The Invincible Dad And The New Culture Of Fatherhood

My son is one month old today. He hardly knows what’s going on around him, so I have time to work out what he’ll see once he can understand who I am. I remember how I saw my father as a young boy. No one was bigger, stronger, or more powerful than my dad. Between the ages of 3 and 12, I would have brokered a fight between him and any other boy’s dad, fully expecting my dad to exhibit a fighting ability for which he gave me no evidence. My dad wore a watch, a gold necklace, a gold bracelet, a gold wedding band on his left hand, and a gold pinky ring on his right. These were tasteful and common elements of style for a man from New York in the 90s. But to me, he may as well have been adorned like a Persian king. So at 5 years old, my Christmas list included a watch, a gold necklace, a gold bracelet, and a gold ring. I thought my dad was invincible. More specifically, I thought that he knew he was invincible. A part of me still thought that fatherhood would come with a spontaneous immunity to suffering and a deep knowledge of the world. But one month later, I still wonder: Shouldn’t I feel invincible now?

Since realizing my father is not all-powerful, his hero status has not waned. What my dad told me about becoming a father was accurate to my experience while trying to tally how many of my son’s breaths I could count before losing track. I was overwhelmed with love to a transcendent extent. It is true that the feeling of becoming a father, the love that envelops you, cannot be explained to anyone who has not experienced it. It is what real love must be: a force so powerful that you surrender your ego and agree to blindly follow its instruction. In my wife, I witnessed an equally powerful shift. After experiencing the end of her life before marriage, and the death of who she was before getting pregnant, it was this transition that was the most profound. It was as if her soul was replaced with a new one the moment our son left her womb. He began to cry. She instinctively began to comfort him. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she assured him with the velvet tone that textured our long phone calls while we dated. Those were the first words he would ever hear in his life: comfort in the key of what will become his inner voice.

My wife and I experienced a rebirth of ourselves as parents along with the birth of our son. Together, we subordinated ourselves to the purest form of love either of us had ever known. Throughout her labor, I watched joy cower in a corner as physical pain and emotional toll seized the endless hours. I pretended I was perfectly cozy in the dad chair I was assigned, which can best be described as a sciatic nightmare. Slowly, the drum of labor beat on, rising louder as the contractions became more frequent. Imprisoned in the hospital room, nurse after nurse came in to check on her, each smile seeming to conceal imminent, grotesque pain. In our ignorance and in her fear, she might as well have been heading for a guillotine. In some sense, she was.

Throughout her pregnancy, I was helpless as the person she was before becoming pregnant was mourned. While I embraced the reality of fatherhood, my body was not compromised. My options for leisure remained. My mood was subject to the same variables as it had been before. Not so for my darling wife, whose body betrayed her by the day and whose mood quarreled with her by the hour. For 24 hours in the hospital, she would endure another death a mere 9 months after the last. Rapidly, my pregnant wife would give way, and each symptom she experienced during pregnancy would return for a brief and intense encore before she re-emerged as the mother of our child. There was no time to process such an emotionally unreasonable succession of events. I understood that maybe the greatest portion of who I am as a man hinges on how well I support her when she endures each death inherent to motherhood. All I could do was watch and reassure her that everything would be okay. Imagine the futility of me, humanus sans uterus, attempting to pass along comfort. It was a task I usually performed well. But in the delivery room, it was like trying to pass chickenpox via email. I know I cared for her well, and still, I did not feel the invincibility I expected from watching my father. The joy of new fatherhood was balanced by dread, and the true qualifier of my father’s heroism became perfectly clear: he had no idea what he was doing either.

In the weeks since, I’ve contemplated a role that is more complex than most men understand. For at least the next decade, I will be the invincible, godlike figure to my son, whether I like it or not. I am implicitly charged with being his beacon of safety—not just from monsters under the bed, but from his awareness of his own mortality. Do I distract him from his mortality by preserving my immortality in his eyes? Not necessarily. That part of my role will carry out on its own. But I can keep the beacon steady while giving him the tools to depart from it. I can teach him to face the world and find a sense of meaning that makes his budding awareness of mortality seem trivial. In other words, I can equip him to be a man.

