Life Kit - Life Kit presents: What's in a dad?

Episode Date: June 18, 2022

Code Switch host Gene Demby and comedian Hari Kondabolu are both new fathers, and they're both learning to raise kids who will have very different identities and upbringings than their own. It's left both of them reflecting on some big questions: How will they teach their children about race? What are the elements of their childhoods that they want to pass on? And what, exactly, is a father anyway?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey again, listeners. You've heard a lot of advice on our show about parenting and navigating identity. Our friends over at Code Switch had a great conversation about the complexities of fatherhood and what it really means to be a dad. And we wanted to share it with all of you. Hope you enjoy. You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. And not that long ago, we did one of our favorite kinds of episodes, Ask Code Switch. It's where we take often very personal questions about race and identity that we get from y'all, the listeners of Code Switch Nation, and try to report them out and contextualize them and offer up some advice. And those are often like our most contentious episodes because people

have very strong feelings about the answers we get from experts and the conclusions we arrive at. You know, like all advice. But on a recent Ask Coach Which episode, we focused on race and parenting. That is how we should go about talking about these big questions around identity with our parents. How do you set boundaries with immigrant parents that think it's disrespectful to set boundaries? Where does the idea that certain small physical traits like having straightened hair are too grown come from? Why did you fight harder to ensure that I was accepted into white American culture than you did to ensure, I was identifying mostly with the letter writers as somebody's child, thinking through how that relationship should look since everybody is an adult. Right. But since then, I have joined the other club, the parent club. as y'all know i've been out and away from code switch getting to know my own child and it's been a mind-bending experience as my friend kasha told me you just love your kids so much that it almost

breaks your brain and that suddenly makes your parents much more legible to you like oh so this is how you felt about me like no wonder you're so ridiculous and now the ig algorithm is spraying you know all kinds of cute kid content my way and the search engine is trying to get me to buy baby clothes and i'm trying on this new identity father and i really don't know what it is i'm doing y'all i was raised by my mom with lots of help from my grandmother and aunts and my older cousin and so I don't really have a template to work from but I realize a lot of people who do have one are struggling with some of this stuff too. So before the baby came I reached out to a lot of my friends to talk to them about their own fathers and their feelings

about fatherhood and things got real heavy. There were some very dramatic estrangements one friend's father chose a cult back in philly over their family another friend's dad was shot and killed during a robbery while he was driving a cab but for most of the people who were gracious enough to let me pick their brains about this stuff their fathers were more mundane mysteries, like taciturn, maybe functioning more as a disciplinarian than a source of counsel or affection, that whole thing. And so even though they had examples of fathers in their lives, they wanted the way fatherhood might look, either done by themselves or with their future partners, to look a lot different. Of course, this all assumes a male parent, right? This is all very hetero. There are countless families headed by two adult women

or one adult woman like mine or in which no one identifies as a woman or a man. And so another thing that kept coming up really organically in these conversations I was having with people was, what even is fatherhood? How much care work done by a male parent is, and I'm doing air quotes here,

fatherhood and not just parenting. Is there some ineffable thing that makes someone a dad that makes what you do fathering? These are big questions. So, you know, I had to call in some help. Y'all probably remember Hari Kondabolu, the stand-up comedian from his documentary, The Problem with Apu, or his Netflix special, Warn Your Relatives. A lot of his comedy is about race and identity and the incoherence of it all.

And as he told us on a recent Code Switch Live show, he also recently became a father himself. And so Hari pulled up the metaphorical co-host chair to chop it up with me. Man, Gene, I'm so glad to be here. I am glad to be talking to another young father. I'm glad to be talking to anybody since I've been inside for way too long. And we took on this deliberately provocative question. Is fatherhood even necessary today? Oof.

