#99 Best of 2023: Conversations of the Year

NICK FIRCHAU: So another year has come and gone on Paternal, and before we dive into this Best of 2023 episode I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has listened, our audience is bigger and broader than it’s ever been and I’m hopeful it will grow even more in 2024, beginning with brand new episodes in January.

For now though I want to take the opportunity to look back at some of the best conversations we had on the show in 2023, and if you’re one of those listeners who is relatively new to the show, maybe you found us midway through the year, you can always go back and listen to any of the episodes dating back to 2017 at paternalpodcast.com or they’re in your feed wherever you’re listening to this show, right now. And if you like what you hear on this episode I encourage you to go back and listen to the full episodes for each of the guests we’re featuring today as our Best of 2022, starting with a portion of one of our most popular episodes of the year, with W. Kamau Bell.

Bell is a comedian as well as the host of the Emmy-winning television series “United Shades of America,” and the director of the 2022 Showtime documentary series “We Need To Talk About Cosby,” which netted him a Peabody Award. I spoke to him for Episode Number 93 on the heels of the release of his HBO films documentary entitled “1000 % Me: Growing up Mixed,” which examines the lives of a few mixed-race couples and how they raise their children, and won the award for Outstanding Nonfiction Program at the Children and Family Emmys. You’ll hear a clip from the film in our interview.

Bell and his wife Melissa are a mixed-race couple, and that’s where I’ll start this clip, with how they met. When they met in San Francisco years ago Bell was already an up and coming standup who incorporated topics of race into his comedy regularly. Melissa had to adapt quickly to those conversations for the relationship to work, but she also needed Bell to educate himself on a topic that was important to her.

Here’s W Kamau Bell on Paternal.

W. KAMAU BELL: So the first day we met, it just so happened that I got called to do a show, a stand up show that night. And I was like, gonna show this new woman I met that I was attracted to, that I thought was cute, ‘Hey, you wanna come see me do a stand up comedy show?’ And she came, which is a big deal. She's like, what if this guy's not funny, first of all? So luckily I was funny to her. 

So I was already in this sort of like, race conversation on stage. I was in it with my friends, in my social group. So she was immediately around this thing in a way that she had to sort of go, ‘Okay, this is what we're doing.’ I would say this, with her, I was suddenly around a conversation about feminism that I hadn't been around before.

So from the very first moment, we were having a lot of big conversations, and it's also a very Bay Area thing. Structural racism, structural feminism, as a part of our courting, you know what I mean? As a part of like, getting to know you. And so I think that a lot of our early relationship, if she hadn't been down for the race conversation, we wouldn't have stayed together. And if I hadn't been down for the feminism conversation, we wouldn't have stayed together. 

So part of it was just like, sharing what we believed, what we had learned, what our life experiences. So she would say something to me, like, ‘I don't feel comfortable walking around in the mission district of San Francisco at night.’ I'd be like, ‘What do you mean? The mission is great. It's so friendly!’ And she's like, ‘You're a six-foot- four man. I'm a five foot eight woman.’ Oh, good point.

You're like, so, so I have to sort of like go, everybody's not me. And she's helped me understand that her experience as a five-foot-eight white woman is different than a six-foot-eight, six-foot-four black man. I wish I was six-foot-eight, a six-foot-four black man. 

NICK FIRCHAU: Were there landmines that you guys had to negotiate, uh, sort of in the early going or when it came to race or was it smooth? 

W. KAMAU BELL: No, I mean, this is something that we have done, I have done work on it before, I've written about this before. The first time I met her grandfather, who was a Sicilian American, she sort of grew up identifying culturally as Italian, even though her grandfather was Italian, her grandmother was Portuguese, her dad was British and Irish. So she's at most, like, one quarter Italian. But as white people in this country can do, they can pick. He's Sicilian, he's my grandfather, he's the one cooking all the meals, I'm Italian, even though by DNA I am like, a fourth Italian. 

But when I met him, the first time I met him, he refused to look at me, he refused to shake my hand, and this was the guy who was like the patriarch of the family who everybody loved. Talk about, do we have any landmines? We had years of landmines of navigating how to, how to navigate him, how I would navigate him.

There would be times where Melissa would be like, we're having a big family occasion this weekend. And I'd be like, ‘Is your grandfather going to be there? Yeah, I'm not going.’ And then eventually got to the point where she was like, she told her grandfather, I'm not showing up anymore until you learn to accept Kamau. This is years into our relationship.  At that point, he totally like the ice cracked and he realized I'm about to lose my granddaughter over some nonsense. And our relationship flipped overnight. And now this is after years of him not looking at me in the eye. We, and then we had several years after that where he was, he called me his grandson and he was a Fox news watcher unless United Shades was on, then he'd watch CNN. 

So it's like, that was our biggest landmine. I've written about that. Uh, before I wrote a, short story called Everybody Loves Kamau, which is about the irony of Melissa, when she met me, everywhere I went, people were like, ‘Oh, Kamau’s here!’ And then she, and then I met her grandfather, and he did not love Kamau. So it was sort of the irony of like, everybody does not love Kamau. 

NICK FIRCHAU: On the subject of conversations about race and then having kids, is it true that your wife sort of had to train herself to have black kids? Like, I think the example that you've given in the past is that she had to learn how to braid black hair?

W. KAMAU BELL: Yeah. Now we'd had years of like, cultural conversations and cultural sensitivity and racism and the civil rights movement and microaggressions, like all the things in the outside world, but that doesn't train you to do your daughter's hair. So it was like, there's the intellectual discussion, but then there's the like, What do I need to literally learn how to do so I can be prepared for this little girl to be in the world? 

