Fatherhood is Undefeated

A deeply personal look into why being a father remains the greatest honor of all

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: what I’ve learned as a father.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Suppertime! I promise to feed you only once a week, and never after midnight.

Ingredient List

📖: I finished “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” by Jonathan Haidt and I highly recommend it.

Just started “Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir” by Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine. San Francisco in the mid-sixties, what a time to be alive, and what a way to see the birth and revolution of rock ‘n’ roll in America.

This Past Week

The kids are out of school so we made our annual pilgrimage to Fernandina/Amelia Island, Florida, where my mother-in-law resides. Do I have regrets about not buying land here five years ago? Yes. Either way, it’s one of my favorite places for the laid-back vibes and beautiful geography. Did a 12-mile long run through Fort Clinch State Park last night, a tree tunnel of palmetto palms and Spanish moss draped from old oaks. It was lovely.

If you’re anywhere near Lake Tahoe, I’ll be there on Thursday with Believe in the Run, you should definitely come out and hang out with us, we’ll be doing a ton of free activations and group runs over the weekend, they’re listed here.

A few other things I wrote and/or edited this week:

• “Hoka x Nicole McLaughlin Team Up Again on a New Mafate THREE2” for Believe in the Run

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round-up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic manner. You can subscribe here.

And now, onto the dinner service.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Grilling in Air Monarchs

Since as long as I can remember, I’ve been a subscriber to Esquire. For those who are unfamiliar, Esquire is the quintessential magazine for men, with a strong focus on fashion and general living. Throughout its pages, life advice mingles with shorter introspective essays and long-form stories, many of which end up as some of the best American writing. I’d be lying if I said that a large chunk of my writing style didn’t come from the Esquire style. 

The writing has always been top-notch and the advice was always on the same level. Whether that was how to live or how to dress or how to make a proper cocktail, it was all stuff I needed to know, like a password into a speakeasy (are those still cool?). My own dad wasn’t much for fashion and more of a fan of simple utility– a clip-on tie being the pinnacle of that fashion philosophy– so I relied on Esquire to figure out how to dress. Its fashion editors (most notably Nick Sullivan) taught me how to tie a tie, roll a master sleeve, and how much shirt sleeve should show beyond the cuff of a suit jacket. Things that most people don’t care about, but that seem of utmost importance to me. Case in point– I wore shorts on a plane this weekend and I hate myself for it. 

The fashion advice was great, but the deeper dives into manhood are what really formed me. And there was one issue of the magazine that changed my life. 

It was the June 2014 issue with Mark Wahlberg on the cover, and it simply said “Fatherhood.” I’ll be honest, I don’t even remember the exact details of what was inside, I just remember that I read it from cover to cover, filled with advice from fathers, stories about kids, guides on how to grill and wear Nike Air Monarchs with gusto.

I’d been married for two years at that point, and we had talked about having kids, but the idea of being a real, live parent– even at the age of 32– still seemed terrifying. Like, how could I do that? 

After I finished that issue, I knew that I was ready. I don’t know why or how, but I just was. 

I was right, fatherhood was scary and intimidating and it required me to grow up and become a man (still working on that part) and move into the phase of life that I was meant to move onto. But I was ready for it this whole time. 

It just took reading that issue to make me realize it was true.

And for that I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Expired Baked Beans

Most guys have the Roman Empire taking up too much space in their heads; I have The Road, a book I think about every day, multiple times a day. For the unfamiliar, it’s one of the finest works from acclaimed novelist Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, and– my personal favorite– the horrifically brutal Blood Meridian. It was also made into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen, with a good number of scenes shot on an abandoned stretch of turnpike off the Breezewood exit in western Pennsylvania (you can still go there and explore or even run a half marathon there and I highly recommend it). 

Without giving away too many details, the story is that of a father and son as they navigate their way through a post-apocalyptic hellscape while evading death at every turn, whether that’s due to lack of nutrition, exposure to the elements, or murderous bands of cannibals. It’s pretty bleak.

I first read The Road in my mid-twenties while touring with my band. To say I was a huge reader at the time would be an understatement. I consumed books constantly and collected them at the same rate. Before each tour, I’d go to the Hershey Library and check out eight books that looked or seemed interesting, and all of us bandmates would rotate them around throughout the course of our three weeks on the road (the irony of reading The Road on the road is too beautiful not to point out). It was my first Cormac McCarthy book so it took a few chapters to get used to the sparse dialogue, the intimidating vocabulary, and the lack of punctuation. However, since he’s a master of stripping a story down to its essentials and adding flourishes when it allows, it was a thoroughly great read. 

