crying at McDonalds

on masculinity, fatherhood and the usual things I'm obviously an expert in

When you think of a father what do you picture?

What kind of concoction does your brain come with? Is it a man holding some kind of sports equipment accompanying a son or a daughter? What is it? A soccer ball? A tennis racquet? Swimming goggles? Or is it like the holy pictures, an enlightened Jesus with open arms descending from the skies with all the warmth that is humanly imaginable?

What is it you see and what makes it so fatherly? Is it just a man smiling, or holding a baby? Is he a blue-collar worker or a suited-up lawyer? Does he take the image of your father? What does the image of a father look like when you’ve never met yours? Funnily enough, one of the many picture-generating AI services created this when I prompted it to show me “a father”:

When I started writing this I just went off of media stereotypes of what a father looks like and it’s clear that the data on which all AI was built feeds onto this stereotypical depiction. The other 3 options were virtually the same, a white, conventionally attractive man with 2 kids, and a golden retriever, as all happy white families own one. The only differences between the 4 generated pictures were the types of sports balls held by the dad, among which a comically large baseball one, and the combinations of gender between the 2 kids.

There’s always an assumption of entertainment and absence with fathers. They’re the fun parent, he’s not around every day but when he is it’s all joy and laughter. In the popular dichotomy between mothers and fathers, there are settled gender norms that clearly put each into their own area of activity. Most daddies don’t cook or nag about homework and mess around the house and most mommies don’t play around in the park or teach you how to drive and get wrench sets for their birthdays. That is, in the eye of some, the perfect, white, nuclear family. Where the balance is perfected, everything is where it’s supposed to be and no-one asks questions, ever.

Although motherhood and the feminine state of being is my forte and I love a good reality awakening, this is not about women. It’s not about the way we perceive mothers, the disposability of the feminine experience, of birth, of safety, of happiness. I’ve written lots about women, no. This is about the other side of the primary and gentle caretaker coin that is projected onto being a mother. It seems that after all, I don’t discriminate.

“Gotta get my gun ready for when the time of your first date will come.”

If you ever open TikTok and one of those energetic experts for living your best life pops up, you will quickly learn about masculine and feminine energy. How I was born dainty and in a gruesome need of constant protection and how men have no choice but to employ themselves into offering said protection and become financial and physical caretakers. How women are bound to be overly emotional and the stoic man has been placed on earth to offer balance and contrast. This religious and conservative discourse repackaged into spiritual awakening bullshit and dating advice for smart girlies who need to find themselves a man who provides has reached my inner limit. Misogyny obviously teaches you to despise women and put men on a pedestal, but it also has some cruel machinations. Within the set gender norms, women are always pushed to learn how to be a mother, for fuck’s sake I had a baby doll when I was still a baby, the world wants me a mother first and a human second. But with men, the gender norms no matter how prevalent don’t teach men to be fathers, rather, just an outer shell for protection.

The head of the family, the last name, the all-surrounding force around the nucleus of the nuclear family. The attributes associated with men will never equal into fatherhood, just into superiority. I remember in one of my kindergarten exercises we had to complete sentences and one of them was “My father is strong”, the other ones all focused on the attributes of a mother.

If all we imbue our men with is this urgent sense of protection, stoicism, and strength then we get clueless fathers. Some will experiment on their children while raising them to be good fathers and some will never even try. I think of my father who I know tried and continues to do so yet who never succeded. He’s always been a good storyteller, a good historian, a good friend, a good husband, a good soldier, a very very good man but not a father, no.

He’s never been strict because he was never that involved, he only cared as much as he thought was necessary, and despite what the world taught him about what a good father looks like, he really tried to be one. He was never overbearing, he always tries to be affectionate but never really knows how to in the most endearing way, and despite the military he only made “cocking my A-47 when I meet your boyfriend” jokes only in known irony between me and him when his colleagues would come over.