I think there's a Grey's Anatomy episode that helped us where she didn't want to be the white parent with the black kid whose hair is all jacked up because they don't know how to do their kid's hair. And there's this also happens with I know a lot of uh white parents who adopt black kids who do the same thing.

Like there's the like how to be sensitive, how to make sure they have black friends, but then what do you need to learn in your house and how to care with this? Like, black people have more eczema. So then how do you learn to have the right lotion in your house to make sure that this kid, this kid's skin is okay. So there was a lot of that stuff that Melissa, and she's an academic. She's got a PhD. So she's very good at like, ‘I'm gonna have to study.’

NICK FIRCHAU: One of the most interesting scenes in the entire movie comes near the end when this couple, Bryant and Jidan, he's African American, grew up in the South, and she's Chinese American, she grew up in Berkeley. 

Their daughter is mixed, and the mother talks about the concept of embedded cultural assumptions about what is good for kids. And they discuss an argument they had once about if their daughter can wear mismatched socks to school. 

CLIP FROM “1000 PERCENT ME: GROWING UP MIXED”: 730 in the morning, we're like arguing about whether Mila should go out of the house with mismatching socks, you know, because I've thrown everything, you know, I'm like,   get out the door. He's like, ‘You're not gonna let her out of the house with mismatching socks. She's a black girl.  You don't need to send her out in mismatching socks.’ 

NICK FIRCHAU: And my question for you is, how did you navigate that with your kids? The idea that you're carrying your experience as a black man in America to the table. But that's not necessarily her experience. Was that an issue for you?

W. KAMAU BELL: I mean, there's, it happens regularly and every decision is different based on context. I think a lot of times white people think that like, there's a lot of talk about when black people have the discussions with their kids about, about like, how to deal with the police. 

And there's a lot of focus on that, as if that's the one conversation black people have with their kids about race. When really, like, that's just one of them. Maybe it's the most difficult one, or maybe it's not, because you start doing it so early the kid doesn't even process it as difficult. But, I'll give you examples.

Like, when Sami was in school, early on, like probably six, first grade or something, And they were learning about the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. And she was having this moment of like, ‘Wait, there were times when black people and white people couldn't go to the same school. And I was like, yeah. And you know what? There's somebody in your family who lived through that era. And she was like, who? And I said, GoGo. Who's my mom. And so I literally took Sammy and walked her into a room with my mom. And I'd prepared my mom. I said, I want you to talk to her about growing up in Indiana in the 30s and 40s.

And I just closed the door and let them have the conversation. Tell her the way you want to tell her, you know? And I wanted Sami to have an intimate conversation with my mom. So that's one example of it. Like you're being taught at school about this thing and in school, it sounds like something far away and foreign.Meanwhile, there's somebody in your family who can say it from real world experience. 

I think a lot of times it depends on what the conversation is, what resources you have to help the conversation, and really providing yourself with a lot of options of how to talk about race and racism. 

So for me, it's funny when Bryant and Jadon told the story about socks, my version of that is body odor. I don't want you going to school smelling bad.  So deodorant has become a big thing early on in our house. I don't want anybody to go, that black girl smells bad. You know what I mean? So like, I think that all parents, especially black parents, have ways in which we try to -  racist hacks, racist life hacks, or unracist life hacks.What can I do to make the world be as smooth for this kid as possible? Because I know inevitably there's going to be bumps, but I don't want to give, I don't want to give the world easy targets, which is impossible, but you just do the best you can. 

I want her to be a free black girl too. I want her to also be herself. And so, you don't want your anxiety about the outside world to limit your kid from, from individuality. So it's like, how do you navigate that? And that's the thing, every parent has that, even if it's not about racism. Hopefully you're trying to not overwhelm your kid.

I just want my girls to be intentional. So if you're gonna wear mismatched socks, I want you to know how the world might treat you, so you can be prepared for it. And so now that you go out there and be intentional about how you present to the world, don't, don't think you can take anything for granted, basically.

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s K Kamau Bell on Episode 93  of Paternal, you can find a link to the full conversation in the notes for this episode.

Next up we switch to my conversation with longtime rock critic Rob Harvilla, and a segment from the most downloaded episode of the year on Paternal. Harvilla is the host of the podcast “60 Songs that Explain the 90s,” which is presented by the folks at the Ringer and which you can find on Spotify. 

In true Paternal fashion I asked Harvilla on to discuss how father/son themes permeated some of the biggest songs of the 90s and the impact fathers had on some of the biggest artists of the decade, including Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and of course, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, whose parents split up when he was nine, in a moment that would come to define his life and shape one of the biggest bands of the 1990s.

Here’s Rob Harvilla, on Paternal.

ROB HARVILLA: It keeps coming up, right? But I had a vague sense of that even as a teenager, you know, the Eddie Vedder of it all, you know, the Kurt Cobain of it all, you know, I'm reading these magazine interviews, like reading anything I can get my hands on. And I have a sense generally of, you know, trauma in that way, you know, and just that, that like, difficult relationship in some sense. For some reason with your, your parents, it's just part of being a rock star. 

There's this movie called, I think it's called The Other F Word. 

NICK FIRCHAU: Oh yeah. It's the movie with Flea from red hot chili peppers, right? 

ROB HARVILLA: Right, it's about punk rock stars and their experience now as fathers, you know, but also in a lot of cases, their own experience with their own fathers. And that's why art, Alec Zach is I'm going to, I hope I'm pronouncing, the dude from Everclear.  I listened to Everclear a ton in high school. I loved those records, Sparkle and Fade and So Much for the Afterglow in particular. And there's that song “Father of Mine,” right? 

