Fatherhood and the Bond Among Men

Happy Father's Day to all the devoted dads out there. Here's a brief autobiographical Dispatch about an unexpected benefit of becoming a dad. (Issue #123)

As I mentioned last issue, I'd intended to skip today's Dispatch, but the spirit moved... plus I have a house full of sleeping adolescents and have to be quiet. La Profesora is out for a couple hours, and I found myself thinking about fatherhood... so I'm seizing the moment to share.

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There are numberless comedians' routines about fatherhood, including one hilarious one (I can't remember who did it) comparing Father's Day to Mother's Day, but whether joking or sentimental most people don't talk about how fatherhood creates a bond among men.

Here's what I mean.

It will surprise no regular reader of this newsletter that I am a big nerd: I read a lot. I'm a lifelong fan of Shakespeare, Superman, and Star Trek. My high school varsity sport was fencing, which I got into because I had read Dumas' Three Musketeers and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels that featured sword fights and derring do.

In elementary and high school, I had guy friends both because there are other bookish nerds out there, and we tend to congregate. (It's nice to have somebody to compare notes about continuity in DC comic books, and there's also safety in numbers). Plus, I went to an all-boys high school in Los Angeles; it was a hotbed of misogyny and homophobia but had the genuine benefit of forcing guys to learn to talk with each other about nasty things like our emotions.

As a kid, I was not interested in watching sports, and that is mostly true in my adult life.

This isolated me at events on my mother's side of the family: all the females gathered in the kitchen, and all the males watched football. I was unwelcome in the kitchen and bored in the family room. Once I learned to read, I brought a book, which was great except for when my cousin Lin took my book away because she thought I was being antisocial. Lin did not realize that there was not a lot of sociability taking place in the family room besides grunting at key plays.

As an adult, there was a guy with whom I had nothing in common and therefore with whom I had difficult talking: Sports Guy. "How about that last play in the Lakers and Celtics game?" he'd say. "That's... Basketball?" I'd ask. Conversation over.

I had resigned myself to this being the case for the rest of my life until I became a dad.

Suddenly, Sports Guy and I had a different topic where we had common ground. "You have kids?" "Yeah, two boys." Conversation started.

Round about 2005, I had become Editor in Chief at iMedia Communications, which had both a daily newsletter about digital advertising and a series of similarly themed Summits all over the country. There were a lot of iterations of Sports Guy at the events, but I had no trouble connecting with them because we were all dads.

The first time I realized that I could be comfortable and happy in this community was in a boozy afterparty when I washed up at the bar with two guys, D and C, and we all shared stories about the incredible, beautiful, terrifying days that we each became dads.

Years later, at a different industry event right before COVID lockdown, I had separate conversations with three different guys, G, M, and R, about some of the particular challenges of raising adolescents. G and M lived in the same town and had no idea that they were each going through similar things (I fixed that). R and I had known each other for many years but had never had a real conversation until that one about fatherhood.

These days, as many of my guy friends either have empty nests or nests that will soon start to empty, we have new conversations about what it's like to have adult children. My kids actually call to get my take about things, which is shocking and has led me to quip that they act like consulting clients who don't pay, but that's just a quip. Nothing pleases me more than to help my daughter and son.

There are many ways to take the measure of a man, but I don't know of a better one than to see what kind of dad he is.

So, for all the devoted dads out there with whom I've spent the last quarter century trading notes about fatherhood, sharing our kids' successes and mourning their challenges, and going on the adventure of being a dad knowing that other guys out there are doing the same thing: Thank you.

Happy Father's Day.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.