Introduction
Look, I know this post is a little late, Father’s Day having been last Sunday. On that day I had to (well, chose to) provide (quasi-) live coverage of a bike race. But isn’t a week later a better time anyway, now that all the fanfare is over, to reflect on being and/or having and/or having had a dad?
I lost my father in 2017. What a strange way we have of saying this, like it was somehow my fault. “How did you lose him?” one might ask. “Is a grown man that hard to keep track of?!” Perhaps I should say the world lost him, and/or he lost the world. Anyway, one upshot of this is that the holiday doesn’t really require anything of me anymore, which is nice. I always struggled with what to write on my Father’s Day card to my dad, as you shall see … which always brings me to this question: have I made it difficult for my kids to write this card?
This post is a reflection on these and other matters, and is perhaps a bit less lighthearted than my past Father’s Day posts (here, here, here, here, and here).
Trigger warning
Before I begin, I suppose I should warn you that what you’re about to read is not particularly self-deprecating. If you feel that you are a bad father, or are married to one, you might find this post distasteful. If it bothers you to read about how somebody has his act together (or thinks he does), to the point that you basically hate me, you can balance out your experience by reading more self-critical essays here, here, and/or (especially) here.
I say all this because I am not writing today in a hangdog or confessional tone. In this post I will not try to channel my inner Erma Bombeck by poking fun at my haplessness and foibles in a way that is relatable to any audience. I take parenting very seriously, and I am tired of reading essays from irresponsible types who think parenting is about their “personal journey” rather than about their kid(s). For example, I’ve read several testimonials from parents about how being cooped up with their kids during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place taught them how much they’d neglected their kids previously. “I was always at work and didn’t realize what I was missing out on,” this or that dippy father says. “Now I’ve gotten to know my kids better and you know what? I kinda like the little rascals! So now I’m making more time for them.” So what? You were a lame dad and you learned something? Big whoop. I’d rather get my wisdom from somebody who was a good parent all along and didn’t blithely botch the job until a crisis like the pandemic made him pull his head out.
The email to my brothers
The genesis of this post was the below email I wrote to my brothers many years ago. I’ll let it speak for itself.
From: Dana
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 10:54 AM
To: Geoff; Bryan
Cc: E—
Subject: Father’s Day
Gentlemen,
Since you’re both fathers, and Father’s Day is upon us, I thought I’d share some of my feelings on this occasion. Actually, this e-mail is mainly procrastination, as I sat down this morning to write something in a Father’s Day card and get it in the mail on time, and I’ve got serious writer’s block. It may strike you as odd that I could get writer’s block over such a simple matter as a card, when I generally have what is arguably one of the worst cases of logorrhea on record, but I’ve always found the short card to be a bigger challenge than a 2,000-word blog post. Here are some of my mental rough drafts, crumpled up and thrown into my mental trash bin:
- Happy Father’s Day to the best dad ever!!!! ⇐ False, sentimental, likely to be taken as sarcastic … I mean, this is our dad we’re talking about, and even he isn’t so clueless as to believe I’d call him the “best dad ever”
- Happy Father’s Day! ⇐ Too simple, likely to be taken as perfunctory
- Happy Father’s Day! I hope you like the card. I thought of you when I saw the car on the front. I hope the car picture doesn’t dredge up ill feelings based on the fact that I bought a Volvo, the very car you warned me against buying, based on the murderously, scandalously expensive official Volvo replacement parts that they force you to buy. I didn’t ignore your lecture, either time, about the friend who took his Volvo to a mechanic to have the rear-view mirror replaced, only to find that the car rejected the used replacement like a bad organ because its computer chip did a VIN lookup and it didn’t match, and the new mirror was $600 (or was it $800?). I want you to know that although I listened to that story and committed it to memory, I then went right out and bought a Volvo anyway, because it looks cool and I want to be the envy of the neighbors, even at the expense of our planet since my car gets vastly inferior gas mileage to your car [a Scion XB that we call “The Toaster” because it looks like one]. Also, your VIN lookup story failed the sanity test … I think you might be mistaking your own wild-ass theory for reality. ⇐ Too long, too bitter, too judgmental, too likely to engender ill will
- Happy Father’s Day! I hope you like the card. I thought of you when I saw the car on the front. Of course this car is a convertible, which isn’t safe, but I couldn’t bother myself to search harder for a card with a safe car (or a toaster) on the front, or to make my own card. No, I just selected the first thing that basically slotted in to the “more or less germane” category, if only in the most perfunctory way. ⇐ Too subtle