CLIP FROM “FATHER OF MINE”: 

Father of mine

Tell me where have you been?

You know I just closed by eyes

My whole world disappeared

ROB HARVILLA: One of, if not my, favorite Everclear song. And it's very specifically about, like, just this terrible relationship he has with his father and how that now informs the way he is parenting his own children. And like so much of the gravity of these songs and these stories went over my head as a teenager, but like “Father of Mine” can't go over my head as a teenager.

It's so direct and it's just, you know - I will never be safe, I will never be sane, I will always be weird inside. Like, I can recite the lyrics to that song. Now I am a grown man with a child of my own, and I swear I'm never gonna let them know the pain I have known, you know, like, it's obvious. 

CLIP FROM “FATHER OF MINE”: 

Now I'm a grown man

With a child of my own

And I swear, I'll never let her know

All the pain I have known

ROB HARVILLA: There's no subtext, there's no getting around it, and you just, you understand, even if you're a 16-year-old lunkhead, that exchange between your father and then the father you become and what you try and give your kids that you didn't have, or what you try and keep them from, you know, so much of that was buried subtext at the time, but not all of it.

And of course, now that I listen back from a completely new perspective as a father myself. All of it is just brimming with these parental issues, you know, stretching back into the past and also into the future.  

NICK FIRCHAU: I'm glad you brought up that Everclear song because I was going to ask you about it anyway, because as you said, the message in that one is so overt in comparison to the next song I wanted to discuss, which I think the messaging is a little bit more subtle and you dedicated an entire episode to this one.

And that's “Say It Ain't So” by Weezer.

ROB HARVILLA: That was an interesting song because I think I didn't get a lot of that at the time. And you know, it's Weezer. Even on that first record, you were already coding Weezer as like silly, you know? And so like, what really tripped me out about that song is the first line, ‘Somebody's Heine Is crowdin' my icebox.’

CLIP FROM “SAY IT AIN’T SO”: 

Somebody's Heine'

Is crowdin' my icebox

Somebody's cold one

Is givin' me chills

ROB HARVILLA: I forget the details, but like, he saw a beer sitting in his refrigerator and it was like he was thinking about his dad leaving? It's actually a legitimately profound and sad image, like a lone beer bottle in a refrigerator. And that's the emotion that it brings up for him. Even, even in the song, even as he's singing the song, he has this tendency to sort of shroud it in goofiness, you know, to the point where, like, you don't understand what an important and what a sad line that is if you're not dialed all the way into what the song is about. Even though the rest of the song is like, ‘Dear Daddy,’ are words in the song. It's not subtle in that way, but you are inclined because of the Weezer of it all, to take it as a joke when it's not a joke at all.

CLIP FROM “SAY IT AIN’T SO”: 

Say it ain't so

Your drug is a heartbreaker

NICK FIRCHAU: On “Father of Mine” in particular, I hear that song on the radio from time to time. And like you, I liked Everclear a lot when they came out, they were hugely popular, they were everywhere. bBut something inside me now is always wondering if those songs are still cool or if they're outdated now. And so my question is, does that song in particular hold up for you?

ROB HARVILLA: It's so funny because like, ‘Does it hold up for you?’ is a question that I think about a lot, but it all does, to be totally honest with you. I can't think of anything that I've heard where it's like, ‘Well, this, you know, this is, it turns out this is not really good, you know?’ or ‘This doesn't make me feel anything.’

I don't have that feeling and I'm grateful for that, right? Like it's, it's, it's, it holds up at least in my own internal, emotional cosmology and obviously the Everclear approach and the Weezer approach are different. In subtle ways, not in huge Metallica versus Bon Jovi type ways, but yeah, that's a different approach.

But like, Oh yeah, like “Father of Mine,” you know, if anything, of course hits even harder, you know, and, and “Say It Ain't So,” hits so much harder now that, you know, I, I have a little bit of a greater sense of the layers inherent to it. But like, it's all rewarding, you know, even the dorkiest stuff, you know, that I liked when I was 14, I still find value in now. And I'm so grateful for that. 

NICK FIRCHAU: You said sort of in passing earlier, when we started talking about this, that, you know, you were aware of the Eddie Vedder of it all, and the Kurt Cobain of it all. And I want to ask specifically about Cobain.

His parents divorced when he was nine and it had a tremendous impact on his life. There's a 2001 biography of Cobain called Heavier Than Heaven, where the writer, Charles R. Cross, discusses the impact on Cobain and said that the divorce sort of unleashed a, quote, “emotional holocaust.”  Did Cobain ever write a song about his father? 

ROB HARVILLA: Is there a song, like an entire song, that's obviously about his father? I don't know about that. But there's just tons of glancing blows. The family trauma song, Nirvana-wise, you know, is “Sliver.” It was a single, it was a B-side. That's a song about him being a kid and his grandparents are babysitting him. 

CLIP FROM “SLIVER”: 

Mom and dad went to a show

They dropped me off at grandpa Joe's

I kicked and screamed

Said "Please, don't go!"

ROB HARVILLA: That's the song where you get the clearest glimpse of him as a kid, as a little vulnerable kid, and you understand how crushing, you know, that divorce, you know, his family being torn apart, you know, and the really rough relationships he had with both his father and his mother from that point forward, like that's the song where you can hear all that.

