Man, Dad, these letters keep getting better and better.
We talk on the phone every weekend but it’s hard for me to dive into everything you said over a video call.
I’ll try to do so here.
I know these letters are between you and I, but I wanted to do something fun and bring our readers into the discussion this week.
You asked me whether you have to be a good husband to be a good father. Our friend
had this to say in the comments of your last letter:“That question made me think as I read it. And what I thought of was how if you hold these roles in a traditional household, you're having to juggle three different identities:
1. Father
2. Spouse
3. Individual Self
Having to juggle those three different senses of self in the same place I imagine is pretty tiring. Can't be easy and you just try to do things the best you can.”
I was talking to a brilliant writer yesterday and he showed me an article he wrote years ago about a time when his marriage was strained.
He said it got to a point where they were so tired his wife and him couldn’t even muster up the energy to fight.
That speaks to what Jon wrote about it being tiring to juggle all three senses of the self. It’s pretty obvious Pop Pop was a good teacher, and wanted to help kids in the inner city of Baltimore. I never really knew that. Like you said at the end of your letter, “there’s more to a person then when they show their flaws.”
That’s one thing I learned at Pop Pop’s funeral. People got up and told stories about him with tears in their eyes. I wondered how that was even possible. Then I realized something..
Who Pop Pop was to me wasn’t who he was to others.
Said a different way, my experience with Pop Pop wasn’t the experience others had.
He might’ve been “bad” to me but he was “good” to others.
This is what so many people fail to realize today. I think even in the worst people there’s traits you can find that are inherently “good.” I’m not saying Pop Pop was a horrible person—in fact I’m making the argument he was more good than I give him credit for.
I used to work in a mowing truck in the summer with a bunch of rough dudes. One of them was visibly disgusted with me pretty much every day during my first season because I made every mistake in the book.
I remember one day he yelled at me in the street because I failed to tell him I broke a piece of equipment. I was such an idiot back then.
With time, though, as I got better and we had more conversations in the truck, we became friends. He told me all sorts of stories about his family and the debauchery he got into as a high schooler. We won’t get into any of that, lol.
He told me he had regular fights with his teenage daughter, and couldn’t understand what the heck she was thinking half the time. He told me that when everybody went to bed, the first thing he’d do was go in the basement and smoke enough weed to pass out before work the next day.
He told me about the fact he did acid like 20 times, and he loved to bring up the fact that the US government apparently considers you clinically insane if you’ve dropped acid 7 times. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounded cool.
He told me without his brother, who owned the mowing business, he’d probably be dead in a ditch somewhere from a drug overdose. He overcame all those problems. He told me to never touch any drug—especially crack cocaine. I remember he told me a story about how he first tried smoking crack out of a pipe. He said that before he could put the pipe back down on the table, he was asking for another hit.
Apparently getting addicted to crack is like rolling the dice. You either have the “gene” that makes you addicted to crack after the first hit, or you don’t.
He even told me a story about how, after his wife cheated on him, he unloaded a full magazine into the side of her car to get revenge. He knew she wasn’t in the car. He just did it to make her pay for a new car or something.
So, what kind of a person is this? A monster? He certainly wasn’t to me. I used to quote Will Ferrel SNL skits in the truck and they’d laugh their assess off. I loved doing that. We worked hard together. We took pride in getting a lot done. We helped each other. And at the end of the day, we got to be outside in the sun for 8-10 hours every day and drive to beautiful houses to cut grass. It really wasn’t that difficult.
But I could almost see how how certain people in his life would consider him a monster. Which was weird, because I thought he was a better man than even he gave himself credit for.
Remember when he came to our house after everybody in the truck had been picking on me all day to apologize? That meant a lot to me. Maybe he just did it because he knew they needed all the help they could get, and that I was five seconds away from quitting, but I’d like to think he also did it because he gave a damn about me.
I’ve come to realize over the years that men really aren’t as complicated as I thought.
I used to think you had to almost “earn” the friendship of other men. I used to think men were so gosh darn distant because they would only show their secret heart to people in their “club.”
In reality it’s a lot more simple than that.
Most just don’t know how to show love at all. And many are too scared to show that love, too, because of gender roles or something.
I don’t know.
It’s not like Pop Pop didn’t have the same emotions that so many other people feel. I think we all pretty much “feel” things as much as everybody else does.
The true culprit of man’s inability to show affection isn’t incompetence, but fear.
We are so scared of being seen as a—pardon my language— “little b**ch.”
Sorry, I only mean to talk like how men talk with that statement. That’s how I’ve heard it said many times. It’s crazy because getting vulnerable is actually an incredibly courageous thing to do. Knowing that you could be seen as weak by “showing your emotions” and doing it anyway is an act of courage.
It’s amazing how much men have been brainwashed to believe that the strongest thing you can do is the antithesis of strength.
Let’s take my friend Cristian, for example, from college. He came out to me as gay in the first week of our friendship. He also happened to be my roommate. I’ve seen him go out in public dressed exactly the way he wants to dress. It is not the typical style we see “men” use in society.
But he does it anyway.
He gets stared at by everyone. He knows he’s under a microscope. But he doesn’t care. He’s courageous enough to be himself. That’s truly incredible, and I’m not just saying that because it’s P.C. to say that these days.
It’s true.
I’m going to share another Joker quote from The Dark Knight.
“You see, in their last moments people show you who they really are.”
In a past letter, I told the story of how Pop Pop kissed my hand when I visited him in hospice care. He did not look good. The brain cancer and all the tests that were being done on him took a toll.
But before I left he took my hand and kissed it, because he couldn’t talk.
I would like to believe this is who this man was all along, and he just couldn’t get past the fear, societal expectations, and the idea of what a “man” is to show it. This is all conjecture, of course. I don’t know for sure.
I’m not much better, to be honest. I find myself not doing what I want to do out of fear of what people will think of me all the time. But once you get a death sentence, all that stuff becomes irrelevant.
I guess that’s the one silver lining of dying.
It just allows you to be who you always were all along.
In terms of you, Dad, you did a good job being there for all of us growing up. You always listened whenever I had a problem. You were very sensitive to that. I actually just wish I would’ve talked to you more as a teenager.
I think I got closer to you and Mom with distance. That’s both good and bad, I think. It kind of sucks that distance was the missing ingredient to bringing us closer together.
To conclude this letter, I think striving to see the good in “bad” people might just be the only way to find some peace with them.
It’s dehumanizing to only see someone as “bad.” We’re all a mixture of good and bad traits. Hopefully most of us have more good traits than bad.
I choose to focus on the good.
Thanks for listening, Dad!
Wishing this kind of vulnerability for all men- we need it.
It is one of my fondest hopes that our world is changing and deepening to the degree that men and women can live as the truest version of themselves. Older generations held each other to toxic standards (real men don’t cry… stop acting like a girl…). My Dad mellowed in many ways as he aged. I wish he had chosen to much sooner. Two days before his death, he apologized to me for not being more supportive when I divorced my husband. Dad had judged me for more than 20 years for that decision, and only at his end did he tell me he understood.
I am so proud of the men of younger generations. Choosing to write their own stories, eschewing toxic masculinity, and choosing to be real. The world is a better place for it.