Charlie Capen's Blog: I have no idea what I'm doing.

Author’s Note: I wrote this back in 2016 but it is no less important that we support boys in their growth and development.

Alright, dads of boys. I know what you’re thinking. ‘I’m so busy with my son’s schoolwork, sports, dance classes, tutoring, LEGO pieces on the floor, and every other damn thing, that it’s hard enough parenting a boy, imagining what it would be like to have a daughter would be insane.’ I get that.

But you have an important role whether you realize it or not.

You set the stage for boys who will become men. You can reinforce or tear down false assumptions about girls and women. You, in your own ways, can help your boys be great partners with women in all respects. Whether your boys decide to become fathers or not, their actions guide cultural norms and belief systems. They’ll hold positions of power. They’ll decide on legislation. They’ll work for women. Our sons will walk into a world feeding them messages laced with all kinds of hidden meanings.

And these preconceptions can be subtle. Let’s take the subjects of advertising and commerce, for instance.

Whether it’s noticing a missing key female figure on the shelves for one of the greatest sagas ever made, or pushing for greater diversity of representation available for kids, men still wield powerful influence over the world and can be active voices in these discussions.

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In case you’re wondering, I’d like to see Dad-bod Ken from the Barbie line. Because representation. Ha! (Note: This post was written just six months before Dad-bod Ken was released…)

I’ve recently been part of some really important conversations with major companies about girls, princesses and the future of entertainment brands. At first, I wanted to keep my mouth shut. What help could a bearded white guy with two sons offer about the fate of girl culture around the world? But after some reflection, I realized as the son of a single mom, and ardent supporter of women, I needed to look closer. My sons can help usher in a more equitable, fair society where men and women can both given opportunities, and women defy expectations because of their sex or gender.

I know the exploration of these issues goes way deeper than commerce or simple gestures, but it’s a start. A call to action. Fathers of boys, stand up for girls. Sometimes that will mean simply listening, hearing what must be said from a different vantage. You can do it. You can gain greater understanding, and pass it along, at no cost to your masculinity or your pride.

I’ve never been prouder to be a man than when I’ve supported other people in or on the periphery of my life, especially women, and shown my sons what it means to be a man.

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Read more:

My Embarrassing FatherWhere Do Callouses Come FromThe Blogged Generation

How long will I have to endure listening to unrequested parenting advice and criticism? It’s been 10+ glorious years of these fun thought grenades lobbed at us like slow-moving explosives of self-righteousness.

When my son was just 18 months old, someone close to us told us that he had some “discipline problem.” This, after only 40 minutes of observation. The information was delivered first to my wife (who almost lost it), after which I called Captain Commentary to see if I could clear up the misunderstanding. The critic launched into a solid hour of armchair quarterbacking. I paraphrase:

Your son, maliciously and premeditatedly, hurled a sippy cup at your wife’s head. On purpose. Following that, he went over to a younger cousin and hit him. Twice. On purpose. He is undisciplined and the sole cause of stress in your life.

You can imagine how shocked I was to hear that my giggling, laugh-riot of a son was already on the road to petty larceny and war crimes. The resident expert toddlerologist who shared their opinion is an adult with grown kids of their own. Their observations were unsolicited and entirely out of the blue. My son’s maladjustment was just that severe, I guess. His cuteness blinded me. They went on to take issue that Finn wasn’t subsequently disciplined after the “incident.” We dared even PLAY WITH HIM instead — the f**king horror. You’re right. I probably should have waterboarded him and set some of his toys on fire. I fought every urge in my body to launch my cell phone beyond the stratosphere and hit the satellite linking our phone call.

It’s easy to get defensive when people make observations about your kids. A ‘who the f**k are you to judge my kid’ rage can erupt. I made a determined effort to keep my ear canals open so that I could look at the statements honestly. I listened. I was diplomatic!

I’ll be the first to admit I’m a stubborn person. Blame it on my astrological sign, my Hogwarts house, my Enneagram, my upbringing, or my inhumane good looks. But that doesn’t make me immune to criticism. I don’t think I’m a perfect parent. Hell, I’ll be the first to say I’m not that great at it. I feel like I’m failing half the time and the other half, well, I’m too tired even to assess my own performance.

But let’s have a frank talk about parenting advice, shall we?

When you have a baby, you expect the doting commentary about their looks and unceasing requests to hold them. There’s also the occasional “Ohhh! I’m just going to steal your child!” As time passes, relatives and close friends start laying on the advice pretty thick. Some of it can be helpful, but the majority is utterly unenlightening or borders on condescension. The suggestions can also turn into harsh moral judgments on you in a blink. The saddest part is that they were all probably borne out of some helpful intention. But there’s a particularly poisonous venom when these suck-gestions come from someone familiar or close to you. Honestly, there should be a statute of limitations on prejudging other parents, or maybe a full-scale embargo on undesired counsel.

