Late last night I watched a movie called Possessor with the dog on our couch as my 37-weeks pregnant wife was upstairs trying to sleep. The movie was written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg, and the apple does not fall far from the tree in that the movie is a bloody, unpleasant, jarring, and generally fucked-up sci-fi horror ride. The senior Cronenberg’s most classic films – The Brood, Videodrome, Scanners, The Fly, and Dead Ringer – all came out shortly before or after I was born, and I watched many of them in my teens and twenties, sometimes alone in my dorm room, sometimes with a friend or two in a dirty apartment with beer cans stacked on the floor and a bong on the coffee table. There was a subculture of guys like me, cinephiles with a taste for the macabre who were born slightly too late to contemporaneously experience the beauty that was 70s and 80s horror but who then caught up in our late teens and early twenties. How many nights were spent devouring the oeuvres of auteurs like David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Roman Polanski, George Romero, and Brian de Palma? I’m sure that there are a lot of women out there who were also into these movies – I mean, there must be – but for me at the time it was very much a boys’ club. Boys who didn’t play sports and weren’t very popular in high school, to be more specific.
As I walked the dog after the movie ended, I had a vision of my future son in his dorm room at Yale with his two best friends (Eric the ginger kid and Manny the Nuyorican, both of them half-Jewish). Probably passing around a joint; marijuana will be completely legal everywhere in the U.S. by then (not that they’d refrain otherwise). My son informs his friends that the grad student T.A. of his Intro to Film Studies course (a pasty fellow named Colby with long hair dyed jet black who wears a trench coat over his Melvins T-shirts) had recommended this total mindfuck called Possessor that came out the year before they were born. He then uses his Mentalink® to pull the movie up on the giant monitor that takes up half of the dorm room wall, and they watch in silence, shaking a little during the more gruesome scenes. When it’s over, they give a collective nod of approval and then pull out their personal devices to research similar movies for their next viewing party.
But what if, unlike Cronenberg and Son, Kaufman and Son do not share the same interests? I recall a piece of parenting wisdom I received about 7 years ago reflecting this concept. While still working at the big law firm, I had flown with a partner to Seattle for a long day of negotiations. We had co-counsel on that deal to focus on some tricky patent-related issues. He was a character – mid-50s, 5’6” (but only due to his platform soles), tan seersucker suit that perfectly matched his mustache, and he was a smoker, which is not something I often saw among the lawyer crowd. During one of our negotiation breaks, we went outside to discuss strategy while he had a cigarette, and after a few minutes of lawyer talk we started chit-chatting and the subject of kids came up. The partner with whom I had flown up had expressed a little concern because his 6 year-old son dreamed of playing football; this was during that era when all of those exposés about concussions were being released and it was in vogue for parents to say that they’d never let their sons play football. I half-jokingly mentioned that the partner should try to expose him to other, less-dangerous sports, like hockey and WWE, so that maybe the boy’s interests would shift. In between drags, our smoking co-counsel asked me if I had children. When I replied in the negative, he laughed. “Anybody who believes in the whole ‘nature-nurture’ bullshit probably doesn’t have kids,” he proposed. “You can maybe smooth down the rough edges a tiny bit, but kids are really their own people: they do what they want, they act how they want, and they turn out like they turn out.”
Not too long after that, a father of a close friend of mine would convey essentially the same message in a more concise manner: “a son is not a clone.” As easy it is to say those words out loud, I find myself struggling to truly internalize the concept. I have detailed plans of the music, books, movies, TV shows, political manifestos, philosophies, and abstract concepts to which I want to expose him, with a timeline that is probably not remotely age-appropriate. But what is “age appropriate” anyway? Isn’t my son going to be abnormally mature for his age? I want my son to be able to relate to me as soon as possible, but there’s a part of me that dreads that he will never follow in my footsteps culturally, intellectually, or even politically.