And you know, just the way he sings at the end, “I woke up in my mother's arms,” you know, in the classic Kurt Cobain screaming voice, like that's the song. That's the song where you can hear all that most clearly. But also, it's animating every song he ever did, you know, and then sometimes you know that because he specifically mentions, you know, his father, but it's, it's just in the air hanging over everything all the time once you know, even a little bit about like where he came from and how he came up.  

CLIP FROM “SLIVER”: 

After dinner I had ice cream

I fell asleep and watched TV

I woke up in my mother's arms

Grandma take me home

Grandma take me home

NICK FIRCHAU: I want to ask one more Cobain-related question, and this one I think has to do with parenting because this is a scenario that happened to my friend. He has a nine year-old daughter and they went to a birthday party and two or three of the girls had those Nirvana t shirts on, sort of like retro rock Nirvana t shirts on, and his daughter wanted to get one.

And Nirvana is one of the most important bands of my friend's life, I think he saw them before Cobain died, and he decided that if his daughter was gonna wear the shirt, she had to listen to the music. And if you listen to the music, you need to know about Kurt Cobain, which then led to a conversation between my friend and his daughter about suicide. I'm curious if you have a take on that dilemma and generally speaking, if music has led you to any similarly complicated conversations.  

ROB HARVILLA: When my kids were born, I was adamant to not be like the cool rock critic dad, who's like playing them Wilco, you know, as they're incubating. But what I fear happened instead is, I swung too much in the other direction, where I'm playing music around them all the time, but it's, I'm not playing it for them necessarily. I'm not like, ‘Listen to this, it is very important.’ Like I don't really do any of that. I was trying not to force anything upon them. But now that they're a little older, right now that they're, you know, 12 and nine, you know, I wonder if I haven't had enough of those conversations.

So I can't think of an instance in which the Nirvana shirt leads to the Nirvana music, which leads to the Kurt Cobain arc, you know, which leads to a very intense topic that you'd rather not talk about, but you'd better talk about. 

It's so funny to me, because yeah, you can buy Nirvana t-shirts in Target. So I totally get his impulse to be like, ‘If you're going to wear this shirt, then you gotta earn it.’ Like that's, I get that. Absolutely. But you know,  my wife and I, you know, we find ourselves talking about things we don't want to talk about all the time now, whether that's, you know, abortion or child abuse or whatever.

And I'm sure there are plenty of instances, you know, where music is bringing up that stuff, because we try not to shy away from those conversations if something's bothering them or if they ask about it. What I've tried not to do up to this point is the album-by- album discography,  like dad is going to teach you about this music type thing, but like I could probably serve to be a little more proactive at this point. 

Just to encourage whatever they're into, you know, not, not to foist my own bullshit onto them necessarily, but just, just to be encouraging the way my parents were encouraging to me. 

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s Rob Harvilla from Episode 89 of Paternal, you can find a link to the full conversation in the notes for this episode.

Next up, received tremendous feedback earlier this about the conversion with our next guest, Jonathan Malesic. Back in 2022 Malesic released the book The End of Burnout and an essay in the New York Times entitled  “How Men Burn Out,” and both examined the often misunderstood term “burnout.” If you’re someone who often thinks about the balance between your life and your job I strongly recommend going back and listening to this entire episode, but we’ll start with the genesis for all of this study on burnout for Malessic, who spent 11 years as a theology professor at a small college in Pennsylvania before he slowly began to lose his enthusiasm for the job, and then everything changed.

Here’s Jonathan Malesic, on Paternal.

JONATHAN MALESIC: I got my dream job as a college professor in 2005. And I expected this job that would totally fulfill me as a person. And it did pretty well for, you know, seven or eight years. And it started to take a turn, and I started to feel this increasing frustration. 

It was like every couple of weeks, I seemed to have an irrational kind of explosion,  almost, of emotion. You know, I can remember very distinctly going to an academic conference. There was some scholar who I wanted to talk to, and I happened to run into him in a hallway of the conference hotel. And, you know, he was like, oh yeah, hey, and then kind of moved on.

And, you know, I felt very snubbed and slighted. And I went back to my hotel room that night and called my wife. I just ranted about this guy, like ‘This asshole. He wouldn't even say hello to me. Just totally brushed me off!’ Looking back like this is fairly, you know, I mean, it was maybe a little impolite, but it was a totally normal interaction, and I went crazy. 

And I found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I found it harder to plan for class and I was just unhappy, you know. I just couldn't figure out what was wrong. I started drinking more. I started binge eating and I was forever exhausted. You know, I would wake up in the morning, you know, whatever time, seven o'clock or something like that. And by nine or ten, I was wiped out again.

I would sometimes have to take a nap at like, 10 in the morning. I felt like a failure. 

NICK FIRCHAU: One of the challenges for people when it comes to burnout is this idea that the word is so ubiquitous now, like I'm burned out of this, I'm burned out from that. You write in the book that people will try and say, ‘You know, I'm burned out from rooting for this specific sports team, I can't do it anymore.’

But that's really not what burnout is. What did you learn about the specific criteria for burnout? And you list them as cynicism, a sense of ineffectiveness, and the one that I think everyone experiences from time to time and might confuse for burnout, which is exhaustion.  

JONATHAN MALESIC: Yeah, if you are working full time and sometimes the schedule was a little unpredictable and you know, you, you are taking kids to practice and, and things like that, um, maybe you're taking care of parents who, uh, are elderly and that, that can lead to a kind of chronic tiredness, that is not necessarily burnout.

So like if you're tired at the end of a project, say, or like me, if you're tired from having, you know, graded 100 final exams, you know, the last week of the semester. Yeah, that's understandable. And if you can get your normal amount of rest and you feel better then that's not burnout. If it continues and no amount of rest seems to help, that's more like the exhaustion that we associate with burnout.