Growing up, as undisciplined rapscallions, my brother and I were told not to say “shut up” to each other. So, we innovated. We created a new phrase: “SHUT MOUTH!!” It was our way of being witty and rude when we couldn’t say what we wanted to tell each other.

This is where I’m at now. My son is amazing by my standards, and you should hope that people don’t scrutinize you, in this life, as hard as you’ve scrutinized my near-two-year-old son.

SHUT MOUTH.

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Read more:

My Embarrassing FatherWhere Do Callouses Come FromThe Blogged Generation

Author’s Note: I wrote this when my eldest son was only three years old. He has never stopped asking profound questions that, at first glance, seem insignificant. It’s both tiring and spectacular.

Finn and I walked through the park, holding hands, like manly men often do, and spoke of the world. “Ambling” is probably a better description of how we proceeded, but I’m in no mood to be poetic. I’ll leave that to the lonely, crying men.

Having barely walked the long expanse of a trail leading away from the playground, and toward the sandy pit where the gymnastics equipment lay, Finnegan stopped and tugged my hand. We weren’t in search of anything in particular and had no destination in mind. But he yanked on my arm again with some force.

“Dada, what happened?”

“What do you mean, my boy?” I asked my question as plainly as you just read the line yourself.

“Wha happened to yore hand?”

He pulled on and flipped my palm in his small, stout hand.

He was referring to the rough patches at the base of each finger on my palm, those circular pads of raised skin. I’d earned callouses there from years of lifting, climbing, and carrying things. All he’d known about, to this point, were bruises, scrapes, cuts and scabs on his own tiny body. And the occasional rash, of course. These “owwies” were a new species.

“They aren’t owwies, buddy. Dada got them from working.”

He didn’t understand why something that looked like an injury would come from working and didn’t continually ache or sear. He kept asking if they hurt, and I told him, no, but he proceeded, “Did they hurt when you get them?”

“Some of them, but sometimes when we get hurt, we get stronger, right? We learn.”

I muzzled the notion that they’d helped me when I used them with clenched fists. I withheld that some women like them, and some don’t, as well as the fact that they peel away when you subject the rough skin to vigorous hand-washing. I also didn’t fill him in that typing on the computer all day doesn’t give you callouses.

In all, we counted 12 hardened patches of skin on my hands. Four of them from music. Eight of them from gripping things tightly. All of them originating from a life of laboring to be more of a participant than a spectator.

“I have dohs too?”

“Finn, your hands will grow and get stronger every day. You’ve got good hands. You make ’em whatever you want them to be, okay?”

“Kay.”

I want my boy to know the value of working with his hands and mind, to understand that he can earn his scars, both inside and out, and wear those that suit him. Or scrub away those that don’t.

I want him to know that carrying things and people can mean building callouses, but they should never harden so much he can’t open his hands.

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Read more:

My Embarrassing FatherThe Blogged Generation

My Embarrassing Father

If there were a prototype, my father would’ve been the prototypical radio DJ/writer parent. A bohemian and anti-establishment renegade (in San Francisco — really?), he was a professional at both charming and pissing people off, especially his employers. Dad also felt it necessary to explode my pre-pubescent eardrums with blasting music. The house was a reverberating subwoofer, night and day.

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My parents separated when I was rather young, but, as a matter of record, they were never married, so when they had my younger brother and me, they just cemented the fact that we’re ghastly bastards.

Dad did his best to look after us, when he did. His birthday presents were generally odd or esoteric. Hostess donuts. A weird Chinese toy of unraveling paper. Chernobyl survivor-looking babushka stacking dolls. And, as my brother will also attest, every time my father looked after us while my mother was away on business, we reaped the benefit of a ton of future stories to draw upon.

One Spring day in Seventh Grade, I was waiting for him to pick me up on the curbside after school. He was late, as usual, and I waited for a good 30 minutes. I was preparing to do my two-mile walk home when there he appeared, putt-puttering up the school driveway in his old Volvo. I was relieved because the man, for all his finest points, was a ‘forgetter’, and today he had not forgotten if only by a hair. Or perhaps he did forget and then had an “ohshitimsupposedtopickupcharlie” moment. In either case, he made it, and that made me happy.

Dad was part of the clergy… of dudes in priest outfits trying to pick up women?

