Not Just Darkness, and Not Just Luck: On Being Honest with Our Kids about our Triumphs and Failures
I am told that somewhere, there exist parents who decide what music gets played in the car. I am not among the ranks of these determined souls. As I shuttle Heloise and David to school events and games and practices, they take turns selecting the soundtrack of our travels.
My son likes rap, particularly hip-hop-infused Latin music. (Peso Pluma, Bad Bunny, and so forth). My daughter remains firmly in her Swiftie era. Lately, they have found some rare common ground on Noah Kahan, whose “Stick Season” was one of 2023’s cleverest and catchiest hits. I’m not sure if it’s better described as a banger or a bop, but it’s good:
We know all the lyrics, my bunnies and I, and we sang the whole song twice yesterday as we inched along Olympic Boulevard. One of the lines gives me pause:
So I thought that if I piled something good on all my bad
That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad
The children do not hesitate to sing those words too. Are they not paying attention, to sing that lyric in the car with their father? Should I bring up, perhaps in a self-deprecating way, that I hope they find their own way of canceling out whatever darkness they inherit from me? I – wisely – decide against it. It occurs to me that if my darkness was really as all-encompassing as I fear, my kids would not blithely and loudly shout that verse. (No one needs a papa who explains song lyrics, anyway.)
You are probably aware that Los Angeles is beset by a homeless crisis. To navigate the streets around my home, we sometimes step over the sleeping bodies of our drugged, drunk, exhausted fellow citizens. We shake our heads as we turn down the panhandlers, though every once in a while, I will feel the impulse to part with a dollar. That kind of charity is rent on a very frayed social contract. My children, when they were younger, always asked for dollars to give to the homeless. Last fall, though, Heloise was at a local pizza joint with her friend Mia. When a homeless man walked up to the table and asked for a dollar, Mia proffered one – and the wretch grabbed Mia’s purse and ran away. Both girls were badly shaken. They are more cautious now, which is both a necessity and a sadness.
Heloise has learned the hard way that smiling at homeless men, as she did when she was younger, now tends to produce unpleasant results very quickly. My first-born will be fifteen on Friday, and she walks the streets as New Yorkers ride the subway. When I see her “armored up” to meet the city, I am equal parts proud and dismayed. I think of my small-town boyhood, and the shock of my first encounter with a panhandler when I was fifteen, on a field trip to the opera in San Francisco. My children know a different world.
My children also know quite a bit about my darkness, and they know that for a season, I was homeless. I had a car to sleep in, and friends’ homes to shower in, and though I sometimes didn’t have enough to eat, I was never in danger of serious malnutrition. David asked me, a few weeks ago, how I went from that unhappy state of unhoused hunger to my current comparatively prosperous condition.
My initial response was automatic. “Well, I was very lucky, son. So many people helped me start over. I am incredibly grateful.”
In a strange way, left-wing social theory and my family’s rules for gentlemen reinforce each other. To the true leftist, middle-class white men who thrive do so primarily because of racist social structures that are set up for their benefit. White men from educated backgrounds are born on third base, we are told, so anything good they do should be attributed primarily to unearned advantage rather than to merit. That particular social theory finds a congenial counterpart in the way in which I was taught to attribute all of my achievements to luck. A gentleman never, ever attributes to talent what is better explained by unmerited fortune.
In the story I tell my kids, all of their father’s very public failings (my children discovered my Wikipedia ages ago) are due to his own terrible choices. Yes, we now understand there was a brain injury, but encephalopathic head trauma is no excuse for the lies, the infidelity, the compulsive need to engage in – and then confess – all manner of sordidness. I have known men who blame their shortcomings on their own parents, or on the church, or on systemic racism, or on capitalism. The left-wing social theory I imbibed (and later peddled in the classroom) makes it clear that while less privileged men with darker skin may attribute their failures to structural disadvantages, a fellow like me can only justly ascribe his failings to his faults. A well-bred gentleman, by the same token, knows that blaming others is base and vulgar. A man of manners never admits to being the author of his own success, but he is quick to declare himself the architect of all his adversities.
I am not, in fact, a character in a nineteenth-century novel, even if I do tend to speak as if I am. It damn well doesn’t do my children one bit of good for me to pretend that I am! And it occurred to me this week, thinking about both that Noah Kahan song and my son’s questions about homelessness, that I do my kids a huge disservice if I refuse to admit a basic fact. While it is certainly true that being a white guy with a doctoral degree has not hurt me, it is absolutely not the case that I have survived and thrived solely because of my skin, my sex, and the circumstances of my birth. To put it bluntly, I have survived and rebuilt my life because I worked tenaciously. I worked my ass off to stay clean, to stay sober, to show up on time for manual labor jobs – and later, to deliver high-quality manuscripts on schedule.
My success, such as it is, cannot only be the result of the Self-Deprecating Trinity of Luck, White Privilege, and the Kindness of Strangers. Make no mistake, I know I’ve been lucky. I know I have privileges inherent in my upbringing and my appearance. Many people have given me second, third, and 97th chances. Those things can be real, and my effort can be real too. I escaped homelessness and poverty in part because of privilege and in part because I made good choices. Those who remain mired in those unhappy conditions often remain so in part because of capitalism and racism -- but also because they continue to make poor choices of their own volition. There is an interplay between structural forces and free will, and any politics or philosophy that denies the power of either badly misses the mark.
I told my son this week, “I have made some very bad choices in my life, and I hope you won’t make them. At the same time, I have always pushed very hard to start over, and to rebuild. I have never quit. I have always pushed myself to do better. I have been lucky, but I have also made myself available for the luck by always showing up.”
Show up. Be kind. Don’t quit. Look people in the eye when you speak to them. Write thank-you notes. Whatever you want to be good at, practice it – and ask for coaching. I have done these things, and, well, I wrote four books in the last twelve months, and I have a couple more under contract. Luck, yes. Privilege, yes. Hella hard work, yes.
Parents are called to give kids the tools they need to survive and thrive. We must be honest about the reality of our own darkness. We must also be honest about the way in which our virtues (and not just luck and privilege) led to our successes. Somewhere in that balance, our children will find something useful.
And one of these days, I’m going to make them listen to my music in the car.
I always appreciate your perspective. Thank you for sharing! ❤️
"We must also be honest about the way in which our virtues (and not just luck and privilege) led to our successes." It's hard to parent honestly and modestly. How you love your children, and how much they must love you.