex of all this was that I studied abroad in London when I was a junior, and it was an awful experience. I had a really hard time making friends — I really didn’t even try — and spent large periods of time alone. All this business of not being in touch with myself was catching up to me in a scary way. I was obsessed with a poem by Shelley about a poet’s life in solitude then, but I wasn’t in solitude — I was for the most part isolated and isolating, afraid of myself, afraid of the world, depressed, anxious, often alone, etc.
This started a very painful chapter in my life, which I don’t really have the time or interest to write about today. I do remember returning from London, my Mom picked me up at the airport, and I still could not talk about how unhappy I was! It was a vast form of denial, repression. It was sad, this inability to really share how I was feeling.
Fatherhood Redux
So, at some point during my young adulthood or adulthood, my thoughts about being a father changed. I no longer carried around the assumption that I would be a Dad. I had been struggling so much with depression and anxiety and other stuff, and I decided, consciously or unconsciously, that I did not want to bequeath this mental pain to my kids. My Dad’s Mom had suffered throughout her life with schizophrenia, and I assumed I had inherited some of this DNA, and that this explained why I was so unhappy and quiet and alone all the time.
But this decision, conviction, resolve, call it what you will, seemed to waver. I met a great person in my late 20s, we dated, and I thought “maybe I’m wrong about fatherhood.” I started a new master’s program in Toledo, and me and said person broke up, but I felt for the most part more like myself. There were a few problems with mental health stuff, but I finished the program eventually, then moved to Cleveland for a PhD program, (which I left after a year, another story).
Still, when I joined OkCupid in Cleveland once again around 2015, and made a new profile, for some reason I said “not interested in kids.” This stayed up for the entire time I stayed on the site, even after I started talking to the woman who would later become my wife (and later, though this is another story, my ex-wife). She had marked on her profile that she was Jewish, as I had; I could not believe there was another Jewish person on the site, since I’d never really met or dated any Jewish women during my time on OKC. She was photographed smiling under a tree; she had sunglasses on; she looked cute and happy. We started talking, dating. But here was the thing, which I learned on our first date: she had two twin sons who were four years old. Their biological Dad was a sperm donor, who they did not know nor had ever met; she had decided to have kids herself, after not finding the right person, before it was too late.
Okay: so what did this mean, exactly? I think a part of me felt that that old assumption about being a father, even a desire to be a father, was beginning to be stirred up, activated, in ways I wasn’t totally aware of, though I liked the feeling, which made me feel hopeful and engaged, and also added a level of responsibility and commitment to my life that I hadn’t had, but that I felt in some deep way that I was ready for. (I was also rather amazed by my then-new-friend of sorts; wasn’t this shockingly….brave? Independent? She wanted kids, so she had them, by herself. This utter resolve, and the deep maternal desire to have children and be a Mom it implied, deeply, even profoundly, impacted me, who was living then with far less levels of responsibility.) Of course, I didn’t meet these mentioned kids immediately; my then-girlfriend felt it would be appropriate to date for three months before we all hung out. I thought this was reasonable — what if it didn’t work out? What if they started calling me “Dad,” or more importantly (and probably unavoidably?) saw me as a Dad figure, and then we broke up? That would not be good; no, that would actually be absolutely horrid (it turned out okay). Anyways, we dated for a full and meaningful three months, she somehow miraculously found babysitters this whole time, and then, finally, I met these two boys, her sons.
Where did we meet? We met at the Cleveland zoo. One son, who had long black hair, was very excited about me being there. They had just watched “E.T.” with their Mom, so she had suggested that I bring Reece’s Pieces to give to them (aha! this is a man-form who gives me candy; and this candy is associated with a magical movie; therefore this man-form-thing-person is magic…brilliant move on her part). I did this, the boys were happy, we walked around the zoo, the long-haired child constantly saying my name and taking my hand and whisking me around breathlessly to anything and everything that excited him; and, although I’m not sure we saw anything exactly, because we were so busy moving around and being excited (and I was excited, though nervous, too; I had never been a Dad, at least in this life, only an uncle, and what exactly was happening????) — and although the other son was more quiet, and stayed close to his Mom, and seemed deeply interested in me, but also slightly wary — at any rate, we hit if off, and said long-haired child even invited me to dinner that night at their apartment, which their Mom dutifully, nicely assented to.