You know, it's complicated because on one hand, it's like, what's the difference between fatherhood and parenting, right? Exactly. those are gender differences, right? And like examples that are based on like gender norms. And then, you know, especially in the last few years in the mainstream, there's been more of like a critical questioning of gender, right? And so it's almost like, well, you know, even like even claiming I'm a father and let's say, you know, I have a son, right? Like even that, just saying I have a son is like, okay, I'm going with what

he was assigned at birth, which I guess I helped assign it. Like, you know, as a father who is raising a son, I still want to try to teach my kid not to be steeped in toxic masculinity, that, you know, maybe he's still seeing in the outside world, I want them to know that like, being a quote unquote, man does not have to look this way. And at the same time, I'm like, I don't know if conveying that stuff is, is limiting him and also reinforcing something in society. Should I just be viewing this as a human being? I'm a human being, raising a human being. And I'm like, I don't know. And that's usually when the kid poops. And then, you know, you don't, you stop thinking about it. You're just like, whoever this

animal is, the diaper has to be changed. Yeah. I mean, you know, that gif with like Puffy and that dude where they're sort of staring at each other. Like, I feel like that is me and my baby right now. I was like, just trying to size each other up. And I actually don't know who in that gif I am if I'm puffy looking, like judging the other person or the person there in the headlines being judged. But right now, I feel like I'm thinking all these big existential thoughts. And the logistics of being a parent is just like feeding, sleeping, pooping, cuddling, right? We're not at the stage where we're necessarily talking. Like, my kid doesn't understand anything yet, right?

But I know that we are going to have to sit with these big questions about gender and race very soon. These are not avoidable questions. And also that the way that I'm answering these questions is going to be very different from the way that my mom answered these questions for me. That's right. And you and I have talked about this a little bit before, but I'm wondering who, if anyone, you were looking to as a template for like the kind of father you would like to be. Hmm. I mean, you know, I think I'm fortunate enough, or depending on your situation,

you know, to have a father that is in my life, was there growing up. So, you know, I guess the assumption is, well, you know, isn't that the role model? And I have complicated feelings about that. I mean, I think my father, like a lot of men from a lot of different cultures, and I'm going to talk specifically about my South Indian culture, grew up steeped in patriarchy, as did my mother, right? So growing up, he never cooked. He never cleaned. He never did the laundry.

He didn't, like, all these things that were considered women's work. And the thing is, that was reinforced to me not only by the fact that he didn't do those things, that my mother did those things, but also if I was going to the kitchen or wanted to help, I was told, this isn't your job. By who? So it was by my mother. Oh, to help, I was told this isn't your job. By who? So it was by my mother. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's right. Patriarchy is deep. It's not just like men who are affected by it. It becomes part of – it's like this is how you raise a boy, which is confusing to me looking at it now because my mom is somebody who broke lots of gender norms in southern India as a woman that was educated, who didn't want to get married as her

first, like, this is what I want to do, but I want to be a doctor. She was a doctor very young with her own practice. And then she got married, moved to America and lost those things. So I'm like, you're already somebody, one, who defied so many, uh, gender norms and expectations. And then you kind of like, went along with it, and, you know, weren't able to do the thing you love. So to me, it's like, why are we accepting this? And that's what I think now back then I was just, you know, you're a kid, you're just going with what you're told. So like, a lot of times I have a tough time because I'm like, that's not what I want to be as a partner and a father. So oftentimes who I end up modeling myself after are my peers. You know, I'm 39 years old.

My partner also is, you know, in my age range. I feel bad because it's like, is it stupid that I'm not giving her age? Isn't that a stereotype of a woman? But at the same time, I don't know. Anyway, but the point is that I'm an giving her age. Isn't that a stereotype of a woman? But at the same time, I don't know. Anyway, but the point is that I'm an older father, so I've had friends who've had kids who are now like 8, 9, 10 years old, and seeing them be parents, and seeing them be fathers, and seeing them be partners in, at least in the examples I'm giving in heterosexual relationships, I see how they contribute in the household.

