The Herald asked five writers for meditations on their fathers. They offer five perspectives on the arduous or fun ways that they learned their masculinities; on the intersection of fatherhood and manhood; on how they got their bearings in a gendered world.
My father grew up in Gretna, a town across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. It was there he learned to say pork like “poke” and shrimp like “shwimps,” and it was there he learned what a man sounds like.
And when he heard me speak twenty-some years later in a Sacramento suburb, he knew I did not fit the bill. I was 10 when he told me that my voice was too breathy and soft, like that of a little girl. He said it kept him up at night, thinking how no one would respect or listen to a man with a voice like mine.
My dad didn’t say these hurtful words to me in his thick southern accent, but with a strangled tongue that sprouted when he moved to San Francisco at the age of 22 to attend medical school. He arrived to a sea of wealthy white faces. My dad was poor and southern and black, and he knew too well that his peers and professors would look down on him because of it. He also knew his cajun tongue would make this problem worse, so he tightened his lips and spoke palatably. This worked for a while, but after a few years his throat turned on him. Genetics and unnatural stress made his vocal cords permanently tighten, making him sound perpetually out of breath. To this day he labors to control his cracks and sputters.
In my father’s voice I hear my own, doomed to be judged, like his. He tried to change his voice, but 32 years later, he still worries that it makes his patients quietly cringe. I might have tried to do the same but, thanks to him, I know it’s futile. Thanks to him, I speak freely — varied in pitch; full of drama; feminine, masculine, and uncompromising.
—Marc Boudreaux, ES ’21
When my Irish father noticed I was reading James Joyce’s Dubliners, he told me that I reminded him of the young narrator of “Araby.” I was like the young boy in Joyce’s story — hopeful until I realized that I could no longer get what I wanted, as easily prone to disillusionment as to illusion. My father had to be there — he would always be there — to meet my disappointment when my imagination no longer mapped onto any reality. Sometimes, he would be the one to break these illusions. Most of the time, though, he wouldn’t be able to stop them from breaking. I think that broke his heart.
Since then, I have seen my father cry many times. Teary-eyed, he asks me to bring down a box of Kleenex halfway through the movie Inside Out. During drives to and from the airport — the only drive we seem to be making together these days — his nose runs as he tells me things that shatter the imagination I get so used to wearing as armor.
Twice, I remember those thin, sheltered tears giving way to uncontrollable sobs — the sobs that make your lungs heave and your head ache.
These are the sobs you expect from Joyce’s characters. But few of his protagonists cry like this, even when most feel alone, are alone, think about death, or are dying. They stand tight-lipped and weighted to the ground, their lack of motion synonymous with a lack of emotion. We want them to snap out of their immobility, and we want this so much that crying becomes an opponent of paralysis, a symptom of living.
If I am the narrator in Joyce’s story, filled with illusions, my father tries his best to help me find what I don’t know I am looking for. Seeing him cry is a reminder of the all-consuming reality he lives in to allow me, his daughter, more time to indulge in unreality. I am thankful because no imagined pain hurts more than real pain.
In reality, there is a lot of pain. Joyce knew this, as does my father, which is why both show that there is little pleasure in not crying. In fact, we feel most hopeful when a pair of Dubliner’s eyes brims with tears.
—Helen Teegan, ES ’21, YH Staff
I kicked my soccer ball back under my bike, walked out of the garage, and came face to face with my dad, standing totally naked in the kitchen, flipping a fried egg by the stove. He turned, smiled the smile he always does when he knows he is being weird but also thinks whatever he is doing is hilarious, and said to me, “If you want to be a dude, then you’ve got to be nude.”
I owe so much of the comfort I have in my own body to my dad. Whenever we’d walk into a bathroom together when I was little, he’d stop in front the mirror and say, “Wow, I am handsome.” At the mall, sometimes he’d pick up a shirt and exclaim (to my intense and also vocalized embarrassment) just how good he would look in it. He has this strange ability to teach body positivity by example; without ever needing to convince or demonstrate his own attractiveness to anyone else, he is comfortable in himself.
Yet he is not without his own insecurities or self doubt. He gets upset when my mom posts a picture of him on Facebook that shows his chin at an unflattering angle. He’ll snap at me if I ask whether he should be having a second serving of ice cream. His comfort does not exclude concerns about his weight, about his hair, or what he is wearing on a given day. But it is with his attitude of bodily love that he deals with those insecurities and showed me how I could too.