The point of all this is that I had never been a Dad. BUT, I had a Dad, and he was a good Dad, even if we didn’t talk much about feelings, even if that responsibility fell on me eventually, as probably happens to many other people in this world. And this Dad I carried inside of me as a part of my self; and he would come out often when I spent time with the boys, reading or talking to them, and was for the most part kind, gentle, patient, and strong. So, over time, as I got to know each boy, and grew to love their Mom more, as a partner and as a Mom to four-year-old sons, I started to say to myself, “Okay, is this actually happening? What exactly is happening?” I would go to their apartment and read stories to the boys; then, as time passed, I’d pack their lunches in the morning sometimes, or make them breakfast, or sit with them in the morning as they ate their breakfast, or look at them, or pick up after them, and one night my then-girlfriend took a picture of us three reading a book together at night, and I looked at the picture, and was like, “Who is that?” I didn’t really know. What I did know was, I liked bonding with the two boys, whenever it happened, through music or reading or talking, and I really liked my girlfriend, so I would keep on doing what I was doing.
Marriage, Etc.
Fast forward a bit. Then-girlfriend and I got married. I spent much more time with her and the two boys, who I began to know more objectively in a way. One had occasional tantrums in the morning, and only my wife seemed to knew how to talk to him. The other boy, when he started crying, sometimes did not stop crying, and again, the expert was my wife. For some time, I hung back; I let their Mom, their best friend, their in many ways everything, to handle most disciplinary stuff — well, most stuff in general.
As we have lived together now for a few years, things have in many ways changed. I am not a Dad figure anymore. Most days I feel like their father. Which is kind of weird, if you think about it, since I’m not their biological father. (Maybe this is not so weird.) All of our names start with “A,” so we call ourselves the “A-team,” and have meetings, sometimes near the tree in front of our house, which we have also given an “A” name, perhaps being unfair to their Mom, who does not have an “A” name. Sometimes I say something to them that I wish my Dad might have said to me, like “I’m here for you if you need to talk about anything — anything, ever.” I have no idea what this means to them, or if they will take me up on this when they’re older and hormonal and angsty and probably hoping to have someone, even an adult, even a parent, to talk to. But this is the thing — life is a series of iterations. That’s how I’ve been thinking about it lately. We are working drafts, and over time we can become better. My Dad’s father was not always the greatest Dad to him; I think my Dad tried to make up for this by providing for us in deep and lasting ways, and giving us as many meaningful experiences as he could, that would stay with us for our lifetimes. And that has happened. The managing feelings stuff didn’t really come with this, but I learned it eventually. And today, a week from father’s day, I feel strongly that I want that for my sons — I want them to feel comfortable in their bodies, minds, and spirits. I do not want them to be afraid of themselves or the world. I want them to understand that the world is really what we make of it — if they are trusting, generous, tolerant, and genuinely open-minded, then the world they see will be mostly trusting, generous, tolerant, and open-minded; and that, in this way, they can live rich, full, and meaningful lives, with people who love them, and who they love. Sometimes, when I am upstairs with them, it’s bedtime and we are about to say the Shema, I feel this deep sense of amazement and gratitude for what they have brought into my life. I sort of secretly cry (I pretend I’m not crying, though I am — maybe more machismo). And this feeling seems to say to me, “all that pain you experienced in the past, maybe it was a good thing? For look at what life has brought you. You can really appreciate what you have, because you know what it was like those years ago not to have any of it.” For some, maybe they already have this sense? Maybe I just needed to learn it. Whatever the case may be, on this upcoming father’s day, let’s be thankful for what has been brought into our lives. When my sons hang on to my legs like koalas, and I walk like a giant, with them hanging on to my legs and laughing hysterically, into their bedroom, I feel blessed in a way I often, as an adult, never thought I could or would feel. And it’s just an iteration, an extension, of washing my Dad’s car with him in the summer, or smelling his aftershave, or seeing a stuffed wombat sail in an arc past your childhood bedroom door, and laughing giddily with your very own Dad.