A decade later, I read it again as a father. I’m sure many books hit differently when read later in life. Holden Caulfield seems a little annoying to me now (join society and get a job already), Dean Moriarty and all his friends seem lost and lonely (poetry and poppers don’t pay the bills), and both The Lottery or The Most Dangerous Game honestly sound like a good idea at this point, if it were somehow just politicians or Instagram influencers facing the threat of elimination (I’d be the first to pull a number). 

So while all the meaning of stories change as we change, nothing hit me as hard as reading The Road as a new father. When I was a childless twenty-something, I read the story as an outsider, as someone looking above a scene, watching it unfold. When I read it as a father, I was inside the story, I was the main character, and I was in hell. That was me, rolling a rusty shopping cart with a broken wheel down the cracked pavement of an old highway, praying to find a can of expired baked beans. That was me, chest rattling in the cold ash that drizzled down after a nuclear fallout, holding my boy close to my chest. That was me, putting a gun to my child’s head while he slept, wanting desperately to save him from the possible pain and torture and murder that lay ahead of him, the packs of wolves waiting to devour him when I’m gone. 

By the time I got to the final scene, the one that broke me whole and made me cry uncontrollably (the only book since Where The Red Fern Grows to do so), the story was already embedded inside of me for good. 

I reread it again during the beginning of Covid, because we were one electrical grid failure and banking system shutdown from becoming that story. It was even more visceral, because I knew then that it could all be true. The great toilet paper shortage of March 2020 showed me that we would all murder each other in cold blood if given the slightest justification to do so. Even now, I sense a gloss over everything; it’s all a facade and our deceitful hearts simmer underneath, waiting for the chance to destroy.

Like most parents, I’m scared that the world I’m sending my boys into is one full of horrors– that they’ll be sent into a war only to be droned to bits, the moral collapse of society itself, the soulless usurping of life’s beauty by AI and technology, the hatred and division between friends and neighbors in the name of politics. All of this is true and plausible, but my job isn’t to give them over to the marauders. 

It’s to be with them, even as I stand here closer to dying than I am to living, and to show them they can survive without me. To tend to the glowing ember inside of them, blow on it, feed it with kindling, build it into a fire that will burn through the night. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. 

To let them know they have my whole heart, they always did, that they’re the best guys and they always were. So that when it’s time to let go, I can, and I’ll know that they will carry the fire.

Course 3

The Main: The Marrow

Here’s the thing about fatherhood– you can experience a great life without it. A life filled with laughter and friends and travels to faraway places and stories of adventure. But you will never experience all of life. You can experience the breadth of life– driving long distances along the road map of the human existence and hitting all the checkpoints along the way, but you can’t know the depth of it. Call it the deep marrow, the nutrient-rich soil, the guts of a glowing fire. 

You just can’t know that until you’re a parent.

Trust me, I was skeptical at first. I had a great life going on. I was able to travel the country with friends, sleep in on Saturdays, go to brunch, and watch whole seasons of shows on Netflix in a single week. Weekends spent going out with friends until 2 a.m., staying up even later if we were staying over, watching football for an entire Sunday. Burning through beers and smoking cigs on back porches, baseball games on any day of the week, and bike rides all over Baltimore. All of that was pretty awesome and I even managed to do it while maxing out a Roth 401k. What kind of person would pull the reverse switch on all of that?

I was still skeptical– doubtful, even– when my first son, Rye, was born. I remember feeling nothing in that hospital room, or at least not what I thought I should be feeling. There he was, in my arms but so small he was mostly in my hands, and I didn’t feel what I was supposed to feel. Where was this rush of love and wonderment and stacks on stacks of superlatives for this writhing and crying form before me? He wasn’t grown in my body, he didn’t know me, he didn’t need me, and when he smiled it was just a facial contortion to something else going on. I did absolutely nothing to bring him here, from a single cell to a human. I could do nothing to keep him here– my nipples were bone dry, thankfully. I felt no attachment. Nothing. I know everyone’s different, but it’s something I make it a point to tell all my friends in the days after they have their first kid– you don’t have to feel anything, and it’s okay if you don’t. Because you’re not needed right now. You’re literally just there for moral support. Don’t worry, it will come. And boy, it really does.

Eventually, those kids grow, and then it’s time for the scuba gear. Because things get deep. 