The fact that they see the work of a household as something that is shared, that is not gendered, that they acknowledge that their partner has work too, that both of them are doing work outside the house. So the work in the house has to be split, which is my mom had a full-time job and was doing all the other stuff as a quote-unquote housewife and mother. So she was doing two or three jobs, two of them at least that weren't being paid for, you know, that were not monetized. So my best friend is behaving in a way that I find admirable and that I want to emulate. How he talks to his wife, how they both work through issues together as parents. And look, I get it.

They definitely fight like all human beings fight and they have their issues. But I see how they parent together. And I'm in my late 20s watching this. And it's so foreign to me, you know, to see how it works. Not only because it's my friend that's parenting, but also like, I didn't have that experience growing up, nor did he probably. I mean, what about for you? What is it like for you to parent in this situation? And also how, who are your models as a parent and i guess as a father yeah i mean that's such a heavy question it's part of the reason why i decided to start um asking my friends about their experiences with their fathers because you know i've talked

about this a little bit on the show before but i didn't grow up with my father at home at all one of the reasons i don't like talking about it because it always feels like this like cultural pathology thing like, oh, a black man, another black child who was raised in this fatherless home

in the 1980s and 90s. But it really didn't feel like that. Like, you know, like I grew up in a neighborhood where there weren't a lot of fathers around and so there was nothing about it that seemed anomalous to me,

right? And if anything, the fathers who were like in my block, in my neighborhood who were like, you know, there were a bunch of kids on my block and we all played together.

And the three or four kids who had fathers in the home had the kind of fathers that seemed like agents of chaos to me. Right. Like it did not feel like to me that life would be better off if if a cat like that was in my house. You know what I mean? When I talked to my friends about it, I was like, oh, well, you have a blank slate. And I was like, well, I don't. right i still get the same cultural scripts that everyone else gets too right and i don't i don't know how much they work right for me which is one of the reasons i want to talk to my friends and like you said like a lot of the people who i look to as models of how to do this are contemporaries of mine right so when you talk about like not liking like the scripts are you talking about those examples or are you talking about just everything that you've seen in media and in your life in terms of Like, my cousin Carol told me how to shoot a basketball, right? Like, my mom told me about what, you know, she told me the rules of football, right? She

told me about, like, this is a 4-3 defense. Like, you know, we were in Philly, you know what I mean? Everybody's an Eagles fan, so whatever, you know what I mean? But, like, the people who were in my world who were doing all the things that are, like, stereotypically masculine were women. The people who tied my ties, right? And, like, you know what I mean? The idea that those things are the domain of men is not necessarily true, right? So then it's like, okay, so what is it that a father would do? And if it's not these, like, like you said, if it's not these sort of stereotypical male things, then it's like, oh, we're talking about this other stuff, right? We're talking about being emotionally available and being present and being accountable, right?

And that is not necessarily a model I've seen in real life outside of my contemporaries. You know, your child will be mixed. Mine will as well. Your partner's an Indian-American, right? Yeah, she's South Asian. She's from India. So she came over as an immigrant when she was three.

Oh, she's the real deal then. She grew up in California to be, you know what I mean? All her references are like Luther Vandross and Anita Baker. It's fun. It's fun. I mean, yeah. My partner is Puerto Rican and Italian and reads as white. So my child, I don't know what he will look like as he gets older.

Because right now he's still, like, you see somewhat of an outline, but he's still clay. So I don't, you know, I don't know. I mean, how do you feel about that? Like, when you see your child, do you immediately identify with your child, like, physically? So a funny thing is, like, everybody I know says that my son looks exactly like me which I don't see but everyone's like no he looks exactly like you but one of the things that I think about a lot is like even in my family like a kid with his complexion he's somewhere between me and my wife um I'm dark-skinned she's like well I guess we see olive color but I don't

even know what that what is olive color but he's like, well, I guess we see olive color, but I don't even know what that, what is olive color, but he's like butterscotch. Right. Um, and he's getting darker all the time, but like in my family, there's plenty of people as dark as me and as light as him. You know what I mean?