The second one is cynicism or what researchers sometimes call depersonalization. So it's treating someone like less than a full person. And so that's me in the hotel room, you know, ranting irrationally about this guy who didn't do anything all that wrong. Or it's me thinking, you know, these students are, you know, they're lazy. They don't care. They're ruining my life. That's the kind of second dimension that researchers used to measure burnout. 

And the third is that sense of ineffectiveness, that your work is just not accomplishing anything. And some of the best researchers, Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, and they have a good recent book out that kind of summarizes five decades of research on burnout, they are now talking about burnout profiles. And so you can, you know, maybe your burnout is driven primarily by a sense of ineffectiveness. You know, maybe you're just frustrated with your job. You don't feel particularly exhausted. And in a way that's, that's good to know, because then you just kind of, we know what to do.

You need to be able to see the good impact of your work. Um, and so perhaps a conversation with coworkers or a supervisor can help you see that and pull you out of burnout. 

NICK FIRCHAU: As you were doing this research for the book, and so that you could better understand your own experience here, was there anything that surprised you once you got into the research?

JONATHAN MALESIC: One of the biggest surprises had to do with age. Our metaphor of burnout is you've got this tank of fuel that you gradually burn down until it burns out and well, that's going to happen over time. And I probably also have, I don't know, maybe a little bit of, uh, some, some influence from the great Neil Young and, you know, his line, it's better to burn out than to fade away, which of course is tragically quoted in Kurt Cobain's, uh, suicide note in 1994.

And that makes it seem like burnout is something, Oh, I'm just going to burn through everything I have. And that's not really how it works. You know, burnout, our metaphor is kind of, I think, inaccurate. Burnout is more like stretching. It's more like being stretched between your ideals for work, so what you expect from your job and what it actually is over a long period of time. And that could happen at any age and younger workers are often very susceptible to burnout for the simple reason that, you know, you start out in your career, you have these really high ideals and you have the worst conditions you're ever going to have.

You're making the least, you have the least interesting responsibility, the worst schedule. And so younger workers are very often caught in that gap, and, and they end up suffering quite a bit more from burnout than I had anticipated. Once you hit mid-career, or maybe you cycle through a few different lines of work, you kinda can figure out how to keep those things in balance.

You know, you’re probably paid better, for one thing. You have more interesting responsibility. You have more autonomy. You know, you just have more experience. You sort of know how to navigate it. And I think that that can make it a little easier to manage that imbalance.

NICK FIRCHAU: We talked a little bit earlier about this article that you wrote for the New York Times in 2022 entitled, “How Men Burn Out.”

And in that essay, you touch on the connection between burnout and parenting. And I want to quote you here, quote, “the way men burn out as parents also reflects the way they are conditioned by the breadwinner ethos. In one study, researchers in Belgium found that while mothers scored higher on the paternal burnout measure, fathers more quickly exhibited burnout and its negative consequences. Escape fantasies. Suicidal ideation and neglect of children. That is, given the same level of parenting stress, fathers reacted much worse than mothers did, putting both themselves and their children at greater risk of harm.”  

So how do you interpret that? What do you take away from how men and women experience burnout from parenting?

JONATHAN MALESIC: I think this also has to do with the social script that we read from. Our society has spent the last, I don't know, five or six decades debating whether women can quote unquote have it all. I think women are a little bit better equipped,  socially speaking, for recognizing that, okay, if I want to have a career and a family, it's going to be difficult. It's going to be difficult in these ways. You know, these are the things that I need to do to mitigate that difficulty.

In the United States, so much of masculine identity is tied up with work and being a breadwinner. You know, that is something that men in the U. S., again, you know, as a group, it'll certainly vary from individual to individual, but it's something that up and down the income scale, you know, regardless of race, age, like that is a core component of American masculine identity.

And to burn out is to suggest that you can't live up to that. You failed in some way. And there hasn't been that same conversation among men, and I think that, yeah, that means that when a lot of men encounter that difficulty of being, you know, the kind of father that they want to be, and at the same time being the kind of worker that they want to be, and the kind of husband that they want to be, it's hard to balance all those.

And so, men are kinda not as well prepared for it. And as I recall from that study, that was one of the big takeaways, is that the researchers said, ‘Well, you know, men need kind of better training.’ You know, I think that most men, even to this day, are kind of mentally and morally ready. to work, you know, 60-plus hours a week if they have to, to provide for their families. They're less ready for the more engaged model of fatherhood plus that 60 plus an hour a week job.  

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s Jonathan Malesic from Episode 84 of Paternal, you can find a link to the full conversation in the notes for this episode.

Next up we switch to the guest from Episode 80, author and professor Matthew Salesses. Much of our conversation from earlier this year focused on Salesses’ new book, The Sense of Wonder, which follows the story of a fictional Asian American basketball player and the mix of recognition and racism he endures in the NBA. But we ended that episode with a discussion about Salesses’ late wife, Cathreen, who was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2017, after the two had already become parents to two young children.

Salesses was born in South Korea and was adopted at two years old by white parents in Connecticut, so he effectively grew up without his birth mother. And as Cathreen’s condition deteriorated in a hospital in Seoul Salesses found himself coming to the realization that his two young children would grow up without their birth mother as well.

Here’s Matthew Salesses, on Paternal.

MATTHEW SALESSES: What we thought was like, just longstanding morning sickness. You know, actually we were kind of primed to think this because with the first child, my wife had morning sickness for six months instead of three months and um, had all of these pregnancy complications. And so she had a really, really rough pregnancy.

