What makes a daddy?
Plus: I made Dan Savage cry, my thoughts on Emily Ratajkowski's single-mom essay, attempts at saving marriage, advice for the 'positive masculinity' folks, and more in an early link roundup.
I’ve got Father's Day on the brain.
I was just thinking about how I have to work to find Christopher’s name if I’m trying to get his attention in public—say, at the grocery store. If we’re with our kid, my first inclination is to say, “Hey, Daddy?”
Maybe that sounds pathetic or kinky, depending on your positioning. In those moments, I don’t say it with any kind of intonation. It’s what our kid calls him. So when we’re out and about as our little trio, he’s Daddy. It’s his name. Just as mine is Mama.
When it’s just the two of us, I’ll often default instead to a pet name, but “Daddy” might slip out. Sometimes it’s more intentionally deployed and then there is an intonation, actually, but it’s with two hands slipped around his waist and a look that says: you are Daddy, the person I parent and cohabitate with and, despite all that, I want to fuck you—even more so because in this moment I am remembering that you are not just my domestic co-worker but this full, desiring, and never fully knowable man.
The intonation is around the fact that we can still find each other in these roles, and beyond them. It’s also, sure, a winking nod to the power play associated with the word, because sex in the midst of The Domestic Project often does feel like it requires letting go of my competent parent-self, which is a kind of surrender—to him, to us, to myself.
I have never actually witnessed a father who is sexy in his paternal authority. I have witnessed profoundly unsexy moments of dads losing their cool with their kids or bungling domestic tasks, and betraying just how little authority they have. Just a few things that are actually sexy in dads and middle-aged people more generally: punctured illusions, gained wisdom, increased capacities, tender softness.
Anyway, in honor of Daddy Day this weekend, I’m running these Deep Daddy Thoughts, along with an early link roundup.
I made Dan Savage cry
I went on the Savage Lovecast and Dan told me that while reading my memoir My Mother’s Daughter in a coffee shop, a barista had to come up and ask him if he was okay because he kept breaking down in tears.
He’s an adoptive father, so the book hit hard. Dan called my book “stunning… incredibly moving… tremendously engaging and funny… and heartbreaking… a thrilling read.” He suggested that everybody should go read it, along with my first book, Want Me, and you will not be surprised to hear that I agree.
It was a stellar interview. It’s an honor to be read and understood so deeply—we talked patriarchy and marriage and race and class. At one point he told me that the book was “such a monument to the woman your mother was,” and then said with real emotion, “I love your mom.” Gah! Here’s just a snippet of our conversation.
Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay
Ratajkowski, the model and author of the memoir My Body, writes in The Cut about returning to sex post-divorce as a single mom. There is so much that I relate to in the essay from my own long-ago experiences as a single 20something—and on a level that runs deeper than the motherhood piece.