There is a sense of pride that comes with having a child who looks like you. It is a safeguard against death to know that even after I’m gone, the world will have to continue looking at my face and tolerating whatever comes out of it. I hope the world likes it. Fatherhood has bred an alarming self-awareness that is unique to having a piece of yourself screaming in your face because he has gas. I have spent much of my life terrified of the capacity of my own free will. Now there is a part of me that has a purely detached free will from me, and I am helpless against the inadequacies that I may have missed ahead of him. Not only do I regret missing the opportunity to scream at someone when I have had gas in my adult life, but I’ve become painfully aware of how addicted I am to sweets and how bad I am at math. Expecting fathers must know: whatever you’ve learned, whatever you’ve considered, whatever preparation you think you did, you will be overcome with a wealth of new anxieties that you cannot conceive of before your baby is born. It is the nature of life that it remains unpredictable no matter how much routine you build into your days. Imagine how unpredictable things become when another life falls into your purview.

Throughout these drastic changes, there are many points of relief. I can’t count how many times I confronted a situation in my marriage, through my wife’s pregnancy, and now into fatherhood, where I thought I am so glad I went to therapy. I’ve come to agree with the Christian notion that you don’t know what God is preparing you for when you go through a dark time. When I couldn’t sleep for nights and couldn’t stop sleeping for days; when I made appointments with therapists during the handful of times I needed them; when I hated how honest I needed to be with myself to grow—all of it helped prepare me for right now. Had I still not processed a divorce; had I still maintained my old vices; had I still been chaotic in my relationships and friendships, and not worked out why I treated people the way I did, I never would have been ready to help a brand new human being face the beauty and tragedy of a life lived from scratch. He might procrastinate, be introverted, or need braces because of me. But I can give him an outline on what to do with the parts of me he inherits that will make things difficult. I imagine it will be as easy as it would have been for Michelangelo to carve the statue of David if David were breakdancing and screaming through the marble. But I can give him the tools to keep chipping away at the stone.

Today’s fathers have built up some incredible company. Online platforms and brands such as Day1Dads, Dad Nation, and Dad Gang Co. are perpetuating a new reality of proud, present, and loving dads. Individual social media accounts like Ricky Bee and The Tired Dad have dispensed with the patina of marketing and modeled what present, loving, and real fathers experience. These outlets are showing, in real time, what recent studies have confirmed: today’s new fathers spend more time with their kids than fathers have in decades. What’s more, according to Pew Research, today’s new fathers view fatherhood as a central part of their identity and are keeping more families together. Finally, today’s dads are taking care of themselves. Gone are the days of the bumbling idiot father who spends his free time trash-talking his wife over a case of light beer with his bumbling idiot friends. Not only do we drink IPAs and Yuenglings now (if you don’t, grow up), but in our culture, we build each other up to be good husbands, partners, and dads. We push each other to keep up our fitness and sort things out with our partners so our relationships can thrive. Being a good dad is the coolest thing a man can do. Those who have chosen to relinquish their responsibilities and deliberately neglect their kids are complete and utter losers. This is the new dad culture, and it’s here to stay.

Is fatherhood terrifying? Yes. The secret is, we’re all scared like Bruce Banner is always angry. Just as The Hulk may be slow to trust his control, we might wince at our own courage. But if courage wasn’t necessary to face the world, our own lives, let alone fatherhood, wouldn’t be worth it. My son looked up and smiled at me today. I immediately teared up. I barely got a picture of it in time. I don’t remember the last time my wife and I were able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time. I love her more than anything. I know my son can see it. I’m still convinced she’s invincible too. No one has figured otherwise and no one ever will. Not even him. And he is the light of our world.

There is nothing like being a dad.