WHEN MY SON Charlie was six months old, my wife, Jorden, and I took him to the Penobscot Nation Reservation, where I grew up and was raised, to visit with my aunt Linda and her husband, Uncle Mike.
We ate pizza and did what Natives do best, which is tell stories. But much of the time there was all about Charlie. We sat at the table, all eyes on him as he sat on his mother’s lap and drooled.
“My God,” Aunt Linda said, “he looks just like your father.” I took comfort in that. My father has been gone now for 12 years. When I look at Charlie, I see it too, but only the resemblance of my father, of that man, the man my mother divorced because of his addictions and gambling, the man my mother hated as much as she loved, the man I never was able to emotionally connect with despite how much he loved me.
“I can’t get over it,” my aunt said. “If your mother was alive, she would be so pissed he didn’t look like her.” Uncle Mike, a retired tribal police sergeant who is so big and strong I’d place money on him in a fight against an Alaskan grizzly, just about fell off his chair cackling. Though she is gone, I know my mother’s pissed. I can hear her: “The next one better look like me, dammit.”
My mother was also not so different from my father. She suffered from addiction and died too early. As a child, I saw and experienced things no child should see or experience. But my mother had such strength.
And that strength is something I’ve seen only once elsewhere: in my wife. Mom always called her Tiny Dancer, although I don’t quite know why. As a father now, I understand what my own father was never able to witness or learn. To be a father is to recognize the strength of women—or anyone who may adopt the role of mom when it comes to parenting.
Tiny Dancer, Jorden, your intensity as a mother, your love for our son, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. (Sorry, other moms—even my own.) It makes me laugh for some indescribable reason that might simply be that men, in my experience, take their time in figuring things out. We’re slow learners. Or at least I am.
But I have to laugh. That laughter has been the pain pill for my swollen heart, alleviating the grief and anger and jealousy and irritation of not having my parents here right now or way, way back when they should have been.
A version of this article originally appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of Men's Health.
