Fatherhood Series Essay: Nature and Character
My Father Versus Me
*This piece is part of a series by a group of men writing on Substack, which now includes Michael Mohr, , , , and . In this first series we’re sharing pieces on the topic of fatherhood—something that all men can relate to, whether they are fathers of their own children or not. We’ll release one piece each day over the course of this coming week. All of the pieces in the series will be linked from this introduction to the series:
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My father—who died on June 2nd—was a consummate man of character. Born in 1945 in New Jersey but raised exclusively along the Southern California coast, he had nearly-transparent blue eyes, was 6’1, 180 pounds, broad-shouldered, and went bald in his early thirties. (As I did, too.)
We were always polar opposites, even physically: He was tall and lean; I was short and thick. He had blue eyes; I had brown. He was a very conventional man, laconic to the core, kind, thoughtful and affable. I have always been largely unconventional, talkative to a fault, not the most kind or thoughtful (though sometimes, yes) and not the most affable (ibid). My father was always intensely practical, worrying about finances like a woman veering into panic about laugh lines in her thirties.
Dad was also always prepared: In 2021, when I was caring for him during his cancer, I took his 2018 all-electric Nissan Leaf; in the back of the Leaf he had everything you could possibly imagine you might need were you to get stuck in the middle of say the Mojave Desert in the middle of the night. A survival paradise. Me? I never cared about that stuff. In my twenties I lived by the mantra “Live Fast Die Young.” In my thirties I matured, but, even now, at 40, I haven’t moved as far away from that mode of thinking as I probably should have.
Dad chose marriage because of love, yes, but only partially, I think. It was also conventional safety and security which sharing a life with someone brought. Marriage—until recently—was always something I avoided. Dad loved sports and the stock exchange and collecting rare coins and owning dogs and his job as a computer engineer; none of that stuff ever made sense to me, with the late exception over the past couple of years of dogs. I learned I have a deep love for dogs. Who knew.
And yet my father and I are not as different as I once thought. The truth is: We share a lot. DNA, first off. Genes. We both first off have a deep and abiding love of nature. Backpacking—which my father started doing with me as young as nine or ten, in the early 1990s—was one of the biggest and most enduring gifts my father ever gave me. It’s something I still very much do now. I took Britney a month ago on her first trip. She loved it.
My father’s intelligence, arrogance, pretensions, love for political analysis and debate are also shared by myself. Arguing with Dad about “capitalism” in my immature, clunky, naïve twenties (he was for, I “against”), and about the polarized nastiness of both fringe sides in my late thirties, as a more formed mature man, was one of the engines that drove the mysterious car that was my relationship with my dad.
I often thought my father was weak, emotionally, because he was always so nonconfrontational (especially with my mother) and because he was essentially unable to “go deep” with me or, as far as I know, my mother or anyone else. (Though I cannot say that for certain.) Dad often mystified me: He was a profoundly unemotional, stoic man.
Yet I remember watching some movie—I can’t recall which—sometime in 2021 or 2022, when he was sick but still physically able to move around, in the living room, with my mother and me, and looking over at my dad in the semi-darkness and seeing him silently crying at some scene in the film. That made me realize, just like some character in a Flaubert novel, perhaps Frederic in Sentimental Education, that my father probably had, like more or less everybody, an inner essence, an inner world, an inner life that was possibly as real, vibrant, colorful and true as my own…only he did not or could not express it openly as I did.
That notion exploded something inside of me, something I’d felt certain about for a very long time, a dumb, childish assumption I’d basically unconsciously made: That my father was as blank and disconnected on the inside as he presented himself on the outside. Clearly, that was not true.
And this made me think of when our chocolate Lab died when I was a kid, maybe around 1993 or 94, how my father came in to my room, crying, and told me the dog—Hooch, named after the 90s Tom Hanks movie—had died. I remember saying nothing and feeling empty, vapid, numb. Yet there’d been my father, feeling it, expressing it externally.
There are only a few scattered times I recall my father ever crying. That is, before he got really sick near the end of his life. He was of the generation wherein when I went in for a hug—even near the end—his instinct, even then, was to reach his big veiny hand out to shake mine. A father shaking hands with his son to avoid emotional discomfort: How bizarre. His father before him had been this kind of man. I remembered my bald, intense grandfather, a CEO worth tens of millions, those same blue eyes, that same gesture of nobility and arrogance and self-worth, and that same walled-off closed emptiness. Yet he also must have possessed some kind of inner life.
My father was always closed and walled off to external expressive emotion. My mother was the opposite: Intense, emotionally stormy, highly sensitive, needy, controlling. She expressed her emotions on the page and with her voice. Maybe too much. There was a happy medium, as there often is in life. I do not claim that I myself was that medium. I wasn’t and am not, though I do share genes from both sides, obviously. I’d argue I am 75% my mother, perhaps 80%, and the rest my dad. But he is unmistakably in there.