When I was a kid I loved Shel Silverstein, and I’m going to do my best to ensure that my son does too. Starting from when I was young – I mean very young, seven or eight years old – I had anxiety-related insomnia. Shel Silverstein has a poem about this that resonates with me:
Whatif
by Shel Silverstein
Last night, while I lay thinking here,
Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear
And pranced and partied all night long
And sang their same old Whatif song:
Whatif I’m dumb in school?
Whatif they’ve closed the swimming pool?
Whatif I get beat up?
Whatif there’s poison in my cup?
Whatif I start to cry?
Whatif I get sick and die?
Whatif I flunk that test?
Whatif green hair grows on my chest?
Whatif nobody likes me?
Whatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?
Whatif I don’t grow taller?
Whatif my head starts getting smaller?
Whatif the fish won’t bite?
Whatif the wind tears up my kite?
Whatif they start a war?
Whatif my parents get divorced?
Whatif the bus is late?
Whatif my teeth don’t grow in straight?
Whatif I tear my pants?
Whatif I never learn to dance?
Everything seems swell, and then
he nighttime Whatifs strike again!
After not thinking about this poem for decades, it has re-emerged in my psyche, as I find myself feeling anxious about my not-quite-yet-born son. I was really good at school as a kid, a precocious young lad, as they say in Britain (I’m assuming). What if he’s not? I was obsessed with music from my third birthday, when my parents gave me a Fisher-Price record player and every late-era Beatles record from Revolver to Let It Be. What if my son is not musical? I could probably write my own poem about all of these fears:
Whatif he’s not too bright?
Whatif he can’t sleep through the night?
Whatif he isn’t nice?
Whatif he has to do fourth grade twice?
Whatif he’s not funny?
Whatif his nose is always runny?
Whatif he isn’t groovy?
Whatif he won’t watch classic movies?
Whatif he doesn’t sing?
Whatif he’s obsessed with material things?
Whatif he’s a jock?
Whatif he’s not into rock?
Whatif he won’t play with puppets?
Whatif he doesn’t like Simpsons or Muppets?
Whatif he has stubby fingers?
Whatif he votes for rabid right-wingers?
Whatif he’s not woke?
Whatif he can’t get a job and is broke?
Whatif his face is busted?
Whatif he doesn’t turn out well-adjusted?
One of my biggest but also pettiest and least rational whatif fears is that my son shows no interest in the arts but instead is obsessed with sports and resents or disrespects me because I’m clearly not as good at throwing a football as Peter’s dad or Jared’s step-dad. And I’ll be like yeah but can Jared’s step-dad play piano and he’ll be like no but he plays electric guitar and he’s also a surgeon who feeds starving kids in Kenya. Perhaps the solution is to keep him away from Jared, which of course will never work. “We don’t want you hanging out with that Jared kid – he’s a bad influence on you!” That will just make him want to hang out with Jared more, and do some drugs that didn’t even exist when we were kids. But Jared probably doesn’t even do drugs, the little goodie-goodie.
In retrospect, I don’t think my own dad particularly cared what interested me. He did introduce me to some old movies that I love to this day (in particular, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World) and he and my mom did play plenty of good music for me, but I’m not even really sure what my dad was into as a kid. He was tall, handsome, and athletic in his youth, but he never told me what sports he played – and he didn’t seem to mind when I showed little athletic prowess. He never encouraged me to follow his lead of joining the military (my dad was an officer in the army, although you’d never guess that from talking to him), and he certainly didn’t try to convince me to go down a similar vocational path by getting into real estate.
Here’s another example. I’m fairly sure that my dad was into cars, mainly because whenever we would watch a movie made in the 1940s – 1970s, he would claim that he could tell the exact year the movie was made by the models of cars in the streets. Of course, this was before the Internet existed (let alone smartphones), so I never could fact check him. I’m sure I believed him at the time; while I didn’t worship my dad like some boys do, I assumed he was usually correct when he stated something. He also would change his own oil and do other work on the family cars, often entering the house with a face and hand blackened with grease after an afternoon of doing lord knows what on his Audi. Despite all that, my dad never tried to teach me about cars or basic automobile maintenance (although I certainly wish he taught me at least a bit about the latter). Was that neglect, laziness, or…good parenting? Perhaps he caught on that I wasn’t interested and did not want to push me. I’ve been told that once you become a parent, you quickly forgive your own parents for what you perceived as shitty parenting at the time. Maybe my dad was onto something with his lack of desire (or effort?) to make me more like him.