- Happy Father’s Day! You were always there for me, Dad … except on those occasions (roughly 12 hours a day, seven days a week) when you weren’t actually there, for me or anybody else, because you were working, except when you actually were at home but were inexplicably lying on your back taking a nap on the floor of the living room and then getting really angry at your sons for making too much noise and waking you up, as though four boys together in a room can possibly be quiet. ⇐ Too accurate
- Happy Father’s Day! I really appreciate your parenting, and I want you to know that I forgive you for the spankings, especially the ones that Mom commissioned (“Wait ‘til your faaaaaather gets home!”), and I appreciate the grim stoicism you displayed when dispatching your spanking duties, even though it sometimes seemed like all you came home for was to spank us and eat dinner before going back to work. I know that your intentions—to produce respectful, obedient children—were good (even if I’m personally opposed to corporal punishment). ⇐ Too political
- Happy Father’s Day! I’m sorry my brothers and I let you down. I’m especially sorry for my own failure, given that I’d given you false hope with some early scholastic promise before choosing a wussy major like English, and I know it must have been humiliating for you to admit to your old Navy/grad-school buddy that I chose English instead of Engineering, and I winced inwardly, not just for myself, when I ran into that Navy/grad-school-buddy at the UPS shipping facility back in ‘90 and he said, “You’re at Cal, then? Good man. Though your dad told me how disappointed he was that you chose English.” ⇐ Insincere, because in reality I’m totally unapologetic about my choice, preferring to see Dad’s disappointment as a failing in him, not us
- Happy Father’s Day! Thank you so much for getting that HP-85 computer and letting us kids use it. My early use of that machine really wired me for the Information Age, and I largely credit your prescience for my gainful employment today. ⇐ Too weirdly specific
So yeah, it’s a difficult task, writing that card. I’ll get to it somehow, though, and I think it’ll even be on time, and I’ll probably even give him a call on Sunday, though talking to him on the phone is a bit nerve-racking, at least at first, until we settle into our respective roles of lecturer and audience. Then it’s a simple matter of saying “uh-huh” and “oh, interesting” from time to time until he runs out of steam and we can more or less gracefully exit the call. As you well know.
Am I too harsh?
Of course with my brothers I can be extra critical of my father, because they know exactly what I’m talking about (even if they’re more likely to cut him some slack). I certainly wouldn’t have shared the above email with, say, the people who attended my dad’s memorial; instead I wrote a speech designed to better balance the laudatory with the honest, to fondly commemorate my dad while still acknowledging the trickier areas of our relationship. But that audience consisted of people who liked the guy enough to attend his memorial … it would be unseemly to stand up at that lectern and bag on him.
Does that make it okay to share the above email here, to a (possibly) wider audience? Well, I doubt my dad’s friends read albertnet (after all, he didn’t). And of course it’s too late to offend him. I think in the service of understanding a couple of fundamental questions—what makes a good parent, and what makes a parent bad?—I’m calling it in bounds.
Don’t we all make mistakes?
There are so many ways to screw up as a parent. Nobody can get it right all the time, and of course all of us parents are learning on the job. It would be nice if we could learn from our mistakes on our firstborn and get it right after that (and it is the case that I’m less screwed up than my three older brothers), but what works on one kid might not work on another (and yes, I was joking in that previous parenthetical, seeing if you’re still awake). Parents learn as they go … or fail to learn.
So what makes the difference between a dad who screws up from time to time but whose kid takes it in stride, and a parent whose kid can’t think of what to write in a Father’s Day card? There are probably a thousand good answers to this, but I’ll focus on a couple. One: how hard does the dad actually try? Two: how much rapport is available to work through disappointments together?
I’ll take an example from my own parenting to explore this. To be of any use, this needs to be a bad memory, of a time when I really screwed up and felt really bad … a low moment for me as a father. (Ah, now I’ve got your attention!) So here’s the story. My older daughter A— was on the high school mountain bike team; I was a coach. We were doing the Sunday team ride on Mount Tam, and she was having breathing problems. Like many cyclists (including myself), she suffered from exercise-induced bronchospasm (EIB), an asthma-like condition that can occur during intense exercise, especially in dusty conditions. On top of this, her bike had a catastrophic mechanical problem (I think the chain got really badly jammed), which I struggled to fix. The group had left us far behind, and I bloodied my hand during the repair, and when we went to catch up my daughter’s breathing was so bad, she could barely pedal her bike. Her wheezing was so loud it seemed to me she was exaggerating it. I blew my top and was yelling at her, as if she wasn’t having a crappy enough time already. I stopped short of accusing her of playing up her breathing trouble, but I’m sure my exasperation came through in my tone and my volume. (I fact-checked this story with A— yesterday, and she recalls that she’d forgotten her inhaler that day, which was part of what drove my fury. I hadn’t remembered that, but we both agree this was a very bad episode in any case.)
