The All Un-Compassing Guide to Fatherhood

As a parent, I’m pretty much just guessing.

There really is no other way to put it. I’m guessing.

My approach to raising my son, how I handle things, it’s all just one big guessathon. I have no idea what I’m doing. I really don’t. I’m just making it up as I go and hoping for the best. I don’t have a model to follow. I don’t know what good looks like. I’m working off of imagination not example or exposure.

My father was the most disempowered person I have ever known. He chose to be. He had ample agency but willfully refused to exercise any of it. Instead, he chose to doggedly insist he had none.

I remember a conversation he and I had when I was my teens. I don’t remember exactly how old I was or what precipitated it but then again, I remember little of my childhood in general. That’s a common phenomenon among Adult Children of Alcholics. Other people remember all of these anecdotes, scenes, details, minutiae from their childhoods, I just… don’t. I remember things as if through a gauzy haze. There are whole, long stretches that are just dark and unconjurable. I just… don’t remember them, and the stuff I do remember, there’s usually a reason for it.

I could have been 14 at the time. I could have been 17. I have no idea. I just know I was already old enough to have a mature grasp adult responsibilities… parental responsibilities… my dad’s responsibilities. There were bills to pay and mouths to feed and child support checks to write, and all of that took money… which therefore required a job. Not having one would become a problem in a hurry. I fully understood all of that. I was old enough to have a rational conversation about it.

And that’s what the conversation was about: my father’s work.

At the time of this story, he was an attorney at a small but well-regarded firm in New York City. The firm had hired him right out of law school. He had moved up at the pace associates typically did and would eventually make partner. The firm didn’t pay as well as more prestigious white shoe firms but my father made a good, comfortable living.

There was only rub: he fucking hated it. He was miserable at the firm and miserable in his work. He just trudged off joyless every day and then trudged home joyless like some sad Eeyore from the firm of Pooh, Tigger, and Robbins. The guy just sad-sacked to work and then sad-sacked it home. Every single day. There was never a time when he even briefly telegraphed being less than miserable professonally.

In our conversation, we somehow got on the topic of his work situation. See, to me, it was a situation. He had an enviable resume and marketable experience. He had received some soft overtures from other firms unsolicited. If he hated his current job, he could just… go get a different one. My father insisted he couldn’t. I pushed back on why that was. He just hemmed and hawed and offered excuses but no actual reasons. I asked what he would do if his firm went out of business. He conceded he’d have to go find a job at another firm. I played his answer back to him and moved in for the fairly obvious checkmate “So, you’re saying you could find another job if you really had to… Well, if you don’t want to be miserable, you have to…”.

He didn’t offer some counterargument. He didn’t try to undermine the foundation of my argument: that he was truly miserable. He just abandoned ship and said he couldn’t change jobs… after admitting he certainly could if needed.

No shit. Lawyers with degrees from Columbia don’t die on the streets if a first job doesn’t last a whole career.

I had checkmated him at the game he played for a living, and he had just abandoned the board. I had backed my father, a guy who argued for a living, into conceding that his remaining at a miserable job was entirely a choice… and then he went right back to insisting it wasn’t.

That one conversation struck me profoundly and stayed with me because of what I knew of his whole makeup. He wasn’t just an attorney; he was incapable of not being one. He thought like an attorney. He talked like one. He routinely lapsed into the stiff syntax and frequently used the diction. The guy didn’t apologize for things; he pleaded nolo without no admission of culpability. His entire brain ran on aOS – an Attorney Operating System. It worked a certain, specific, understandable way. It had structure and rules and order. It had boundaries. All contests took place within them. To step outside of them was to concede.

In our conversation, he had stepped outside of that fence. For the first time in our relationship, he had been forced to defend his case under cross rather than being able to just serve up empty claims to someone in the gallery. His case fell apart because he had none. It was horseshit. Fucking nonsense. Absurdly, insultingly spurious. He had an Ivy League degree, niche expertise, and a good reputation… and yet he was forever indentured to work for the firm that just happened to hire him out of school? And there was nothing at all he could do about that?

Fucking nonsense.

In our conversation, he made almost no effort to claim otherwise. Instead, he abandoned his entire operating system where cogent arguments were like lane lines. You stayed within them and moved forward. Those lines all led to him finding another firm. Rather than do that, he ran his car off the road. He preferred the ditch, voluntary misery, so he abandoned the lane lines altogether - and we both knew he had.

