Tales from the Dad Side
Read Tales from the Dad Side Online
Authors: Steve Doocy
Misadventures in Fatherhood
To my father, of course
There are three stages of a man's life: he believes in Santa Claus, he doesn't believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus.
âAuthor not known
(but obviously a dad)
W
hy, you're asking yourself, does this guy think he's an expert on the topic of fatherhood? Forget the fact that I hosted a network show on parentingâI only did that for the catering. The fact is that as a longtime professional journalist I have been observing my father for fifty years, not counting the twenty years I've chronicled my own children, for a sum total of seventy years, which is remarkable for a fifty-year-old guy. This is the same math logic I use to calculate my taxes.
“You want to be a dad on a sitcom?”
That was what the legendary chairman of NBC, Brandon Tartikoff, asked me, wondering if I wanted to be a wisecracking albeit misguided father on a situation comedy for one half hour each week. I'd be the peacock network's latest version of Bill Cosby, who at that same time was making hundreds of millions of dollars as he dispensed heartfelt advice that always ended with a punch line to his camera-perfect children, who were not really his children but highly compensated actors pretending to be blood relatives.
“Steve, you
look
like the perfect dad,” the NBC chairman added after I taped my show at 30 Rock.
I look like the perfect dad?
That seemed odd because at that moment I was wearing heavy Pan-Cake makeup and a bib. To the best of my knowledge, the perfect dad does not wear eyeliner and a bib, unless it's cross-dresser night at Red Lobster.
Instead I returned to television news and I did not take that sitcom job, which ran almost a decade and made the guy who did take the job tens of millions of dollars. My wife just showed me a photo layout of him in a recent
In Style
magazine surrounded by supermodels on his private island lighting a cigar with a fifty.
There's more to fatherhood than looking the part; a real dad is someone who would do
anything
for his kids. My friend Mary, whose father was a legendary columnist during Hollywood's golden era, didn't know how to break some bad news to her dad. A clever, proud man, he was in his eighties and had slowed down a bitâhe made Larry King look like Billy Elliot.
“Dad, I've got MS.”
Stunned, the father said nothing for a moment. Mary could see the wheels in his head turning. “Don't you worry, we are going to lick this thing,” he said. “Do you want me to call Jerry Lewis's people?”
Mary paused to reflect on his generous offer of cashing in one of show business's most valuable assets, a favor.
“Look, Jerry owes me big. So does Dean, but I can't collect from him, he and Sammy are long gone,” the former scribbler for
Variety, Hollywood Reporter,
and
TV Guide
confided to his girl.
“Dad, calling Jerry Lewis's people would be great if I had
muscular dystrophy,
” Mary replied, “but I have
multiple sclerosis.
Maybe you could call Annette Funicello's people?”
Disease confusion.
Fathers are generally
big-picture guys
who get all sorts of important details scrambled: diseases that start with the letter
m,
birthdays, times of school events, and with painful frequency even the names of their own children. Generally mothers never make those kinds of mistakes, because while they're both parents, dads are different from moms.
That could be the greatest understatement since Noah turned on the Weather Channel and found out that the next forty days called for a 20 percent chance of light rain.
Mothers are reassuring comforters and healers who dole out un
conditional love, while fathers are the family muscle, the providers, the tire-gauge-in-the-pocket practical guys who twice yearly try to be romantic.
“Roses, on a Tuesday?” Mom observed as Dad walked through the door. “Were you stopped at the light again?”
While there is no disputing that nine months of pregnancy is rough on a woman, she should walk a mile in a father's Hush Puppies with thirty or forty pounds of wiggling kid around her neck for the first five years of a child's life. Seeing a father able to stand up straight after a full day of piggyback rides without a trip to the chiropractor would be as remarkable as seeing Mary-Kate Olsen finish an entire niçoise salad.
“Pops, what time's curfew?” Cain asked his father, Adam.
“Be home before
CSI Mesopotamia.
”
“But Dad⦔
“All right, ask your mother.”
That was not what the youngster wanted to hear, because everybody knew his mother, Eve, wore the fig leaf in that family.
History has shown us that ever since the beginning, moms and dads have been different. In reality, new moms are better at parenting than new dads, but there's a reason why: they are programmed to mother. What is playing with a doll if not mommy practice? In fact, there is a mega mother industrial complex made up of thousands of magazines, books, classes, and TV shows that instruct women on how to raise the perfect child. Once a week Oprah tells how to do it despite never having raised a child, unless you count Dr. Phil.