I don’t know you/I’m your carbon copy

I think I was a bit of a “daddy’s girl” when I was a kid, it was always dad this and dad that. When he was away I would tell total strangers on the street where he was and for how long he would be gone (my dad thinks this is funny to this day). He was always away because he had to, he made sure to remind me that he never wanted to be away. He was trying to make a life for me, for Mom, for us. He could only be the cool nuclear dad once every few months, at best and that was all he could offer me, a few days in the park, a few sneaky living room games of stacking up cassettes before mom came home, and playing “Daddy’s hairdressing day” even though he’s almost fully bald. He learned how to be a father from far away as best as he could.

I gravitate between jealousy and gratefulness when it comes to things like these. My dad never really knew or cared about what grades I was getting, who my friends were, and what their names are and maybe it was for the better or maybe it just made me vilify my mom for being overly involved. He missed more birthdays than he attended, he used to bring gifts when he came back from where he was deployed but he would never know my size, or what color I liked. And yet to me, he was the best I could ever ask for, he was perfect.

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Early in 2023, I was retelling an episode in a therapy session. The first and only time I involved my dad in the conversation. I was explaining to my therapist how, during that particular event my dad broke our unspoken trust and how that shocked me more than any other physical abuse I’ve ever endured from my other parent. I explain to my therapist at the time that it was then, after that event when I was around 9 or 10 that I realized I’d been idealizing my dad a little too much. I remember the therapist mustering up the gentlest smile he could offer and I knew what was coming. He helped me realize that the dad I imagine isn’t the one that exists in real life.

“you’ve made him into a saviour because you needed one not because he was one.”

I went home and cried all afternoon that day because I knew it was all true. My dad wasn’t around enough for me to know him as a person and like many others in my position, I made the perfect dad in my head. One that only deserved praise, that did everything right, that was with me even from far away. That day I thought of all the times I was abandoned or beaten and how I would soothe myself by thinking “Dad’s coming”.

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At almost 21 now, I try to separate my idealizations from reality when it comes to my father and I realize that I barely know him as a person. I know most of his sufferings but nothing much beyond the usual ironies, pleasantries, and jokes we share between the two of us. This hurts when it’s placed in contrast with all the voices telling me how much I am like my dad. They’re not wrong, we have the same laugh, the same expressions, the same way of speaking and gesturing, and the same temperament. I am a sullen carbon copy of my father who I can’t see for what he truly is.

I used to be afraid of being like my mom because I despised her, being like my dad always felt superior, and it was something I strived for. I wanted to be perceived as an intellectual, someone temperate but not afraid of speaking the truth, a knowledgeable yet social and magnetic being. I realize that these are all attributes I projected onto someone I wanted as a role model. I can’t lie that my dad wasn’t any of these, he was just not in the way I was praising it so I gotta give it to myself for how I kinda cyborg-ed it all.

Daughter dysmorphia

I think my dad noticed earlier than anybody else that I was picking up on his personality traits because I was idealizing him. He always used to deliver very ominous warnings about growing up with proper care and becoming a good human when I was a kid. He tried to protect me from this apparently unavoidable urge to not become a good human, and he did up until he could not help but notice himself as he watched me. That look full of joy, that beauty in fatherly love was slowly conquered by fear, by shame, and most importantly by guilt.

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This summer I went to get some McDonald’s with my boyfriend after a sweet little drive up to the mountains. Although I was enjoying the gourmet offerings of the Romanian McDonalds, something felt off as I was looking around. It felt almost like a simulation, there were only 4 occupied tables in my view, and at all of them sat dads with their daughters. There was something in the way they were all looking at their daughters as if they were the most precious things on Earth that caught me off-guard and put me in a trance. I started to remember, and remember I did, much more than I wanted, and before I realized I was tearing up at a McDonald’s out of the blue.

In a way, it was very beautiful, stupid as well because of where it happened, but mostly beautiful because there was a cycle that had finally reached completion, I finally understood something that hurt. Laying aside all jokes about daddy issues, there is a problem in fatherhood, in trying to no avail, of being afraid of seeing a reflection of yourself in your offspring and feeling shame and regret instead of love. Because that’s what it needs to be, love. Not strength, not gentleness, not stoicism, not protection but love.