The Fun Dad

In one of my earlier photographs of my son Riley, it’s his first Christmas. A December baby, he was less than two weeks old. His eyes are closed, like they still were most of the time, awake or asleep, and he looks less like the self he’d start growing into a few weeks later than a partially formed humanoid, a baby I could understand anyone less attached than me or my wife mistaking for another. He wears red and gray striped, footed pajamas with a reindeer across the chest, a reindeer that splits in half when we pull the zipper down the middle to change his diaper. The pajamas are too big on him, but you’d have to look closely to tell in the photograph.

Behind us, out of frame, there’s the box for a larger car seat Riley will grow into, draped with a red table cloth. Propped on top of it, our small Christmas tree, maybe three-feet tall on its own, adorned with white lights and red and silver balls.

My wife Heather cradles our son, supporting the weight of his body with her right arm, the back of his head with her left. I hug her close with my right arm, my right hand holding the Bluetooth device connected to my phone, while my left hand reaches forward with the selfie stick my father gifted me after a casino gifted it to him for the frequency of his gambling there. I remember using the device a few times that season. It has since gone missing, though I think we still have it somewhere, thoroughly lost in the shuffle of an interstate move a year and half after I used it on our son’s first Christmas.

You can see Heather and I are tired in the picture, though I think we hide our level of newborn, first-child, no-outside-help parenting exhaustion reasonably well. In this picture, I wear an absurdist t-shirt with a cat dressed up like Santa Claus and drop my jaw for an open mouthed smile that might suggest an excitement and levity absent from the true moment, when I remember us squabbling about where and how to pose—to be fair, not the first, last, or most intense moment of bickering about this very issue or even less serious matters in those days.

I remember looking at myself, reflected back in the screen of my phone as I took that picture and thinking of this as a new beginning. Surely, my son wouldn’t remember this moment, but the wonders of digital photography, backups upon backups, and social media meant the photograph would never be lost. And in my big smile, in my arm reaching forward, out of frame, didn’t I look like the fun dad?

I imagined this persona. The father figure who would be brave to demonstrate to this child how someone might be brave in this world. The father who would lift heavy things to teach strength and who would leap into games and jokes and dances to make him laugh and expose him to a level of dropping inhibitions I scarcely conceived of as a child. Because in this moment, meeting one of the people who’d be closest to me, I had a blank slate to work from. Here his life began, and so here began his perceptions of me. He’d never know me as the shy kid or the one who couldn’t hit a baseball or the one whose leg would shake when I had to give oral presentations in class. He’d never know me when I wrote utterly un-self-aware bad love poetry or before I grew a beard. More to the point, he wouldn't know me as overthinking, bookish, or cranky when I hadn’t had enough sleep.

To him, I could be the fun dad. Uncomplicated. A hero.

We were two weeks into parenting then. I don’t think many folks really know what they’re getting into when they have their first child, but I count myself as particularly ignorant. I didn’t have any younger siblings, and though I spent much of my life working with younger people for jobs and volunteer efforts, they were mostly teenagers and up—a few stints working with elementary school-aged kids, but in roles like teacher or tutor, not overnight, let alone across days and nights, days and nights on repeat with cries to sooth, diapers to change, bottles to warm. I read What To Expect When You’re Expecting and built most of the baby-specific furniture, apparatuses, and toys leading up our son’s birth, but invested at least as much mental energy into finishing writing projects and planning syllabi for the next semester in anticipation of having less time and mental energy in the months ahead—not so much thinking about what it would actually, pragmatically be like to spend my days with an infant as much as I thought about what it would be like to not do things I was more accustomed to.

If you know me—and if you’re reading this blog, I expect you do—you probably already know that I didn’t turn out to be the fun dad. Oh, I let down my guard and am sillier with my son than I've been with anyone since I was, myself, a child. I sing him songs and I dance with him. I’m kind as much as I can be. But the fun dad? The fun dad thinks nothing of throwing his boy in the air and catching him; giving raucous, high-speed piggyback rides; getting down in the muddy puddles of the playground right with his kid rather than pulling him out and brushing him off. I’m not the fun dad by these metrics. I’m too careful, too much of a germophobe.

It’s a lesson I’d learned earlier in life, at work, in close friendships, and all the more so in romantic relationships. You can only put on a persona for so long. Maybe you’ll change a little, adapting to a circumstance, to relationship dynamics. But in the end, you are who you are, and you can’t force meaningful, sustainable evolution in your personality or behaviors any more than you can will yourself to lose weight or pack on muscle mass. These changes take time and effort if you’re committed to them, and there are, too, those things you have to accept you cannot change.

The first year and a half of my son’s life, when I adjuncted three classes a semester and spent pretty much every other waking (and sleeping hour) in close proximity to my son, there was no avoiding that he’d get to know the real me, just as I’d delight in learning him. He’d see glimmers of the fun dad. But the neurotic dad? The irritable dad? The cautious dad? The dad who quietly reads his book? The dad who just wants to get away and write for a half hour every now and again?

He knows these versions of Dad all too well.