Of course, worrying about not having common interests with my son is just the tip of the iceberg. Equally as anxiety-producing (if not more so) as my fears that he will not be like me are my concerns that he will be like me – that is, that I’ll pass on my character traits of which I’m not particularly proud. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll certainly schep nachas for my son if he does well in school, goes to a top-rated college and grad school, gets a good job, marries a wonderful woman, devotes a significant portion of his life to charity, tzedakah, and tikkun olam, and manages to make more money than I ever did (all feats that I accomplished, the last one vis-à-vis my own father). But behind all of my successes were decades of insecurity, a disparaging lack of empathy, and ugly displays of toxic masculinity – in each case resulting in hurting people I cared about – and I am genuinely worried about my own son experiencing these same phenomena. I was talking with a friend the other day, a girldad who hopes he will stay that way even if he and his wife bear more offspring, who said this: “Boys are bad. Really bad. Think of the worst thing you’ve ever done – something you’re so ashamed of that you never told me, and sure as hell never told your own dad. Okay, are you thinking of it? Your own son will do something ten times worse.”
So now I’ll admit that I was not-so-secretly hoping for a girl. I know what its like to grow up as a boy and I didn’t want the pressure and responsibility of steering my child away from the making the same mistakes I did. In the #MeToo era, there’s a lot of messaging around teaching your daughters to be strong and your sons to be respectful. I fear that the latter is going to prove much more difficult for me than the former. I don’t recall my dad putting much effort into teaching me those kinds of lessons; in his defense, that was not expected of fathers at the time. If anything, fathers from the baby boomer era and before were conditioned to teach their sons a form of misogynistic (and often violent) chivalry that they touted as “respect,” but to be fair I don’t remember my dad trying to teach me that either. I probably learned it myself from all of those John Hughes movies. If there’s one thing we learned from Breakfast Club, it’s that if you’re a cool, rebellious boy who mercilessly mocks and sexually harasses/assults a pretty girl, she’ll eventually see your tenderness and vulnerability and become “yours,” whatever the hell that means.
Goddammit – what old movies that we grew up with will be appropriate for our own kids? Any of them? Gone with the Wind is out. As is Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and any other Disney film portraying women as helpless beauties who desperately need to be rescued by Prince Charming. Blazing Saddles is probably still okay though, right?
Sigh. Cancel culture is moronic, pathetic, and a necessity if you don’t want your kid to screw up like you did.
I suppose it’s a blessing that I’m in a place where I have mental and emotional room to be concerned about my son growing up to be empathetic and respectful. For most of history, a father’s primary concern regarding children was making sure they were fed, housed and clothed, and I’m pretty sure (kinehora) that won’t be a problem for us. The fact that I’m already aware that I want my kid to be a good human being is probably the first step to making him become one. And frankly, there’s a direct connection between letting my son become the person he wants to be and him becoming empathetic. We did learn things from our parents, whether we’ll admit it or not, and in theory our kids will learn from us. It follows that showing empathy towards our own children is the best way to set the example for them to demonstrate it towards others.
That doesn’t mean that he’s off the hook for piano lessons, of course. But even if he does not stick with piano or any other instrument or any other interest of mine, this will have zero bearing on my love for him or my efforts in raising him.
At least, that’s what I hope. The rubber is about to hit the road for me when it comes to parenting theory versus parenting practice, and I pray that I can maintain focus on what is important. If not, perhaps my aforementioned wonderful wife can kindly remind me to re-read this essay every now and then.