Dads Depression I : Dads can be hurt by kids too.

There is a lot of talk at Dad conferences about the depression of Dads.  There are statistics about it. Maybe I should find some too.  I understand it all too well.

Look folks,  without having a doctorate in psychology, I can tell you with a great degree of certainty that people need to feel good about themselves.  They need to feel good about their work and what they are doing.  Perhaps some people need to feel they are contributing something to life, to society,  or at least to their family if they have one.  When you don't have that feeling of contribution, then  depression can develop.  Of course depression can be caused by other variables, but lets stick with this reason for now.

The problem is that many societies or communities still do not recognize dads as a main caretaker of kids.  I think even in the US stay at home dads are still considered a niche, an anomaly.  Dads should be working.

So when you are a stay at home Dad, your view of yourself must be very very strong to resist this mud that is thrown at you by society.  You are not doing something worthwhile they say.  When are you going to go out and get a job?  Be a real male and go and fix my car or something manly.

I can understand this attack quite well.  To some extent though it can be magnified within ourselves. In other words, perhaps the community is not saying this, but you hear it in yourself.  Your SELF is saying it to you on its own.

The irony of it all is that in many cases stay at home fathers are doing even better work than what they might be doing out in the community.  I can think of many jobs, but will not list them, where taking care of kids is more worthwhile than the jobs we get paid for and spend our time on.  When we all learn that taking care of kids, bringing them up with strong, good values and teaching them the difference between right and wrong is important and can be done by either parent then we will be progressing.  But it should be done by some parent!  Then we will have a stronger community and, yes, I kid you not, but many crimes will decrease.  I would say that is worth quite a bit!  And for what ever reason, if Mommy can`t be the caretaker, then it really shouldn't matter if daddy will teach and be there for children. 

But

After that lengthy introduction, what I wanted to talk about is the pain you can feel as a father when your kids reject you.

Now I am not saying they throw you out from the apartment, they don't want you, but they are just sort of not nice and hurt your feelings.

Like this.

My 9 year old  daughter called for me around 2.25am as she often does when she has a bad dream.  I heard her right away from the parents room and came to their kids room because I sleep like a deer.   She always calls for daddy because she knows I will come to her.  I hold her hand until she falls back to sleep, trying to hold my bathroom needs also which always come if I get up in the middle of the night.  If I am lucky she falls back asleep quickly and then hopefully I fall back to sleep quickly.  If not, I am awake for an hour.

But then, that morning, I came to wake her up at 7am and she said with a wicked sneer, "I want Mommy".  That hurt.

This last week my wife went to the theatre and I got home a little after she left.  They closed the front door on me, and said, "wait, wait don't come in yet".  Well that gets me a bit angry because usually they are closing their game they are playing on their phone and don't want me to see.  But then this time it was even more.  It was, "daddy, don't come into our room, go away."  Mind you they aren`t teenagers.  Teenagers might get away with saying that, but 6 and 9 year olds should not say that.  I went away cursing a bit louder than I should have.  Yes it made me angry.

Then ten minutes later my daughter came into the kitchen and said, the reason we didn't want you in our room was we were trying to fix the computer.  But we couldn't, so could you fix it?

Naturally enough I exploded and said in a rather loud manner, "oh, when you don't want me you tell me to go away, but when you need me then you come to me and say we need you, right after telling me to go away.  Well look, I have feelings too, I hurt too, and it hurts when you tell me to go away.  Whatever the reason."

That might have gotten to them. It got to me.  My younger daughter came in and said, I don't want to hurt your feelings daddy.  Do you want to play Go Fish? (a card game).

Yes.

Yes, daddies have feelings too and we can feel hurt.  I guess we are supposed to bite our lip and let it go. But isn't that what boys growing into men are taught?  Take it like a man.  Boys don't cry was the name of a Cure song.  Now is that natural? I ask myself? Whats up with that??  I just read an article in the NY Times today in which the subheading was something like, girls have more paths but boys have just one.  A friend of mine is able to brush it off like water on a duck, but sometimes for me, it doesn't work. I have feelings which can be hurt, just as kids do.  How else can you let them know that you hurt except by telling them?

Depression in dads can come from many directions.  It can come from society.  It can come from ourselves.  It can come directly from the actions of our kids.  Are we strong enough to just brush it off?  Sometimes.  Many times, no.  What to do when it strikes should be the topic of concern for all us stay at home dads who love our children.  For we  also have to love ourselves, or at least feel good about ourselves.

Paradise in summer. 2018

OK, its been a while.  It is the middle of September. My last post was in April.  Every time I write a new post, I say to myself, I have so many ideas, I will write more and have more posts this year.  Don't know what happened when I thought that.  I guess the ideas escaped from my cranium or I just didn't get around to doing a new post and said "oh well".

I would like my posts to be a small history of me, a father, helping to bring up my girls, moreso than a story telling time of my life.  In other words, I should tell more simple banal everyday happenings of my "history" as a father who loves his children and takes the time with them.

I was going to write at the end of the school year and say that that time of the year is rather sad.  The ending of school depresses me.  That is true only for me as a father.  It was never true as a student.  BUT, I have found that all endings are sad.  And to further complicate the matter it seems that everything ends.  The universe will end some day.  But the end of summer is bad too.  Especially when this will be the last time that I have my happy summers with both my girls staying at my Mothers on the lake in the woods.  Sadly, my Mother had to sell the summer house and we can not go there anymore.  It will not be ours.  I have been going there since I was 0, so this is a deadly blow for me.