So yes, if you want to be a dude, you’ve got to be nude. You’ve got to learn to love and relish in your own body, even if you can never escape your own self-doubts and fears about it. When my acne became so bad that I couldn’t look people in the eye when I spoke with them, or when I became totally obsessed with maintaining my weight during soccer season, that sense of bodily love, shown both quietly and, sometimes, loudly (“You’re handsome, you weigh 168 pounds and even if you weighed more you’d have nothing to worry about,” he’d groan) reminded me that my perception of my body might shift and change, but my love for it couldn’t. That love did not come easily or instantly, and it is still a love that I have to practice, but I am so grateful that I had my dad to model it, naked and beautiful and honest, for me first.
—Rasmus Schlutter, MC ’21, YH Staff
The first time I saw my dad cry was over FaceTime. He called to tell my mom and me that his father had died, and he broke into tears as he delivered the news, his words tripping over each other as his eyes welled. Something snapped in my brain as my image of my dad — a hardened, distant, self-made man who grew up poor in mid-20th century China, who constantly ribbed me for being too soft — jarringly diverged from the emotion that was spilling out before my eyes. My filial piety melted into overwhelming empathy.
About a thousand times, my mom has told me about my dad’s soaring joy at hearing that she was having a boy, but she never needed to tell me. From my earliest memories on, it was clear that my dad wanted a boy. He wanted a boy who played basketball, loved superhero movies, and got way too into video games. He wanted a boy who loved the wilderness, was obsessed with trucks, and wanted everything to be blue. He wanted a boy who didn’t cry. I was none of the above. I was a soft kid, at times unable to withstand my dad’s tough love. I cried when his chiding would become too harsh, breaking down under the weight of his disappointment amid confusion over norms I didn’t understand. My guilt at not being a boy’s boy was a subtle yet constant theme of childhood. My dad tugged me along the path of father-son masculinity lessons, chastising me for watching my sister’s TV shows, buying me countless action figures, and taking me to basketball games.
The pressure lessened as I aged and my dad eventually lost interest in breeding a masculine archetype. Public school would take over and indoctrinate me into American teenaged masculinity, a frightening monster that my dad never could have anticipated. His role would ironically shift into keeping me away from other manifestations of masculinity: chasing girls, proving drug tolerance, looking for any and all trouble. Yet he did so at a distance, while maintaining the importance of academics and making money–in short, becoming a successful man. Nowadays, though he continues to harp on these points, our relationship gradually evolves beyond the confines of masculinity.
As he dragged me through the strange process of masculinity education, my dad couldn’t help but show glimpses of his true character: a quirky, hilarious man, movingly dedicated to his family. The first time I saw him cry, I cried too. I cried because I knew exactly how he felt. He had seen his father in a vulnerable state, and I saw mine become vulnerable too. As a kid, I never understood why my dad wanted so badly for me to be such a typical son, why he cared so much that I was a boy, why he insisted on taking me to those games. I always thought it was just the way that dad’s are, trying to prove their own manliness by showing the manliness of their sons. But there’s more to it. Even as he strove to transfer the teachings of masculinity, my father couldn’t help but show something deeper. Underneath all the tropes and norms, behind all the games and jabs, he just wanted to connect with his son. I’m sure his dad wanted the same.
—Everest Fang, ES ’20, YH Staff
We’ve got these 12-foot-high built-in bookshelves at my home and they’re filled with John McPhee and Robert Caro tomes. Both were careful observers and meticulous researchers. (Caro is still going on his LBJ biographies, but, like George R.R. Martin, it seems like he’ll never finish.) They’re among my Dad’s favorite writers, and I see them in him all the time. He always has five pens and a little spiral notepad in his breast pocket. He keeps a farmers’ almanac of his entire life, assiduously documenting the weather, his biking mileage (daily and year to date), his garden yield (usually more rocks than potatoes, but what can you do with New England soil), and a thousand things I don’t know about. I’ll be going out for a drive and he’ll pull me aside, whip out a napkin, and diagram all the tough intersections, should Siri lead me astray. Or we’ll be in the car together and he’ll point out how half of each tree is covered in snow and half is bare and that’s how you know it was a nor’easter.
I’m way more scatterbrained than my Dad but I feel the same compulsion to document and observe. I guess I do the late-millennial farmers’ almanac. I keep a million lists in my Notes app and a hundred playlists on Spotify and they’re sporadic and fragmented. I try to slow down and read Caro and McPhee and biographies of Lincoln. Sometimes, we email articles from The Onion back and forth or listen to corny Taj Mahal songs or Bob Newhart stand-up bits and it feels like we’re on the same page. Once, I saw a double rainbow and called him at work and told him to look outside. It’s the only time I’ve ever noticed a beautiful sky before my Dad.
—Mark Rosenberg, PC ’20, YH Staff
Father Figure was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.