I remember that one conversation so sharply because it was the moment when I fully grasped just how married my father was to his own perpetual unhappiness. I didn’t understand why at the time and I never have since, but he clung to misery like it was a life ring thrown to a drowning man rather than the lead weight pulling him under in the first place.

Suffice it to say, I ain’t got much to work with in the healthy adult choices department. Instead, I have a bunch of stark ‘don’ts’. Opposites to pilot away from not towards.

I also ain’t got much in the way of firsthand exposure to effective fathering.

Instead, I have a ton of precedent on the toxic dynamics of an alcoholic household. I am an expert on home lives where an adult needs to be okay before a child can be. I’m super deep on what it’s like to grow up with an ‘external locus of control’.

I don’t know a fucking thing about what healthy fathering looks like. I couldn’t pick it out of a police lineup. I don’t know how it works, feels, functions, or evolves over time.

As a father to a son who I adore with the sum total of my ability to love, I am literally just doing my best to imagine it and then build a working model based off my own rough, wholly imagined sketch. I’m just doing my best while paying intense attention to how the rickety scaffolding I’ve built holds up under the weight of an actual child who is counting on me to be competent, do a good job, be a good father.

I have something approximating an informal system. A scaffolding rather than a whole building. The thing that makes it wobbly is the uncertainty, the insecurity, the lack of experience or even exposure to a solid construction. I just don’t know. I never have. My son is 16. I didn’t know when he was three. I still don’t know. Someday, I might gain some perspective on how well I did but it will only be in hindsight. In the meantime, it’s just me and a scaffolding that sways like bamboo which I hope I’m building right and hope is enough.

I have a tendency to pound a metaphor to death. I’m trying to break that habit. So, let me put aside all of the construction talk and just try to explain my ‘system’ in plain English.

In first imagining how to be a father to my son and then trying to feel my way through it, I latched onto a few things early and then clung to them for dear life. Vague principles. I adopted them at first as loose mantras but I then repeated them and practiced them and leaned on them so much, they became freaking commandments.

The single biggest of them all is:

Thy child shall have an internal locus of control.

Y’all, I live that damn commandment. It is wired into me. At this point, I almost never even have to think about it consciously. It’s just coded into the bios, the chipset, the ROM. It isn’t software at this point, it’s built into the hardware. It is on the processor. It is central to how it processes. How I process.

I filter everything through a decision-tree of whether it serves my son – not someone else - being at the center of his own emotional existence and experience. No one’s emotional environment is entirely within their control… but it shouldn’t be at the mercy of someone else either. I safeguard that distinction like my life depends on it. My son’s happiness is not dependent on someone else’s. No one else needs to be happy first so he can be. Not me. Not his other parent. Not a teacher, friend, or person online. His emotional condition isn’t derivative. He comes first in his own emotional life. He is at its center.

That one idea has become a religion to me because I want him to have a healthy, whole, stable sense of self. An identity built on esteem that comes from within. A strong sense of who he is resilient to injury from outside. That is what I want him to have. I have no idea if that makes any sense. I just have this deep, visceral compulsion to foster my son’s ‘personhood’. His existence as a whole person unique and distinct from me and his mother and everyone else in his life now and in the future.

In psychology, there is a concept called “engulfment”. The basic gist is that in toxic relationships, the lines between where one person and another starts can be blurred or even erased. People can be subsumed into the other person in a way. Absorbed. They can become extensions of a person rather than a separate person alongside them.

When it comes to kids, there is a natural tendency among adults to do ordinary, benign things which aren’t anywhere close to engulfment but share a tiny bit of its DNA. While I know this may well be over the top, I don’t want to transmit any of that to my son. Not even 1%.

People, for example, routinely and casually describe children as byproducts of their parents in some way.

“Oh, [he/she] is soooooo your [son/daughter].”
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“OMG, [he/she] is the total mini-me of [his/her same-sex parent].”
“Look how much [he/she] takes after you.”

Those kinds of comments are normal and natural. I get where they come from and understand the root: crediting a parent with having an influence.

Isn’t that what we all want as parents? To shape our kids? I suppose, yes… but still, a commandment is a commandment and I cling to my faith. Those kinds of things – while entirely benign – point out an overlap on a Venn diagram. I’m focused on my son seeing the integrity of his own circle independent of mine.

So, I’ve never said any of those kinds things about my son to him or to anyone else for that matter. With him, I have always scrupulously avoided language that made him a product, a result, something cultivated by me rather than something merely allowed to bloom as it is.