Where our memory diverges is around my apology. I recall apologizing later that day, and again when we learned, months later, that she actually had Vocal Cord Dysfunction (VCD), an evil twin to EIB, which actually involves louder wheezing because it’s the vocal cords blocking the airway. A— does not recall the apologies, and this makes me wince. It reminds me that, as much the lack of an apology can exacerbate one’s pain, the apology itself does not, of course, undo the bad behavior. And yet A—, even without an apology, forgives me for the episode, saying that it “doesn’t make me add an asterisk when I say you’re a good father.”
So how come I struggle to forgive my own father? Why do I look back on his parenting with such a shudder? Why did I always have trouble coming up with anything nice to say in my Father’s Day cards? When I sift through my memories in search of answers, few episodes stand out and I’ll share a couple here.
Exhibit A. When my dad bought me my first bike—a 10-speed (for which choice I have to hand it to my dad, it changed my life)—I read the owner’s manual, which emphasized the importance if the free 30-day tune-up. I mentioned this to my dad, and asked if he could take me and my bike to the shop to get this done. He walked over to the bike, lifted the front wheel, gave it a spin, and declared that the brake pads were on upside-down, and that the person who built the bike (and by extension, apparently, the whole shop) was incompetent, and that we’d be better off not letting them near the bike.
This argument had a couple of problems. First, it didn’t make sense even to my 9-year-old brain that my dad would identify a problem with the bike without fixing it. Second, it wasn’t that long before I knew that his statement about the brake pads was simply false. My dad lied about the brake pads because he was just too lazy (or as he surely thought of it, too busy) to bring the bike to the shop, and didn’t want to get into some annoying dialogue about it. My interpretation of this behavior is that he either a) didn’t have much respect for honesty as a value that should always be upheld; b) was too stingy in his estimation of my intelligence to realize I’d know he was lying; and/or c) underestimated my ability to remember any of this and thus realize later that he'd lied. And then, a year or two after this, he lied again! I’d noticed my bike’s wheels seemed wobbly and asked my dad if my axle nuts were loose or something. He gave the wheel a spin and then said to my brother, “Geoffrey, can you check the axle nuts on Dana’s bike and make sure they’re tight?” Of course my dad knew damn well it wasn’t the axle nuts; he just didn’t want to have to work on my bike. Geoff knew this too and said, “It’s not your axle nuts. Your wheels are out of true. It’s a spoke tension thing.” He seemed as disgusted as I was. Again, my dad had just figured out the quickest way to exit the conversation, even if that meant flat-out lying to me.
To reiterate: two things differentiate my poor parenting example and my dad’s. One is how hard he was trying (or wasn’t), and the second is how much rapport existed to support any effort toward resolution. In the case of my transgression (the outburst during the mountain bike ride), at least after the fact I could discuss my behavior with my daughter. Even if her memory is the correct one and I didn’t apologize, we’ve talked about this (and other episodes) several times over the years, and we’ve talked in general about how she feels about me as a dad. I’ve invited both my daughters to give me a report card from time to time. They know I take parenting seriously and can handle criticism. So when I talk about trying one’s best, I don’t just mean endeavoring to always do the right thing, but to be willing to admit it when you fall short, and do the work necessary to understand and (at least try to) correct the behavior going forward.
In contrast, I couldn’t call my dad out on his misbehavior, for two reasons. One, for me to confront him about his dishonesty would be a serious accusation, which he wouldn’t have handled well based on his ego and his failure to hold himself accountable. Second, my dad wasn’t actually interested in having rapport with his sons, at least when we were kids. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the kind of loosey-goosey over-modern type who thinks parents and their children should be pals, without any concept of parental authority, but I think the family hierarchy fulfilled some lack in my dad in ways that weren’t healthy . He enjoyed having his sons be in awe of him, of his great brain, of his height, his power, his aloofness … I think he didn’t even mind that we were afraid of him—sufficiently so to never dream of criticizing him. Thus there was no rapport.
The third thing
Oops, did I say there were two main factors determining whether moments of bad parenting can be assuaged? There’s also a third measure of parenting that is hugely important: consistency. I suppose I have always appreciated this on some level, but it was brought into sharp focus by—of all things—a monologue in a TV show. My daughter A— turned me on to it, in fact; I suspect the episode in question recalled to her some of the dialogue we’ve had about parenting. The episode (s05e06) is called “Free Churro,” and if you have Netflix you can watch it yourself (and you should, if you are, have, or have had a parent). You can read the full script here.