Dad was a man of integrity; there were clear lines drawn in the sand in his paradigm and that was that. If you stepped across those lines you were out. Except for me, of course, because I had the strange, unlikely benefit of being his one and only son. He told me once—actually, not long before he died—that my birth was the single greatest day of his life. (I sigh sorrowfully as I write that.) Nothing topped that day, he said. I crossed probably every line he had in his mental checklist. My teenage anger, alcoholism, rebellion, drugs, law-breaking, stealing, tattoos, girls and fast cars must have done the trick. By a long shot. He often suggested—correctly—in my twenties that I lacked both class and tact.
But he also valued redemption and true human change, rare as these both are. And I changed. Hardcore. Bigtime.
I redeemed myself, at least in his eyes, my own eyes, my mother’s. In some ways I feel I’ll always be paying it back to my father, now to his memory since he’s gone. I took him for granted for most of my life. I was young and selfish and assumed, like some 1,000-year-old Redwood in Northern California, he’d simply be rooted in my life forever. Clearly, that turned out to not be true. We all die. This is the nature of things. There is beauty in death: It shows us the briefness, the limitations, the ephemerality of our silly, gorgeous, dumb little existence.
And so, my father and I returned to each other in his final two years of sickness as if from a long, distant journey apart. He thankfully got to know Britney—my fiancée—for close to a year before he passed. And to know that I was happy and in love and was, amazingly, stupefyingly, getting married. And he watched me as I got and stayed sober for over a dozen years. He allowed himself to be taken care of by me, thus erasing all that tomfoolery in my youth.
I forget what poet said it—Raymond Carver?—but someone once wrote basically that the thing one craves beyond all else before death is to feel loved. My father, rest assured, felt loved.
And I was able to humble myself and put aside my own needs in order to offer him that love. He and I started the journey together when I was born until my teens, then we split apart for 15 years, then we slowly came back together, and finally we once more merged, before he signed off of the planet. And that is a wonderful thing.
I recall a memory. Must have been 2013, 2014. I would have been 30, maybe 31. I was in town, when my folks still lived in Ojai in the house they built after I left home in 2003. Dad and I’d gone on a little hike up in the hills behind the house; the trail started right behind their property. We took the dog with us, their yellow Lab. We climbed up and up and around in warm silence. Huffing and puffing. It must have been December because Christmastime was the only time I was ever home. I can see the wet leaves on the ground, the trees bare, the sky hot and blue, and white lazy clouds scudding, can feel the sting of late morning Ojai cold.
About 45 minutes into our hike, Mom called Dad’s cell. We’d just reached a plateau where you could see much of the open Ojai Valley. It was a spectacular view. Highway 33 ran twisting nearby us. Dad wore jeans and had his gray UCLA sweatshirt wrapped around his waist as he often did. He had a white baseball hat on.
“Ok,” he said, and hung up.
He looked at me. We’d planned on doing the whole three-mile trek.
“Mom wants us to come home,” he said.
“Why?”
Already I felt the irritation brewing.
He shrugged. “She needs help figuring out something with the TV remote again.”
My irritation spilled over. “Dad. We said we were going to do the whole hike. Let’s do it. She can wait.”
My dad looked away, out at the distant mountains behind us, the tops of the Topa Topa peaks capped with snow. Then he gazed back out down the valley. Sniffling, knowing I was annoyed—borderline angry; this had been a pattern—he looked me in the eyes and said, “One day you’re going to be married, and when that time comes you’re going to understand the idea of picking your battles.”
I meant to say something but hesitated. Then a silence fell and it stretched and I never spoke a word. Dad turned around and I followed behind and we walked slowly back down the hill the way we’d come.
Back then—a decade ago—I’d felt he was being weak. Letting my mother push him around, making him perform her whims. But now, engaged to be married and 40, I grasp what my father was aiming at. Life is short. Sometimes life is cruel. We don’t have long on this earth. Good friends are few and far between. Another thing my father and I share: Our suspicion of people, our love of solitude, our desire to be with one person we cherish most of the time. This is how things are now with Britney. There are times I could start a fight or push back. And sometimes I do. But more and more often, the voice of my father, standing on that hill, his gray sweatshirt arms dangling from his waist, comes to mind, and I think, You know what: Let it go.
So in the end my father and I were very different and profoundly similar. The older I get, the more I seem to understand him. Sometimes being a man of few words is a good thing. I should probably talk less and listen more. I try to do my most important talking on the page. At least that’s my goal.
Were my father here now he’d be proud of me, as he always was. I remember breaking down a few weeks before he died, telling him I was grateful for letting me take care of him. That required great love…and great trust. And my father hadn’t always trusted me. I hadn’t always trusted myself. So it was a big privilege. I wept when I told him that. He cried too. So did my mom. Dad cried more those final two weeks of his life than he had the previous 76 years. I’ll never forget that. How he expressed his inner world externally.
How he gave me his love.