And so when it seemed like she had morning sickness all throughout the second pregnancy, we were kind of easily attributing that to another very bad pregnancy. But then it didn't go away, right? So she gave birth, she kept losing weight, kept throwing up, and it turned out it was, it was stomach cancer. And that it had already metastasized. 

I had just gotten a new job, and we were buying a house, it was like all these things that were like a new start, but then, cancer. 

You know, we were still very hopeful because we had to be hopeful, right? Like, there's no choice in that scenario, except to like, believe that something good will happen. And so we kept kind of telling each other that, telling the kids, you know, it'd be okay. And by the time it was obvious it wasn't going to be, it was very late, and my wife didn't want them to see her sick. I mean, not just sick, but you know, cause they obviously had seen her sick the whole time, but dying. 

NICK FIRCHAU: You wrote the bulk of this book, The Sense of Wonder, while you were in the hospital with your wife. You were also watching a lot of K Dramas, which is a genre of Korean television that I hope you can sort of explain. Because the way those shows are typically structured is sort of directly connected to what you and your family were going through.

MATTHEW SALESSES: So during that time being in the hospital for days, right, during these chemo treatments, long chemo treatments that were usually like three to seven days in a very hot ward surrounded by all these other women who had stage four stomach cancer, right, who were kind of like, when they didn't come the next week or, you know, you knew why they weren't going to be there.

And so we were just kind of surrounded with all this life and death that everybody, you know, was kind of relying on each other for support, but I couldn't speak Korean very well. And so I couldn't really understand what was going on. And most of the time, because of how painful chemo is, and I think my wife would have said that the chemotherapy was actually the worst part, she would spend most of that time kind of either moaning in pain or asleep, right? Like the sleep was the best because then she could just kind of like escape from it.

And so I would spend all of these hours in this ward sitting on this kind of bench/cot next to my wife and needing to do something. And one of the things my wife and I did a lot together and enjoyed doing together was watching K Dramas. And in K Drama, there's so much wonder around things that might happen, without people having control over them. 

You know, so like, a thousand years ago in the Joseon dynasty, two people fell in love and it came to a very bad end. It’s kind of Romeo and Juliet, right? And then a thousand years later, in current times, trying to, without knowing it, restart this romance and escape the bad fate that they had the first time. Fifteen episodes of a sixteen episode series, you'd have them kind of falling into the same traps as they fell into a thousand years ago.

And one episode in which they’ve finally broken through, right? And it's this kind of miracle almost, right, because of what you've just seen is like fate has such a hold on who people are. And then it's both like the smallest thing, but also the biggest thing to break through that. And that was what we needed, right?

It was like, in a way it was the smallest thing that could have changed everything for us. Just like one experimental treatment, you know, one change in what was happening in her body, like these are cells that are your cells that have just a small alteration or mutation. And because of that they are destroying the body. 

You know, I grew up with these books, right? Like The Chronicles of Narnia, where like the door between two worlds is, is just like a closet, right? It's like you step over one line and you're suddenly in a completely different world. And it seemed very true to what we needed and what we were hoping for.

NICK FIRCHAU: You've written extensively about processing your own grief, but I'm curious how you're handling your grief with your kids. I think for some men grief is something of a boundary that they can't seem to cross or something they don't want to approach. It's not something that they want to show.  How has that been for you when it comes to your kids?

MATTHEW SALESSES: It was a boundary, but it was definitely something that I felt committed to. I felt like I had the choice either to try to hide everything that I was feeling or try to be open about it. And I thought it would help them more to be open about my grief. And so I would just kind of cry in front of them, talk to them about what they were going through, try to make it seem like grief wasn't a taboo, right? It wasn't something we shouldn't feel. 

I mean, the hardest thing actually was kind of to go back to that feeling that I had when they were really young. That I was going to kind of pass on some kind of trauma of my own to them. That suddenly just became true, right? Like I couldn't actually do anything to avoid it. They were going to have trauma from not having a mom, right? And that happened to be my own trauma and I knew, you know, from a lifetime of living with it how much it hurt, right? But I also knew from a lifetime of living with it, and especially like the later parts of it,  that grieving openly was a lot healthier than trying to hold it in and, and not show that I was grieving. So that helped me to try to do the right thing by them.  

NICK FIRCHAU: What do you think is important to you now as a parent? Like what's, what's important to you that your kids learn and what are you guys talking about together? 

MATTHEW SALESSES: Yeah, I talk to them a lot about how each decision that we make is a decision about who we want to be. You can't kind of like write off any decision as like, whatever, I just had a bad day, or like, I'm just doing it one time, because each time you're choosing who you want to be, and it gets harder, you know, if you do one bad thing, the next time it gets harder to choose the right thing. 

I talk to them a lot about like, how hard it is to change as a person too, and how like, you can't just decide once that you're going to change and then you can just change, right? It takes like, constant vigilance and constantly choosing the thing that you want to do over and over again until that becomes like a pattern for you. I talk to them a lot about grieving and about being open to their feelings, and we talk a lot about how intelligent our feelings are.

For a while my daughter and I were playing this game, you know, I would ask how she's feeling and then we would try to figure out what that feeling meant. So like, you know, I'm feeling angry and I'd be like, Oh, well, why do people feel angry? You know, and you have some idea about how that happened until we got to like, you know, Oh, maybe anger is like a feeling we have when we feel like somebody has done some injustice to us.