Also, it was a perfect summer place for my kids.  Studies find that a happy summer for kids makes them stronger people.  And a good summer entails being outside playing and having small adventures.  Its true.  The house was perfect.  A lake 50 feet away to go swimming every day.  I had helped make it into a friendly lake with a sandy sloping bottom which I worked on cleaning out for 45 years, making it sandy and not mucky.  A great place to swim.  Throw the girls off my shoulders from the water.  My younger girl learned how to swim under water this summer and after that happened she didn't want to do anything else.  "How long do I stay under water, Daddy?  Count the seconds."  "I can swim over to the post under water."  She was really into it.  And now she could look for her own small shells on the bottom in the sand.

Ernest Hemingway spent his kid summers in roughly the same area as where we live in the summer.

And it is in the woods with fresh air and nature.  The year round they live in a bowl which captures the dust and pollution.  Here in the summer we live fresh, besides for the gdmd motor boats slowly polluting up the lake, but the air is good, the woods are good, the atmosphere is good. It is paradise for me.

Any father who wants to be more of a dad to his kids at least during some part of the year, should take the advantage of summer vacation to be with his kids, preferably without mother. I worry about men who are impatient and have a short temper, but I think a summer vacation is easier and more relaxed and is thus a good time to bond with the kids.  Besides looking out on the lake from our patio in the woods with the ferns and green and trees with the sun shining off the blue lake, the nicest part was reading to them in the night time and holding their hands before they went to sleep.  No scratch that.  The best was swimming with them.  Or was it throwing the football with them on the dirt road?  Or....?  Just being with the kids with not many hang ups is the best. All the minutes of the day.

I have written about summer before notably here or this one not to mention others and usually it is the same message: 
1.  It is a great time for dads to be with their kids
2. It is usually banal and not very interesting probably for readers
3. It is paradise

Its the same message today.  Like it or leave it.

More pictures just to spruce things up.

Traverse City Film Fest 2018. A Good Summer Event for All

Summer has to be good for kids.  This is a very important time of year for them.  You would think that school is important, but think of it:  you don't want your kids just sitting inside all the time, the whole summer watching TV or watching their cell phone playing games on it, do you?  And you don't want them running with the bad boys getting into trouble.  And YOU the parent has to make it a good summer.  Even if you set them up with a good summer camp.  It is important.  Put some time into it. 

Summer activities and a good summer experience overall will give the kids strength and lasting fond memories.  

As I have posted several times I have a paradise of a summer with my kids in Michigan. We swim, bike, walk around the circle in the woods, go to the museum and even grocery shopping is fun and something nice to do.  

I had a long vacation with my kids so we weren't going places every day.  I tried to go some place "special" every third day.  But besides that it was great just to be swimming every day and being on the lake.  

But one very special event which I tried to incorporate this year with my kids was the Traverse City Film Fest (TCFF).  This was the 14th year.  It was co founded and still partially run by the documentary film maker Michael Moore, along with literally hundreds, if not a thousand volunteers.   

The TCFF is not some pie in the sky film fest like the Karlovy Vary or Cannes film fest.  Nor is it "unheard" of.  It is internationally recognized and gaining more and more in notoriety.  This year Jane Fonda was the guest of honor for instance.  Others of noted esteem have been there too. 

I have to say this year it was much more to my tastes as it had a lot of interesting documentaries that I would have really liked to have seen.  I was a little hard pressed to find a movie (I know hard core movie goers will see three movies a day, but I thought with kids, one a day is enough, and even that was not necessary) that we could all like.  

great name 

I settled with a documentary which sort of covered a musical genre which the kids could like and a comedy too.  Bathtubs over Broadway was a documentary "starring" Steve Young, former staff writer for the David Letterman show. He digs into the unknown genre of industrial Broadways made for the company staff and pretty much only seen by these staff, of big or even small corporations.  It is an amazing documentary of a genre which is totally heretofore under the radar of everything from American history, to Broadway`s and company history.  

Well, at the time it wasn't the greatest pick for my kids.  They didn't quite understand the humor or history.  HOWEVER, I think in retrospect and over their next years growing up, they will remember it fondly and as an oddity of their childhood that their father brought them to.  And they will be glad about that.  

It was funny that a couple days after we saw the film we were walking down the street still

Steve Young

during the festival and my kids saw the "star", Mr. Steve Young.  I didn't.  After they passed, they exclaimed and danced around, "it was him, it was the star of the movie.  He just passed us!"  As if it had been Jane Fonda or Madonna herself.  I thought that was a good sign.  I wish I had see Mr. Young, I would have thanked him for his fine performance and what he did, finding all this musical history.  

Besides that we saw a Saturday morning matinee  (It could have been at 10am instead of 9am though) of short films having to do with kids as the stars.  Some were mini documentaries, others were short films.  This was a great collection I have to say.  There was a kids short series three days.  Wish we could have seen more.  

That same Saturday they had a kids arts and crafts type little fair in a park on the bay.  I am not sure of any other film fest having that kind of set up during a film fest, but maybe I am wrong.  Not to mention the dusk family film shown outside on the beach park also.  

The point being that the TCFF is a good combination of small town homey festival, like the local asparagus, rhubarb, beaver or in the case of Traverse City, cherry festival, that happens in every town across the US in the summer combined with big tix serious films on the same level as the Venice or Toronto film fest.  My only gripe is they could do a bit more for kids on the film level and in an interesting way.  Not just the mainstream stuff that kids might like, but really interesting films for kids which might not be making it into the mainstream (is there such a thing?)  Or more aspects on making the films themselves at a kids level which could get kids interested in films behind the scenes more than just at a You Tube level.  

Clinch Park on the Bay

Downtown Traverse City, Michigan

Besides that, the TCFF has the beautiful location of picturesque Traverse City on the bay. It has the celebrity status along with a good enough kids section which makes this whole film festival a wonderful adventure any family would do well to go visit in the middle of summer. I think years later my kids will remember this particular event I took them too. I will. I hope we can make it there in future years.  

Michael Moore and Jane Fonda 2018