Fathers and Sons
This essay first appeared in The Missouri Review.
Fathers and Sons
I.
When my ex and I scheduled an ultrasound during her third pregnancy, I expected another girl. The odds were pretty much fifty-fifty, but after watching the coin fall the other way two times previously, I had come to think of myself — and with some relief — as a father to daughters. One does not expect to be struck down on the road to Thebes by one’s daughter, for instance.
But it might also have been that the cultural narratives available to me translated more readily into mentoring girls and young women who might imagine every avenue open to them. Masculinity had become a dark energy to guard against, the systemic foil to every plot in the Rebel Girls podcast my daughters loved. In fact, I had been redefining my own understanding of manhood for many years and wasn’t sure I had firm enough footing on that ground to point a boy in the right direction.
Perhaps that was why my first thought when the nurse drew an arrow to a short appendage on the screen was Oh no, the poor girl has only half an arm. When the knowledge that we’d be having a boy hardened into certainty, I felt a curious swirl of elation and panic.
I can’t say exactly why the stakes felt higher in raising a son. Maybe it was that my likeness in my daughters felt a step removed, more figurative than literally true. A father does not think to name a daughter Junior, even if she is the spitting image of himself as a child. I felt that a boy would seek to emulate me more thoroughly than my girls had, and that this brought a unique responsibility to offer a worthy prototype for the person my son might become.
Over the next few months I searched my memory for guidance, and I was dismayed to remember only one conversation about what it meant to be a father. It was not wisdom imparted by my own father, nor even advice given directly to me, but an exchange relayed secondhand by one of my high school basketball teammates on one of our long road trips.
It was late at night, pitch dark but for the headlights from oncoming traffic. The bus reeked of sweat, socks, and the turkey club sandwiches we’d dispatched after our game, and several of us huddled in the back listening to the team captain’s version of the Bloody Mary story. If you chanted her name while staring into a mirror, he said, she would appear. And if her eyes were red, you were sure to die.
As we sat there laughing, but inwardly horrified that we might glimpse red taillights in our rearview mirrors later that night, my coach called back to us and my friend Scott left to speak with him. Scott’s girlfriend was pregnant, and they planned to keep the child. Our coach, whom I’ll call Coach Taylor, had just learned the news, and he wanted to share something of his own experience at his eldest’s birth.
When Scott returned to the back of the bus, he repeated what Coach Taylor had said, that holding your own flesh and blood in your hands was the most powerful thing you would ever feel. A hush fell over us then. We knew we’d brushed against a sacred truth and that none of us, including Scott, were anywhere near ready to face its full weight. I forgot all about Bloody Mary and sat enveloped in awe of my coach, for knowing something of this mystery, and of Scott, who would soon know it for himself.
The men in my life rarely speak of these things at night, and never in the daytime. And the sad truth is that not one of the fathers in my family — not my father or either of my grandfathers or any of my four uncles — shared anything with me about how they felt holding their newborns or how they went about raising children.
Instead of stories about fatherhood, most men I know tell stories about manhood, assuming that a man’s man doesn’t need to think any differently about himself as a spouse or as a parent. In my experience, this is exactly the wrong kind of education, one I’ve been steadily unlearning as I’ve improvised my own story of fatherhood on the fly.
Even Coach Taylor, whose secondhand wisdom is a shaft of light in my memory, is more a source of cautionary tales than useful ones. Our basketball team often traveled more than an hour for conference games, and during daylight hours I’d pass the time playing Hearts with my coaches for a penny a point.
Between hands on one of those long drives, Coach Taylor recalled his first year on the football squad at the University of Montana Western, how the older players herded the freshmen onto a bus and drove them, under cover of night, out to a cow pasture where the young men were forced to strip naked and stand in single file. The upperclassmen threaded a coarse rope between each rookie’s legs and began yanking it up and down. As my coach and his cohort held the bouncing rope away from their genitals, the team captain carried a stack of cowpies down the line, stuffing one into each guy’s mouth.
Only then could they call themselves brothers.
I’ve always been haunted by the thought of those boys suffering in a pasture somewhere outside Dillon, Montana, but the way Coach Taylor told the story seems just as striking to me now. He told it while shuffling cards, in a minute or less, and it was meant to be funny, like rubbing Icy Hot on a guy’s jockstrap before he dressed for practice.
I never asked, but the implication was that my coach took his place on one end of that rope the next year.
Coach Taylor was a loving father and husband. He taught English and performed Hamlet’s soliloquy and poems he had committed to memory. I thought of him when my eldest daughter was born, after the sudden rush of love when her pouty face came into the world, and later as I held her against my bare chest, singing softly while she slept.
But that moment captures as well as any the contradiction I’ve often felt between the models of fatherhood available to me and the kind of mentoring I know my own children need. I think of my fathering as akin to a soldier’s attempt to reenter civilian life, how I must reckon with the violence done to me while opening myself to love. How I must recognize that much of what other men have taught me is as useless to family life as a grappling maneuver for hand-to-hand combat.
In the next section, I describe the growing physical rivalry between me and my father during my high school years — which culminated in a risky challenge one day while gathering firewood.