NICK FIRCHAU: You've written extensively about grief and how you're processing it, and you've also written, you know, after your wife's passing about how it took a while to process because there were times when you almost thought she was in the other room, like out of habit, and you would sort of I don't know. Listen for her, maybe even seek her out to ask a question and you realize she wasn't there. 

How are you processing, um, I don't know the term exactly, being a single parent or an only parent? 

MATTHEW SALESSES: Yeah, for a while I was thinking, what would my, what would my wife do? Or what would we decide together if we were able to have that conversation? I did really feel like, you know, maybe she was just in the other room and I would just kind of turn the corner and there she would be.
But, uh, you know, obviously now I've, I've kind of, it's harder to see her and it's harder to talk to her. I mean, and that's its own grief, right? Like, first you have the grief, and then you have the grief over the grief.  And probably after that you have some other kind of grief. I'm not kind of anticipating it going away ever. At first I was really thinking, you know, like, is it a couple of years, like, until I feel okay again? 

It's weird being an only parent, for sure, and having that kind of be a thing always in the household. And I, I'm constantly feeling like, God, I wish I could be a better parent than I am because my bandwidth is much lower. And it was when I wasn't grieving, so I'm kind of like constantly living with this feeling that I am doing the best I can, but the best I can isn't as good as the best I could do before. So I'm getting through it by, you know, I don't know, just getting through it, I think, is how I'm getting through it.

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s Matthew Salesses from Episode 80 of Paternal, you can find a link to the full conversation in the notes for this episode.

Last up, we’ll end this Best of 2023 with another one of our most popular episodes of the year on Paternal, featuring author Clint Smith. Smith appeared on Episode 81 of the podcast earlier this year to discuss his latest book Above Ground, a new collection of poems focused on fatherhood. Smith is also a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of the New York Times bestseller How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery, but his latest book is easily his most personal to date and examines how we can hold gratitude and despair in the same hands, how we can hold it all together.

We start this portion of our conversation though, discussing how he and his wife met, and then about a visit to the doctor’s office where the couple was given a less than a one percent chance of having kids.

“I’m not sure how they came up with that number,” Smith writes in the poem entitled Counting Descent 2 from his latest book, “but I remember all the doctors kept saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Here’s Clint Smith, on Paternal.

CLINT SMITH: You know, we met when we were 26. And then when we were 27, my wife had a doctor's appointment where it was revealed that she didn't have many eggs in her uterus. And so the doctors were kind of like, you don't have enough eggs to do IVF. Like, you don't, it's kind of, they use that language. They were sort of like, you have less than one percent chance of getting pregnant. 

And you know, we're just turning 27 years old. We've been dating for 11 months. Um,  luckily, I knew after like one month that this was the person I wanted to be with, and this was a person I wanted to make a life with. But obviously it changed the timeline of how we were thinking about what it meant to try to start a family and to imagine what, you know, different iterations of what starting a family might look like.

After that doctor's appointment, you know, I was like, well, it sounds like we're gonna, you know, if we want to have kids, we'll have to adopt or, you know, think creatively about what constructing a family looks like. And I sort of came to terms to that. I don't want to be reductive about it, but families come in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of beautiful, remarkable ways. And so I was sort of emotionally preparing myself to create a family beyond the sort of traditional bounds that we typically think of.

She and I, we started trying, you know, as soon as we heard that news and we were like, well, if, if we got a shot, let's get a shot. And I don't know how the math worked out, but now we got two. And so, maybe they were the last two in there. But you know, I think part of what we had to do was continue to be really intentional and proactive in our relationship, um, and to, to sort of shift gears, right? To say, ‘Okay, this is a thing that we hadn't imagined for four or five, six, seven more years, but, but it's here now.’

And sometimes I go in, as I think many of us do, I go in after my kids are asleep. This is the irony of it all, right? Cause you try so hard to get your kids to go to sleep. And then after they're asleep, you just go in and look at them. And I was just looking at my kids, man. I was just like, man, there's almost a sense of precariousness, right? Like I, I think about how close they were to not existing. And then now I'm watching them grow into these like full personalities, right? And you just see how quickly it happens. And then this is why I write the poems because I want to be fully present in those moments. 

NICK FIRCHAU: You know, I'm glad that on a few occasions here, you've brought up the idea of sort of holding everything together because I want to ask you about another poem in here, which is entitled for the doctor's record follow up. And in this one, you write, quote, “I'm not sleeping enough four or five hours a night.  My blood pressure fluctuates. I run four times a week, but usually it's away from something.” 

And then later in the poem, you go on to write, “last night another boy who could have once been me, or who might one day be my son, was killed by police, but this time no cameras showed up. I haven't cried in a long time. There have been 11, 315 sunsets since I was born, and I haven't stopped to watch any of them.”  

Now, there's a lot of optimism, you know, collectively in this group of poems, and a lot of them are focused on your kids, or even in some cases, they're focused on your wife. This one, to me, was the most personal about you and about how you're doing at this point in your life. 

What was your thought process in writing this one?

CLINT SMITH: Yeah, you know, I'm always interested in the both/and-ness of the human experience. And I think the way that that reveals itself in writing about American history in my previous book is that you talk about how America is a place that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their own ancestors could have never imagined, and has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed. And both of those things are the story of America. It's not one over here and one over there is that they're both deeply entangled in one another. And you have to hold both together.

And I think that parenthood is a similar thing to me. It is the most remarkable, awe inspiring, tender experience of your life, and it's also the most fear-inducing and the most humbling, and the most exhausting, in so many ways, like the most revealing  about the parts of yourself that you're both most proud of and most ashamed of.

