on fatherhood

Ned Plimpton:
Why didn't you ever try to contact me?

Steve Zissou:
Because I hate fathers, and I never wanted to be one.

I started this blog with a post about my father dying, as a way to give myself space and clarity on my own feelings about our complicated relationship. Writing forces me to organize my thoughts, a bit, and it’s a healthy way for me to get out of my head. I also find that creating some kind of narrative structure allows me to find contentment in the chaos of this life, which follows no real structure (at least not the way I do it, ha) and offers little comfort when shit goes sideways.

Because my dad and I never had a good relationship I was forever searching for father figures. The first one I found was Jim Nordman, who I mentioned here. In addition to starting me on a lifelong fascination with computers and technology, he was the first adult to encourage my writing. I would write short stories just for him and and he return them to me with little notes. “I love it!” or “That’s a funny way to blow up someone” or “Are you feeling ok?” all of which were very valid questions at the time. My stories were terrible but I loved the act of writing them for the same reason I love writing now. And he saw that, and encouraged it, and I’m forever grateful. His son Kyle and I would hang out on the weekends and sometimes Jim would sit up with us at night and ask me questions about this or that, mostly to Kyle’s annoyance. But he took an interest and it felt good to have that validation from a father figure, when my own dad didn’t understand me and wasn’t emotionally able to meet me where I was.

I forgive my father for that, I think. He simply wasn’t capable. It wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t done out of any kind of anger or impatience. He was childlike and impulsive and his own emotional intelligence was low. He grew up rough and never healed and there are a lot of broken men like that. There were a couple of times, when I was older, that I tried to meet him where he was and they didn’t go well. I was still too angry, he was still too always right. Two minutes of talk, 10 minutes of shouting. I know he loved me, but I also know he wasn’t capable of doing that in the way I needed. In retrospect it’s fairly easy to find the reasons for this…his own father was a nightmare of a man and his family had a lot of dysfunction that he didn’t handle well. He was an addict and was forever chasing something to numb him. He felt strongly and couldn’t deal with it. I understand it, and I’m at least grateful that he showed me early how awful addiction is so that I could recognize those same behaviors in myself and avoid them.

My mom is fond of reminding me that I never wanted kids. She does what many parents of a certain age do….she has developed a handful of stories & facts about me that delight her and she now repeats them, ad nauseam, to anyone who will listen including me. I hated Little League and would hide books in my glove to read in the outfield and once ran off the field to chase the ice cream truck, and I never wanted to play outside, and I wore blue laces in my combat boots in high school, and I never wanted to have kids. These little souvenirs are her favorites, for whatever reason, and while they’re all true and I’ll gladly own them, being reminded that for many, many years I was very vocally against ever having kids comes with remembering all the reasons I didn’t want to be a father and that one stings.

When I first saw A Life Aquatic, and Bill Murray delivered the line that I quoted above, I was devastated. I started shaking, and I had one of those moments….you ever been punched in the face and fallen into water at night? I know that’s a very, very specific “tell me you grew up in Florida without telling me you grew up in Florida” sort of thing, but it’s accurate. There’s the impact, the pain, the realization you’re going down and then you hit the water and the sound goes out and all you can hear is the rush of water past your ears and your own thoughts, loud as freight trains. There is panic, immediate panic, as you realize you’ve now graduated from “that’s gonna hurt” to “I don’t want to die” and have to get yourself out of this situation.

That’s how that line hit me. Delivered so matter-of-factly, but with an undertone that suggests so much more pain than we ever get a story to support. We never find out why Steve Zissou hates fathers but Bill Murray says it with such a weary edge that we know he has every right to.

I was 30 when my first child was born. The circumstances weren’t great, the relationship I was in wasn’t very good, but I decided I was going to be a good father. And something about that was very empowering. I decided I was going to be a good father. Not I hoped, not I wished….I decided. I had already learned that a lot of how we turn out in life is a product not just of whim or chance but of the decisions that we make. So I simply decided, and let that decision guide my actions.

I had two kids with that same woman, and two more with my wife Jenni. My kids are currently 17, 15, 7, and 5. Two pair, separated by a decade almost to the week! Three July birthdays, and an August. (Summers are wild around here). When my oldest was born I decided that the life of a traveling yoyo demonstrator wasn’t going to work out all that great for upholding my decision to be a good father, so I quit and started re-building a life that gave me more control. I became unemployable, picking up freelance work here and there as a demonstrator, as a performer, as a consultant. I did speaking gigs, I opened a retail store and art gallery, I started learning e-commerce. When I got divorced, I sold my entire yoyo collection to pay the legal fees to make sure I didn’t lose my kids. An entire career of yoyos, collected, designed, gifted….every single piece of my own personal history in an industry I helped shape, I sold off everything without a moment’s hesitation because my kids were my only priority. I pieced together work and new skillsets, after many years of only barely scraping by I managed to eventually build a life that afforded me the opportunity to be a stable, present, attentive, and supportive father. I fuck it up sometimes, still, like any human being does. But I made that decision 17 years ago and used it to guide me and now I have the kind of relationship with my kids where they know they are loved, they know they are supported, and they know they can come to me with anything. It’s a daily practice that I love keeping up with. It’s not easy, but it’s right.

I see my ability as a father as the benefit of incremental improvement. My grandfather was cruel, abusive, and an addict. My father was kind, emotionally unstable, and an addict. And while my brain may be a sack of wet cats, I am not an addict, I am emotionally available to and supportive of my kids, and I’m aware enough of my own flaws that I work every day at shielding my kids from my shittier tendencies while I learn to control and eventually eliminate them.

Any decent parent wants better for their kids than what they had, and I know my dad wanted that for me. Wish granted, pop. I’m doing alright.