For the last few years I’ve been writing dad essays to celebrate Father’s Day. I started with a little treatise on the noble dad joke, and last year soft launched a project I’m calling “Dad Theory.” Being a dad often feels like being a shark: you’ll drown if you stop swimming, so I’ve been trying to, as Hannah Arendt puts it in The Human Condition, to think what I’m doing.
I was touched by the positive reception of the Dad Theory essay, which seemed to really resonate with a lot of people. My main insight is that being a “dad” is different from the patriarchal model of paternity in ways we haven’t fully thought through:
While moms typically begin parenting intimately close to their children—many babies learn “dada” before “mama” because, it is said, they don’t see a difference between themselves and “mama” for the first few months—and work to introduce more space over time, dads start at a distance and have to work to become closer to their kids. Classic fathers exaggerate this distance, and it becomes a way of life. Dads do the opposite: They recognize a need to reel back the distance of the father and to draw near to their kids, as their own fathers may not have done. These are learned approaches, and even if we are (rightly) hesitant to give cultural roles the imprimatur of nature, it isn’t controversial to suggest that most men are not socialized to be care-givers. That said, being a dad is an ecumenical and inclusive pursuit; anyone—especially anyone caring for small children—could participate in the dialectic of dads, regardless of gender or sexual identity.
I made the connection that this movement—from distance to closeness—mirrors the dynamic of thinking itself, how we need distance, then closeness, in order to know. If I simply absorb what I’m trying to know into myself, I’ve violated its integrity, but if it remains completely “other,” I remain in ignorance. It seems to me that the ambiguous figure of the modern dad isn’t simply a loss of “authentic masculinity,” but gains us something really interesting: insight into the messy situatedness in which all thinking occurs.
This year’s essay is about “Dad Aesthetics.” I guess I’ve done Dinan’s First Dad Critique, and then went and skipped to the third—I guess you’ll all know to expect a disquisition on Dad Practical Reason next year (actually, that’s a great idea). Anyway, this year’s essay is very honest about the illicit loneliness I think many dads experience. It’s illicit because, of course, lots of people are very lonely, and have much more reason to be lonely than dads. But it’s real, and, I think, an important insight into why contemporary dads make the aesthetic choices we do. I hope you’ll read it, and maybe share it with the dads in your life for Father’s Day.