There's a version of this book that could just be like a chronicle of all the tender, sweet moments that we have with my kids, and those are real moments. But they also exist alongside moments of guilt and shame and exhaustion and fear both for my kids and for myself. And so this poem, it's talking about how all of those, the poems sit alongside one another because those experiences sit alongside one another, you know, like the moments of profound insecurity, anxiety, depression sit alongside these moments of levity, of laughter, of tenderness.

And it's, you know, it's in the same way that, you know, in my first book, Counting Dissent, a collection of poems, so much of what I wrote, the juxtaposition was that this was the early stages of the Black Lives Matter movement, and it feels like, you know, every time you turned on your TV or got on your social media, you were seeing that a Black person who'd been killed at the hands of police.  And all of this sort of cascade of black death was happening at the time that I met and fell in love with my best friend. And so it's just like that's what it means to be human. It's like all holding all of it together, and I just wanted a book that reflected the complexity of that experience.

NICK FIRCHAU: The last poem I want to bring up is, is actually the first poem in the book, and it's entitled “All at Once,” which I think connects to the two questions that I like to ask each of our guests at the end of the show.

And this poem is really, you know, sort of this juxtaposition of both the good and the bad in your life in the world. Something we've been talking about throughout this conversation, like a child takes their first steps and tumbles into their father's arms. But meanwhile, the redwoods are on fire, right?

Like, scientists discover a vaccine that will save millions of lives, but people are still dying from cancer.  One of your lines is there is, “a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon.” So that concept of the juxtaposition of the good and bad leads me to the first of the last two questions. 

As a father, what do you think you're good at?

CLINT SMITH: I'm a very fun dad. If you, if we're going to get on the ground and pretend to be a brachiosaurus, like I'm, I'm with it. If we're gonna have a dance party, I'm down. If I need to be a fire-breathing dragon that chases you everywhere, you know, my wife might be upset when we accidentally knock down a lamp, but like, I'm with it.

And if it was up to them, we would do it for nine straight hours. And you know, I'll get to like, minute 45, and I'm like, okay, like it's time to do something else and they'll get upset because that also takes a lot of emotional energy. So I'm not going to sit here and pretend like, you know, I'm, I can sustain that for, you know, super extended periods of time.

But, but I, I think that that stuff is a blast and I like doing it. 

NICK FIRCHAU: And so here's the flip side to that Clint and where we'll end. What gives you trouble as a father? 

CLINT SMITH: Hmm, that's a great question. You know, I think the thing, it's interesting as my kids get older, thinking of how to ensure that each of them  feel not equally loved, but like that they are both Receiving commensurate attention. So for an example, my son is like falling in love with soccer, and that's so fun for me because I was obsessed with soccer as a kid, obsessed with soccer now, like it's, you know, I, from, from age 6 to  18, I thought I was going to be a professional soccer player.

And, you know, my teacher would be like, you're like, ‘You seem to love writing. You're a really good writer.’ And I was like, no, ‘Ms. Mueller, like I'm going to be a professional soccer player and live in London and play for Arsenal, it's going to be amazing!’  You know, then you grow up and you realize that Louisiana is not a hotbed of soccer talent against which to compare your skills on a global scale. But it's been so fun watching him fall in love with this thing that I love so much.

And, you know, his sister's younger, developmentally at different stages, is not there yet. And so, it would be very easy for me to just, like, play soccer with my son all day because, like, I'm having a blast, he's having a blast. And I think she's like, you know, what about me? She, like, she wants to get on the ground and, like, play Peppa Pig with the dollhouse. It's a small thing, but it's the thing I'm thinking of in part because it's, it's been top of mind. My wife is traveling right now for work, and so I've been on solo duty, and I think those moments are exacerbated when you're by yourself, like how you make both of your kids feel, seen and heard and, and this is tied to the idea of being present, but like, when you have multiple kids, especially, I think like you pick them up from school and then it's almost kind of this, like this race to bedtime and it's like, you pick them up and there's like homework or there's in bath and there's, you know, or at the after school soccer practice or the after school ballet practice and then it's, you gotta eat and you gotta read the story and you get, and you're just like kind of going.

And one thing I want to ensure that I am doing okay. It's just like keep continuing to try to just sit with them. It's so easy for me to see now how you can have like absolutely no idea what's going on in your kids’ lives because life gets so hectic and I just want to do my best to try to sit down and like excavate the interiority of their lives that feel you know, I remember I was sitting on my daughter's bed and, you know, having this moment where I was like, I need to ask her what's going on in school, you know, and then she just revealed all this stuff about like, you know, four year old preschool drama.

And I was like, ‘Man, these kids’ lives are like, but that's all they know, right? So like, it deeply emotionally impacts them when certain things happen. So I just want to continue to make sure I take that seriously and try to take the time to provide that space for them. Cause I also want my kids to be able to talk to me about that stuff when, when the stakes are higher, you know, when they're teenagers, and I want to sort of build that currency while they're young

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s Clint Smith from Episode 81 of Paternal, you can find a link to the full  conversation in the notes for this episode.

If you want to go back and listen to the complete episodes with any of the guests we featured today, you can find links to find each of those conversations in the notes for this episode.

Paternal is edited and produced by me, Nick Firchau. 

You can email me at nick@paternalpodcast.com with your thoughts on this or any other episodes of the show, or I’m on Twitter at nickfirchau. If you’re a fan of the show, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, that makes it easier for people to find and hear these stories about the brotherhood of fatherhood.

The Paternal logo was designed by Trevor Port.

I’m Nick Firchau and this is Paternal. See you in 2024.