It’s an unexplainable feeling to people who don’t have kids, but the only way I can visualize it is like this: it’s as if your heart had a hidden trap door that you never knew existed. Maybe you were told it was there, but you just never believed it. Not me, I know myself through and through, you may have said to yourself. Then suddenly, a key appears in your hand, as if in a dream where things don’t have beginnings or ends. A door is there and you unlock it, and inside it’s piles of riches beyond the wildest imagination. It can’t ever be spent, it’s just a richness that is now a thick cord through your life story, something to hold onto when you’re in the heaviest of seas, when darkness washes over you. It’s something that will value your life more than you value it yourself, that deems you the greatest for simply existing. Something that will go on even past your own expiration, that will carry on through history.

It’s your destiny, fulfilled.

Just when you think it can’t get any deeper or any better, it does. They smile at you, then they hold your hand. Then they say your name. Before long, they’re telling you legitimately good jokes and teaching you things you never knew or forgotten. They do things you do, like songs that you like, stand the way that you stood as a kid, hold a baseball bat the same way. They’re them and they’re you, for better or for worse.

In between all that, they take explosive shits that you have to clean up, say “no” more times than they say “Dada”, and act as a magnet for every illness in the surrounding five-state radius, before generously passing it onto you. All of that is true and all of that sucks, but life sucks anyway, with or without kids. It’s part of the deal of being here. In my twenties, I cleaned up my friends’ piss and shit and vomit, now I do it for my kids. 

I still believe I would’ve had a great life without kids. I would’ve taken epic bikepacking trips and climbed tall mountains and caroused through back alley bars and sailed across oceans and posted a million Instagram stories for friends who will ask me how it went the next time I saw them at a wedding on the mainland. I would’ve gone home from that wedding hours after those friends had said their thank yous and goodbyes, because they had to get their kids to bed. After the after party, I would’ve gone back to the hotel that night, probably after planning out my next adventure in my head– something to give me a bigger rush than before, something that would seem more grand at the end of my days. 

A couple rooms over, my friends with kids would already be asleep, hours after tucking their boys into bed, preceded by a toothbrush tug of war, jumping on beds, hugs and “I love yous”, fighting over pillows, and finding the stuffed animal hidden beneath the dresser. Somewhere in all of that chaos, one of them said: “You’re the best dad ever.” A sentence to slay dragons, to lift you from the deepest recesses of your own doubts.

And there is no mountaintop sunset, no desert landscape, no ocean swell, no bright city light, no tequila buzz, no nicotine high, no marathon finish, no Sunday brunch, no walk-off home run, no fully funded 401k, no thing that I could ever do, that could compare to being the best dad in the world.

Because, like Ali in his prime, I am the greatest and fatherhood remains undefeated.

Course 4

Dessert: Family Style Crab Feast

Happy Father’s Day to my dad, who managed to take life seriously in his early twenties (something I could never do) and worked a factory job for over four decades to provide a good life for me and my three siblings. As the only artistic and creative kid in my entire extended family, I was certainly the black sheep and I’m not sure we ever connected or ever will connect on that level, but I know he was always proud of me whenever I won an award or was published in a magazine, and that means a lot.

He always showed up to every baseball game, fixed our cars, worked on our house, and chopped our firewood, even when it meant sacrificing his own time and pleasures. Tied with my mom for first place, he’s probably the most generous and compassionate person I know and would literally help anyone with anything if they asked him to. He loves God and loves telling others he loves God, but not in a judgmental way– he’ll literally just sit down with a random stranger and ten minutes later they’ve told him their entire life story and the struggles they’re dealing with and then he just tells them they’re loved. To genuinely care for a random person on a street– that’s a crazy thing for anyone to do, but I’ve seen him do it hundreds of times. So while we’re very different in many ways, I wouldn’t be here without him and the sacrifices he made for us, which is really one of the most incredible things a dad can do. 

Lastly, happy Father’s Day to my father-in-law, who I wish was still here in Florida, where I write this. It’s not fair that you were taken from us, but I know you’re waiting for us on the other side and we’ll see you again someday. Wish I had more time to know you and more crab feasts to share, because I never realized how similar we were until you had passed. Without you, I wouldn’t be a dad and my kids wouldn’t have the most amazing mom in the world. Thanks for giving me that gift, it’s eternal and priceless.

And thanks to my boys for giving me the gift of fatherhood. It’s an honor to raise you.

Reading while I write

End of Menu

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Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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