Spontaneously upon umbilical cord snipping they become lifelong members of a special sorority with every other mom, which explains how my wife was speaking to a total stranger on a buffet line when the woman confessed, “Forget knee pain, honey, I had an episiotomy with sixty-nine stitches.” Vaguely familiar with the procedure, I quietly crossed my legs and politely nodded in horror.
So they have a vast mommy-wing conspiracy. Meanwhile, across the gender aisle, fathers are usually clueless about what to do with
that new baby at home. I considered it a good father-son outing if I didn't accidentally break off an arm even though he had a spare. This is what happens to an entire species that has no special father TV shows, zero
Maxim
articles on “Nine Simple Cures for Diaper Rash,” and certainly no practice-dad toys. If you think G.I. Joe inculcates in a boy how to be a father, you're nuts. G.I. Joe is not something to cuddle. He's not even a toy. G.I. Joe is a molded plastic killing machine, and let's keep it that way.
In grade school my brothers-in-law were momentarily fascinated by their sister's Betsy Wetsy, to the point that they disemboweled her to see the doll magic that made her piddle. After their fact-finding jackknife surgery they returned the doll to the crib, where she was still fed her bottle, despite the fact that from that day forward Betsy peed from her armpit.
So a man doesn't have much of a foundation in fathering. It's more on-the-job training, and it starts the day he becomes a father, which for me was the greatest day ever. Those stories about how life changes are absolutely true. On the birthday of my first child, when I walked out of that hospital, the sky seemed bluer, food tasted better, and the songs on the radio were happy and apparently written just for me! I had a reason to be on earth; I was somebody's dad.
I would witness my kid's first steps, first haircuts, and the bloody loss of his first teeth. I am, however, not Superman. Nobody can be there for everything, which is how I can live with myself for being on the mower when my son said his first words, which my wife insists were “trust fund.”
Note to self: No more motivational baby books by Donald Trump.
As I prepared this book for publication I asked my daughter Mary, who'd known only a childhood in the leafy suburbs of New York, if she had any idea what my childhood was like growing up on the flat-lands of America's Great Plains.
“Not really,” she started, but “I bet you sat around and popped a bunch of corn pills.”
For the record, I did not spend my Wonder Years lurking outside
a Kansas grain elevator in some sort of a corn silk coma. But she proved what I had believed to be trueâshe didn't know much about my life, which was not the case when I asked her about her mother's history.
“Mommy had a convertible with a personalized plate that was
BLUIZ
, and that gray-haired guy on CBS took her to a Halloween dance.” She continued with such detail about her mother's personal narrative that if there had been a piano sound track, it would have sounded like an episode of A&E's
Biography
.
Mary didn't know much about my life before she came along because just like my father and his peers in the Greatest Generation, we don't like to talk much about ourselves. Some don't want to brag; others don't want to bore. Personally, after a hard day at work I'd rather go home and listen to their daily dramas from school rather than gossip over the dinner table about which of my associates was stealing office supplies.
These stories are all true, which will prompt some of you to question why I have not yet been charged with endangering a child or impersonating a parent.
While I have a highly visible job on the
Fox & Friends
program, in real life my wife and family are the stars. Kathy, my wife of more than twenty years, really deserves the
complete credit
for the wonderful children who were raised at our house. Allow me to introduce them: they are Peter, Mary, and Sally, whose names we have abbreviated for necklace-engraving purposes to
PMS
.
The other person who casts a long shadow over this work is my own father, Jim Doocy, who in 2008 finally retired after sixty-two years of working for the man. Now he has more free time to chat with me on the phone, which is terrific for me because he always has a great idea about how I can fix a carburetor, shingle the garage, or vacuum the refrigerator coil. He's good with mechanical things; however, some of the newfangled digital stuff dumbfounds him. “Stephen, check your fax machine,” he told me this morning. “I sent you a fax. After you read it, send it backâit's my only copy.”
I could tell him that the original is still in
his
machine, but there's no reason for me to lecture him. Like many, he thinks the facsimile machine is like the transporter from
Star Trek
, magically transmitting whole sheets of paper through the phone lines. But I won't tell him how it really works, because I don't want to hurt his feelings. He's the only dad I'll ever have, which means I am honest and direct with him much the same way the Macaroni Grill is an Italian restaurantânot so much.