He parked midway in the school driveway, next to a median at a slight diagonal, not giving a flying funk how other traffic would get around him. As he began to get out of the car to call for me, I squinted my eyes to get a better look at him. Thank the Lord Jonathan Van Ness I was already heading over to the car because I noticed as he got out of the beat-up vehicle, which was between us, his hair sopping wet, and his wrinkled shirt drenched. I was 15 to 20 feet away as he rounded the front-end of his car.

He was wearing only a towel.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said with the verve and swagger of a person not quite in his right mind, which he usually wasn’t. Dad almost looked like he was enjoying how nonchalantly ridiculous he was being. “Dad, get in the car. Let’s GO. Now. Please!”

Just then, I saw some friends of mine exit the school building. I executed my best RIOT POLICE PUSH MOVE. If you don’t remember, Middle School is one of those horrible ages when parents embarrass you by simply talking or breathing. My dad had just won the Olympic Gold Medal of Dad Embarrassment. “Dad, let’s go. Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go. I’m serious. Come on.”

Maybe if I hold very still and smile, they’ll wander back into the forest and leave me alone…

Now, to know my father, you have to understand that he liked going slow when people wanted him to move fast. It was his trademark move. It probably had nothing to do with him being high 90% of his waking and sleeping life. He reveled in going slow and yelling at people to “cool (their) jets.” He was loud when the prim people around us were silent. He stuck out like one of the Blues Brothers in a fancy restaurant. He preferred the phrase “blow it out your ass” to modulate the actions of his fellow drivers.

“Oh right, like you’re embarrassed of meee?”

My father died almost 15 years ago, and I dwell on his choices, his lack of decision-making, his search for something he never could quite articulate. Being a father now, I have so many questions about his behavior, about mine, about how I was as a child from his vantage.

I cite that moment of terror now as one a very few that shaped my lack of shyness, my anti-sheepishness that catalyzed a desire to push myself as an artist and creative. Who could retain their modesty around constant experiences like that?

But we laughed and played and enjoyed each other so much. Our singular language of humor and inside jokes is now an endangered species. My brother and I try to keep it alive. But I can only hope to embarrass my kids, as my dad did for me. As a teaching tool, obviously.

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Today, my father visited me as I drove to a hike. I thought to myself, driving on the wrong side of the wrong and trying not to get distracted by every sight that passed, ‘Dad would love it here’.

And suddenly, my car felt like it had taken on a passenger. I felt close to him again.

I When he’d passed away, he became. more distant than ever. He was a solid solo traveler and seemed to prefer solitude. Craved it. So it’s no coincidence that he’d come to me at a moment of feeling alone in a foreign place just prior to an 8-mile trudge up an escarpment.

As I drove to the trailhead, feeling him close, tears in my eyes, I switched on the radio. A song, quintessentially one of his, came on. A confirmation.

It felt good to have him with me. He would’ve loved this country and its people. He would’ve soaked all of it in. He would’ve climbed mountains with me. Watched me make a fool of myself doing an accidental and quite terrible Kiwi accent.

But we would’ve laughed through it all.

There’s something about the hero’s journey that has always appealed to me. Watching someone come from meager beginnings and seeing them transform touched a part of me that wanted to offer the world something important.

As a boy, I read countless comics and saw all kinds of lionhearted characters who strived to conquer villains and stop calamity. The mighty few who chose to stand in the way of those who wished to bring pain and subjugation upon the world.

And I have Stan Lee to thank, in large part, for that.

As I reflect on my illustrated upbringing, so much of my moral compass and the intrinsic questioning of “Am I the hero or villain?” was formed by my experiences with comic heroes.

Mutants, magicians, space travelers, demi-gods, and warriors created by luck, Stan Lee provided me a realm with avenues to explore who I was through the lens of the superhuman. Over time, these stories have only deepened and diversified, though there’s much more work to be done on both fronts.

Comics are modern mythologies holding the promise of artistic distraction and lessons learned. As a father, I rely on these kinds of larger-than-life tales. Metahumans can be mirrors for our humanity. I can only hope our investment in them will yield more representation and greater inclusion in our fictional realities. We have so much still to learn. And hopefully, new faces will arise to help carry on Stan’s work. Our world needs new origin stories.

Excelsior.

what does the future look like for a generation of children that will be the most recorded and documented in human history?

My family sits like a clump of wires at the back of a desk. Disentangling my familial politics from its woven systems has often proved equally difficult. So when it came time to forge ahead with my dad’s final plans after he died, things were inevitably complicated. I don’t know where my father’s ashes were spread. I don’t even know if that’s what he would’ve wanted.

The days following his death were blurry and intense. Dad had given verbal post-mortem directives to his partner, a woman who supported him for several years, up to and including his cancers treatments, his attempted surgery and his body’s final hours. My mother, brother and I arrived a few hours prior to his passing, but I was the only one in the room when he died.