So he looks like, you know, a Demby, right. At the same time, there's all these experiences that I have moving through the world as a dark skinned black man that he will not have as a, like as a light skinned black person.

And like, there's going to be all these ways in which that will not be exactly applicable to him right and the way people respond to him like i know what it's like to be a black man and my age in the world but also like he's going to live in a world that is materially different around a lot of this stuff right like i imagine this is sort of what mom felt like she was born in 48 she was in dc at howard when the king riots happened in 1968 right like she lived in a different world right she has like a bunch of racial politics that she imparted to me and also like are not my racial politics because we grew up in like a very different world right i know my mom had a very specific anxiety over my

safety when i was a kid right when I was like becoming a adolescent and I was no longer had like baby fat on my face. Right. Um, and I was about the police and like, I, I know that that's going to be a thing that's going to be like crushing for me. Like that is going to be like a waking concern for me all the time. We live in a black and Latino neighborhood that is like gentrifying in DC and there are cops everywhere, everywhere. There's a police car up until like three or four weeks ago that was like posted up on our corner every day all day all night till like three in the morning with the lights blinking and it was annoying because i'd be trying to put this baby down with the like

police blue blue and white like blinking in the in the house and i'm like sooner or later it's going to because that's the nature of like the united states like he's going to have contact with these people and it can go all kinds of ways huh and i just i had a lot of resentment around before but now i have like a deeper like more sort of like um the directionals sort of anxiety about it you know it's strange gene because i feel like i have the flip side of that say more i'm curious you know because my child most likely will be lighter than me. And, you know, neither of us know that variable is very haunting, right? Like, how will they be read by the world? And how will they be treated as a result of that? Right? Yeah, you know, and the hope that the world is a lot better when they hit a certain

age, and it was for us and our parents, and so forth forth and so on. But, you know, that fear that you have of like, the idea of this legacy of racism, the day to day functioning within a structure of racism affecting your child and that bitterness, there was a there was a moment, which, you know, I was, I'm embarrassed about, but is real, that, oh, my child was was born and he was light you know much lighter than me and i thought to myself like maybe this is good because his life will be easier and and i'm like but that's everything i'm against yeah you know how do you turn to that person right who believes in uh public school but your kids in private school. How does that happen? Yeah, exactly. And I had that moment where like I wasn't thinking as me as a person with these values who tries to live out his values in his life.

It was me thinking as a father who's only thinking about like, I just want everything to work out for him and it was just an awful an awful feeling and it was an awful feeling because it also is almost like so much of what i have done in my life is talk about the unfairness of white privilege and whiteness and the history of of race in this country and how like affects all of us to this day. And yet, there was a part of my brain when I saw my child that wanted him to have some of those advantages. I'm actually curious, like, what are some of the things that you grew up loving from your childhood that you cherish from your childhood that will be the hardest things to replicate for your own child oh man playing on the street yes I haven't seen kids yell car in such a long time like you're playing like whether it's

like a basketball hoop set up in um in someone's front yard or um you know whether it's playing football on the street or baseball whatever and then all of a sudden a car is turning and everyone yells car and you run out of the way like that makes me feel bad that he won't have that experience because one kids aren't playing outside. And, two, how many people know their neighbors now? And so that is one thing. You know, the idea of trick-or-treating in your neighborhood and or in your apartment building, because I've done both, and knowing every person that lives there and feeling connected and, you know, seeing somebody grow up. You know, I feel bad that he's not gonna have that the same way that I did. I feel bad that his, he's gonna have elements of

different cultures because of, you know, me and his mom. But it won't be the same. I can't give him something from the source, right? He's getting secondhand knowledge for me depending on how long my parents are around to give him firsthand knowledge like i'm i'm having to give him something that's filtered through the lens of somebody born here with their set of experiences like i feel bad that i can't give him quote-unquote culture, whatever that means, in a way that can preserve more of it. I mean, those are just a handful of things. What is the thing you think you will be able to replicate that you're most excited to teach him when it's time? I mean, look, I don't know because it also depends on the willingness of my kid.

