Being there for your people
Like, really being there.
I was halfway through writing the first Sad Dad Diary a couple weeks ago when my brother called me to tell me our dad had died. I set out on this project to reflect on my own experiences with fatherhood, but given the circumstances I feel like it's appropriate to think about what he modeled for me. So, bear with me on this one.
Like a lot of kids in the late 90s, my brother and I obsessed over Pokémon. We watched the show, hovered over our Game Boys, collected the cards and assembled decks and went into battle with other kids. This occupied our free time, minutes in between classes and on bus rides home, but nothing mattered as much as Saturday mornings at the local Toys “R” Us, where our little Indiana hometown hosted its weekly league. A couple dozen of us would pile into a room, hook up our Game Boys to one another’s or trade cards or speculate over versions of the game that didn’t exist here yet, rumors we’d picked up on over dial-up internet in our homes’ computer rooms. It was the highlight of my admittedly nerdy weeks.
I don’t remember seeing many parents there, but my dad always was. And it wasn’t that he loved Pokémon or even anything cultural, either. He ate scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast, drove only American cars, once ordered a crunchy taco supreme from a small family-owned shack in Florida. He stuck around because we were his boys, as he called my brother and me. That was enough.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad lately and what made him special, what made moments like these stick out in my head two decades after they passed, and I think it’s that they made me feel normal. My dad, a former high school wrestler, Vietnam War veteran, dedicated steelworker—he didn’t think twice about his boys slipping on Hawaiian shirts over Dragonball: Z button-ups and spending hours in Toys “R” Us obsessing over fictional Japanese monsters. He treated it as if he’d done the same when he was a kid.
This can’t be hard to do, right? Our attention is admittedly pulled farther now than it was then, but there’s something to be said about reeling that in for our people, whether they’re our kids or our spouses or our friends. I don’t want to listen to Frozen’s “Love is an Open Door” while I do the dishes, but does it kill me to sing along with the back-and-forth my daughter likes to play out? Probably not. Can I take a night off from watching hockey or reading to watch—really watch, not sit-on-my-phone-while-my-wife-watches—Love is Blind or This Is Us with my wife? In the bigger scheme of things, that should be a given, right?
I guess what I’m getting at is that my dad was great at being present for those he cared about, and it’s probably not a bad idea for me to put down my phone or put aside my dislikes or even what I want to do every once in a while to do the same.
I have a couple recommendations for y’all. This was a favorite part of my previous version of this newsletter, so I’d like to continue it. They’re not all going to be parenting related, just some things I feel might be worth enjoying.
A couple months ago, I had the chance to briefly chat with Ratboys’ bassist Sean Neumann, who has a project of his own called Jupiter Styles. I’ve been listening to a lot of his album Ultra St. Opera, which has a sort of punk backbone but a softer sound that’s nice to just sit around to and take in.
Even before my dad died, I was reading Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, the Japanese Breakfast frontwoman’s memoir about the loss of her mother to cancer a few years back. Zauner does a crazy good job of interweaving her Korean-American heritage, particularly as it relates to food, in with the significance of her mom’s passing and the impact it had on her. It’s a real gut punch of a book in all the best ways.
Until next week.