But why am I blogging about these personal moments in public, sharing the inner workings of my life with you?

We now live in a world so desperately connected and on display that it’s hard to avoid storytelling of any kind. Every day, almost 150,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 55 million status updates publish to Facebook, and 200 million tweets go out to hundreds of millions of recipients. We are the narrators and consumers of story. We broadcast and editorialize our very existence. We are the fuel to a social engine that seems, for the moment, unstoppable.

I have strong concerns as a writer, a content creator and, most importantly, as a father to a four-year old boy. He is now recognized at the zoo and other public venues because of my online journaling. And now another child will enter my family. What does the future look like for a generation of children that will be the most recorded and documented in human history?

There are so many styles of shared broadcasting these days. Our friends showcase a genre of “performance art” in the form of updates to social networks like Twitter and Facebook all the time and mainly about their kids. We can finger through the digital filing cabinets of platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Flickr for media evidence of those stories. The Internet seems to be a mile wide and an inch deep intellectually, but these stories remain immortal. Whether you’re a blogger or just a chronic over-sharer of baby photos, you are crafting a story that people will find even if they become digital archaeology.

Surely we should start investigating these implications for the future of our online children, and who better to ask than the parents of some of these kids in question.

Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com plans to show her daughters her unique collection of digital diaries when they are older. Specifically, Armstrong told me about her eldest daughter, now a nine-year-old and already very Internet-aware from situations where strangers knew their names, “I’m very, very careful now about what I write and what I do. (My daughter) is very conscious. I’ve been very clear in my head that my website is not something I want her to read right now. I’m writing it thinking that one day she will go through the experience of parenthood and have this to reflect on.”

But Armstrong seems cognizant of the greater picture. Knowing her daughter is heading toward a transition period where, as a young woman, she’ll have access to the Internet while not yet old enough go decipher all that her mother has published, blogging has changed for the matriarch and writer as her daughter has grown older, “I have slowly tapered off the amount I’ve written about her but I do think about what she is going think in 20 years when she sits down to read it. It makes me cautious but it doesn’t stop me. I don’t think what we’re doing is wrong. What I would give to hear stories about me from my mother’s point of view from the age of three through seven years old.”

In the case of Kristen Howerton, who writes RageAgainstTheMinivan.com, her four children are active participants in the social media experiment of her self-reflection, “So far my kids seem to revel in my blogging. They ask if I’m going to write a story about them when I take a picture. I think they see that we get some cool opportunities from (blogging) and want to join in on the storytelling. It is going to be weird when they get to the ‘Googling’ age. But they’re so much a part of my narrative, I don’t know how to separate them from mine.”

Though gifted storytellers and commentators on the subject of parenting, have we made plans for the day our children can consume the visual and literary show about their lives? Do we write with their future in mind? And how do we define public versus private content especially when our personal connections, as well as possible careers opportunities, derive more and more from these content-driven channels?

Much like the advent of spellcheck for those who couldn’t spell, has the internet taken over as our mind — a storage of memories for recollection? Serving as a cut-and-paste shortcut of a lifetime for employers and strangers of all kinds to see?

When he died, my father left me two cardboard boxes as inheritance. In these bankers boxes were the key to my past and my future, respectively. One box contained every journal my father had written. There were pages and pages of story ideas, tidbits from his day and musing about what assholes my brother and I could often be to each other. My favorite line was, “The boys are being insufferable today.” I don’t know if he intended for anyone else to see the inner monologues in his notebooks, but I can only assume their existence meant he wanted them found and read.

The second container, my future box, contained every rejection letter from every freelance writing gig he’d ever pitched. Letters from major publications like Outside magazine, National Geographic, and a host of print rags were dumped somewhat angrily into one pile, just for me. I hope it brings my dad some consolation, wherever he is, to know most of the publishers he failed to pitch were ultimately failures themselves as publications, swallowed up the zeitgeisty Internet black hole.

My father wanted me to learn from these corroborating stories and not necessarily from the words on the pages he gave me. He wanted me to know about things I could only understand after a southpoint in my life: his death. The narrative he created through these gifts of his was also an attempt at proving two points: 1. Journaling is at the heart of examining life. 2. Tally your losses to prove, one day, that you survived in spite of them all. It was his own status update before Facebook was even widely available to the public.

Well, that or editors are a bunch of idiots. Present company excluded, of course.

While I remain unsure of how my blogging or digital persona will affect my son’s trajectory, I definitely don’t want my writing to crush my son’s future life. I refuse to be a cancer to his creativity and power of choice. Hopefully, my journals will serve as a preamble to a better story than I could ever tell.

-The story of Finnegan Capen.