Right now, I know that he doesn't like to be held too long. I don't know if that's just because he's 18 months or that's his personality. Like, I want to do my own thing. My mom always watched, like, sports with me, especially tennis. And I know, like, that's something I want to watch, baseball with my kid. My mom still watches basketball with me, which is weird. She got into basketball in her 60s. Oh, wow.

Steph Curry, man, is magic. And we're New Yorkersers so that says a lot that's very weird but you know that being you know i want to be able to have real conversations with my kid i want to talk to him as an adult and not in a way where his childhood feels like you know i have to be this young adult who takes up all this responsibility but in a way where we can talk about things you know that are real are real, which is something that, again, the love my mom in particular, and it's not to say my father didn't love us, but my mom, like certainly doing the bulk of the raising, that love that she gave us, the way she interacted with other human beings, the fact that our grandmother was in India,

so she would introduce us to the older people in the building because that would be our surrogate grandparents while my grandmother wasn't there. And we would spend afternoons with them because at least we would know how to interact with older people as a result. The idea of instilling those kinds of values, which are not religious, but more like, how do you connect with different types of humanity? Those bigger things, I feel that that's something because of who me and my partner are. And because of the love I had growing up, I can give them. And I know that's a lot vaguer than, like, I will make my kid a baseball player. You know what I mean? I mean, what are your things?

What are the things that you're upset that you won't be able to pass down and things that you're really excited and know that you can give your child? It's funny because it's exactly the same thing. Like, I grew up, again, like, in a city in South Philly on a block with a bunch of kids. And we, in the summertime, we were just outside all the time, right? Like, we were playing basketball together. We were racing together. It was boys and girls playing together. When we were really young, it was just me and my sister.

If she wanted to jump double dutch, I would have to tie the rope to the banister outside the house and be on the ends while she jumped double dutch. I just want that weird way that all the little double dutch songs get transmitted through a neighborhood. I just wish that there would be a space like that for kids. But I don't know if kids jump double dutch anymore. I feel like I feel so old when I say that. But the big thing that I'm excited about is like I mean I think about this a lot. It's like the kind of letters we get from our listeners on the show a lot are about people trying to like find community with you know with other black people or Asian people or Latino people when they didn't grow up around them. And I feel really fortunate that I grew up in a world where like my teachers were black and all of the adults in my world were black. Right. And all of my classmates were black. And so

I got to like be around black people in this way that wasn't like, that wasn't like mediated, you know? And it seems like, that seems like a really obvious thing for a lot of us, but I'm really looking forward to raising my child in a world in which blackness is just in the water and it's not a thing that I have to account for. I'm looking forward to the sort of quotidian blackness of the universe that our kid will grow up in. That's beautiful, Gene gene because what you're

saying basically is you want to live in a world where your child's existence is validated by the outside world absolutely i guess on a more sort of basic like emotional level what has been the most surprising part of becoming a father i mean some i mean one that the cliched stuff was was right it you know and that and also that it's okay to be cliched you know like i'm not 22 i'm not trying to convince some hipster in williamsburg that you know i listen to the right music and you know i read the right things It's like my life feels completely different. I don't see my friends as often, and generally I'm okay with it because I have a family.

I look at my kid and I just melt. I just am so happy that he's alive and healthy and I'm his father. And, you know, being able to just hold him is the best feeling in the world. All right, y'all, that's our show. This episode was produced by Jess Kung and edited by Leah Dinella and Steve Drummond. I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all. By the way, y'all, our friends at Life Kit want to hear from you.

If you like this conversation I had with Hari, let Life Kit know. They want to hear your thoughts and your questions about masculinity, about fatherhood. Basically, any topics that make you think, I wish there was a God for this. You can drop them online at LifeKit at NPR.org. That's LifeKit at NPR.org.