Here’s the setup. BoJack, a horse, is giving a eulogy for his mother, and—far from being organized enough to write anything in advance—he’s just winging it, and rather tastelessly. (The show is a comedy, after all.) Bojack contemplates aloud:
All I know about being good I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up, and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so hard.
Part of why this speaks to me is that this contrast between grand gestures and day-to-day stuff helps me understand why the happiest memories of my parents don’t simply wipe out my disappointments. Did my dad ever do anything great? Yeah, of course! For example, as I described in my own speech at his memorial, he showed up with his car to provide support when I biked up Mount Evans (the highest paved road in North America), first with my new bride and then, 22 years later, with my daughter A—. Also, as I mentioned above, my dad bought my brothers and me dashing ten-speed bikes when all our friends were on clunkier one-speeds, and he let us learn to program on his HP-85 computer, years before anyone had an IBM PC. He built a sled for my oldest brothers for their Boy Scout Klondike Derby, and calculated the perfect parabolic shape for our other brother’s solar hot dog cooker, and once did a 360 in the snow in his VW bus with the entire carpool on board. All very cool stuff … but he wasn’t interested in the day-to-day business of just being in our lives, and being interested. He didn’t see me in the school play (though I had the lead role); he didn’t come to my high school graduation (saying “I have to work that day” even though it was on a Saturday weeks in the future), and didn’t even attend my college graduation, though this was from his own Alma Mater that he’d wanted all four of his sons to attend. (Details on that last example are here and never mind the “fiction” label; that was applied before my dad had passed away).
And this is the crux, I think: kids can tell when their parents are or aren’t truly committed. This commitment shows in the willingness to pay attention, to be involved, to attend the middle school band concert even though it is essentially the opposite of music. The sense that you, the child, are not only not the point but are in fact a distraction—an obstruction, even—can be devastating. This is poignantly depicted, coincidentally, in that same “Free Churro” episode of “Bojack Horseman.” At the beginning of the episode, before the eulogy scene, there’s a flashback of Bojack being picked up from school, hours late, by his father, who complains about having to do this errand:
I was on a good run with my novel. I had this really interesting sentence that kept going for pages and pages, and I thought about how rare it is to really get in the groove like that. How, most days, I can’t concentrate because my idiot child is blasting the television, and it suddenly dawned on me; hot cock on a rock, [your mom] never even picked up the little noise and snot factory [i.e, Bojack]! … You know Sunday is my writing day. Sundays are the one day that are just for me and my craft, and still, you and the black hole that birthed you conspire to ruin it for me. What am I supposed to do now? Just go back to writing? I’m out of the zone now, the whole day’s shot! All because of you and that brittle wisp of a woman you made the mistake of making your mother.
Obviously there is massive hyperbole going on here (again, the show is a comedy), but the point really hit home for me. I felt like that noise and snot factory, too. Even when, as a teenager, I got into some really cool stuff (e.g., bike racing; writing, illustrating, and typing a Russian picture book; composing urination-themed poetry), my dad wasn’t aware or interested … his work was more important. And that, above all else, is what makes writing out that Father’s Day card such a difficult exercise, and one that I so little miss.
Am I any better?
To finish this essay on a less unpleasant note, and to make the case that in fact I do try harder and have worked hard to be consistent and approachable and reliable for my kids, I will offer you the bluh-bluh-bluh story. I will start by saying that I always loved reading to my kids, from the very beginning (and still sometimes today, when they’re around). That said, parenting is incredibly tiring, especially when kids are young, and often this read-aloud could be a struggle. (It was even harder coming up with a totally original bedtime story every night, that needed to have fully realized characters and the traditional story arc—exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution—before my kids would be satisfied, but that’s another story … see here.)
At times it was impossible to stay awake while reading, and as sleep overtook me strange words would come out of my mouth, that had nothing to do with the book, and then (as I described in a journal I kept for my daughter), these words would decay into gibberish. These sounds often came out as something like “bluh-bluh-bluh,” and my daughter’s shorthand when scolding me for this would be, “No bluh-bluh-bluh-ing!” My favorite such memory is when I fell so deeply asleep I didn’t even know where I was, and I awoke to the bizarre sight of my daughter’s face inches from mine, and her fingers actually prying my eyes open to wake me up so I could read some more. These were not kids accustomed to being denied.
Further albertnet reading on this topic:
- Father’s Day
- What Are Fathers For?
- A Father's Day Poem
- World’s Second-Best Dad!
- Father’s Day Focus: Are Parents Interchangeable?
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.