I won’t say he takes after his dad. Instead, I would say that we have some things in common.

I won’t liken him to an apple that didn’t roll far from a tree. He isn’t a fruit off of my tree. He is a tree. Just like me. He’s just a younger one.

I got thinking about all of this earlier this week because I had a moment with my son which I had to think about for a while before handling. It wasn’t some big, critical thing. It was just a moment where I needed to think about my own scaffolding and its design.

My son is a sophomore in high school. His first marking period ended this week. His school has a pretty overengineered grading system, so his grades usually aren’t much of a mystery. There is a little last-minute fluctuation but for the most part, he knows his grades save for a couple that could swing one way or the other.

The other day, when the marking period ended, my son texted me to tell me it had. I texted him back asking him what he thought the final outlook was. He didn’t reply. Knowing him, I took that as a sign his grades had come in lower than what we last discussed. I was busy though and so was he, so the conversation dropped.

The following day, he replied to my message with “I got [insert grades] but here’s the thing…”. My suspicion had been right. His final grades had come in lower than the low end of his last outlook on where they were headed. Not by a lot. The smallest possible miss just below his own range of possibilities. That was the “here’s the thing…”. A headline he knew wasn’t great followed by an explanation of how it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

I’m deliberately not being specific about the grades themselves because they aren’t relevant in my opinion. There is no issue with his performance as a student. His grades are not problematic. He just pulled a report card a little below expectations (which he set himself) and he then put off texting me back to tell me until the following day.

That’s where my rickety scaffolding got a little wobbly.

After I got his message, I had to sit and think about how to reply.

Texting is such a crappy medium for conversation. Whatever you say lands like such an anvil absent nuance or weighting. What you touch on seems SUPER important. What you don’t seems entirely unimportant. It strips multifaceted topics down to only a couple facets and then exaggerates their importance.

I wasn’t scheduled to pick up my son for a couple more days. I needed to respond. And he was going to carry around my response until he saw me.

It seems like such a small thing. Scaffolding is built on small things though… People see the pipes and boards laid across them but what holds the whole thing together are the little joints. The places where individual pieces fasten to make a whole. It’s the little things – the joints - that give the whole thing its integrity.

So, this might have been a little thing but I had to think about it for a while.

My son could have done better. He has areas he could improve upon. He knows what they are. So do I. His grades are not problematic though. There is no offense in having room to improve. Don’t we all. The two minor burrs were that he had 1) missed the expectations he set; and 2) then been in no hurry to tell me.

What’s the parental message there?

I don’t know, man.

I’m just a dude guessing here. A dude standing on his own rickety scaffolding with a couple stone tablets of his own damn commandments. I don’t even know how many of them there are because at the end of the day, I usually don’t get much past the first:

“Thy child shall have an internal locus of control.”

Good ol’ Numero Uno. I have no idea whether that principle is actually sound or whether I apply it well, but when in doubt, I lean on it because I’m uncompassed. I am guessing at true north. I don’t know if I’m heading in the right direction. I know I’m heading in a different direction than my dad. But beyond that is just faith and hope I’m going the right way.

Here’s what I said to my son:

“As I tell you all the time, what you want – your goals and aspirations – are yours not mine. You don’t need to please me. You need to please you. You’re the gymnast. I’m on the coaching staff. I’m not one of the judges. I love ya the same no matter what’s on the scorecard.”

Internal locus of control.

He was waiting for a reaction. His attention was focused on me. I turned it back toward himself. I didn’t even address his grades or the miss. I just nudged his locus of control back in his direction. His grades are about him. His life. They aren’t about making me happy so he can be happy.

He replied, “Thanks dad.” And then we went on to talking about other things.  We’ll talk more about his grades in person but even then my comments are going to be true to what I told him. I’m on the coaching staff. He’s the athlete. I had my own time on the field when I was his age. This is his time. The choices are his not mine.

I have no idea what I’m doing here, guys. I’m just doing my best to embody the principle that my son is a whole person growing into himself and I am responsible for providing healthy growing conditions. It’s my job to keep him in the sun not raise him in my shadow.

Tomorrow, I’ll pick him up and it will be easy and relaxed and comfortable. The conversation about his grades won’t be hanging in the car.  We’ll get to it when we get to it… but to be honest, it will be a formality. He doesn’t need to have it and neither do I. He doesn’t need me to push him, and he wouldn’t be propelled by me trying.

“Thy child shall have an internal locus of control.”

My whole religion right there.

And, oh, how I cling to my faith.