The Things Dads Give

and the things we pass on.

passing on my love of sunglasses.

My dad had this little silver pick-up truck with a bench-seat and the whole thing bounced over country roads. That’s the way I remember it — a bench seat bouncing between cornfields. And I remember listening to Tennessee Jed every single day on the way home from preschool.

By the time I was four-years-old, I could sing all of Tennessee Jed. Like, it was my favorite song. Tennessee Jed, for those unfamiliar, is a tune by the Grateful Dead with the lyrics: “drink all day and rock all night. The law come to get you if you don't walk right.”

But this isn’t just me. This is all of us. You — you, right now, reading this — remember the first car you rode around in regularly. If I ask you to bring it to mind, you can. Perfectly. You can remember how it smelled and you can remember what it sounded like. My dad played Grateful Dead cassettes and my mom played Christian radio. Your parents probably played different music, but the point is that you remember (and associate with) that music and car and the way it colored your world.

You cement these associations. You don’t mean to do it but you do it nonetheless. The influence and importance of early childhood associations are a pretty widely-accepted aspect of the personality; it seems like one of the few areas where Jung and Freud are in agreement.

Maybe Tennessee Jed was inappropriate for a five-year-old, but now that I’m thirty-three and mildly well-adjusted, I can say with total confidence that the Grateful Dead didn’t mess me up. And now that I’m a thirty-three-year-old dad, I’m constantly thinking about what associations I might tie to my kid. And again, the pervading fear of parenthood: how do I make sure I don’t mess this up?

Musically, we’re probably too young. He’s two-years-old. He’s obsessed with Thunderstruck and Eye of the Tiger. So, dad-wise, good on me. But those seem to just be reactions, some innate mammalian part of him reacting to the opening riff of Thunderstruck. Like hearing drums in the jungle, it just sparks something in the bloodstream.

But this isn’t just about musical tastes, is it? It’s more about trying to build up associations, habits and hobbies and happinesses that will get him through life. I’ve mentioned this before, obviously, but I think a lot about my friend Cathy’s assertion that the point of parenthood is to “teach your kids to outgrow you.” And again, Cathy is much, much smarter than me. So I usually listen to her.

And so last week, a few things happened. Firstly, I went into an MMA gym in Los Angeles and told them, look, I know more about wrestling than anybody you’ve ever met. I rolled around with their guys for twenty minutes and they tried to hire me. But what I didn’t say — and I left it out particularly, because, again, I was trying to make some money here — is that I want to give this to my kid. I want to show him (without explicitly showing him) that the wrestling room is a place where he can solve a lot of his problems.

Now, I’m just saying that because I solved a lot of my problems in the wrestling room. And I’m not evangelizing for wrestling. I couldn’t give a shit if my kid wrestles. But I am trying to give these things to him. And it’s at a point now where I’m hyper-conscious of it. I want him to read. I want him to surf. I want him to do — or at least know that he can do — all the things that made my life a little easier.

And obviously this all leads to self-reflection. A lot of dadhood is self-reflection. You begin to think ok, well how did my dad pitch this to me? And you also begin to focus on ok, how can I pitch this in a better way?

You give a lot of things to your kid without trying — I’m six-foot-three so my kid is probably going to be tall. I’d hoped he would be a lefty like me (he’s not) and I’d hoped he’d have my curly hair (he doesn’t). But those aren’t really the things we give.

I’m talking about the conscious gifts, the traits we pass along by actively trying to pass them along. And I’m trying to dig a bit deeper than the obvious ones like be polite and don’t fart in public.

You begin to think a lot about the mechanisms — of how you’ll pass them along. I keep going back to Steinbeck, who as far as writers go, was a pretty good dad. Anyway, his son explained the writer’s mechanism this way:

[Steinbeck] actually once bought this cabinet and locked all the books he wanted us to read in it with this gigantic key and hid it on top. We went through that in about two years. We’d sneak down every night with flashlights and unlock this thing. We were about eight and nine. And my father said, ‘Don’t ever let me catch you touching anything in that cabinet.’

It’s a cheap trick — basic reverse psychology — but it worked! And I keep going back to that, especially when I talk to other people — other dads — about this fixation. They all say basically the same thing: just show your kid (when he’s young) that you love these things and, more likely than not, he’ll latch onto them. I suppose that’s true. I do dig the Grateful Dead and at least some of that enjoyment has to be attributed to those memories in the truck with my dad where he wasn’t pitching anything. We were just happy.

….I guess a lot of dadhood is just overthinking dadhood.