Becoming a Father After Fifty
What else is there to do?
No father knows what he’s really doing. It takes a lifetime to find out.
I know that I don’t know what I’m doing.
We’re course correctors… Though we don’t know where we’re going.
I just keep learning not to do ‘that’ again, along an endless chain of love and other natural disasters.
When my first wife and I had a daughter in 1995, I was 31 years-old. What kind of dad was I going to be? Is this going to be fun? What is my part in all this? I just started into the work. (It feels like we’re always just getting started.) Then along came Jack in ‘98.
I wasn’t going to be a traveling musician. I didn’t want to be poor anymore… this was going to cost a lot. And I didn’t just want to have fun; I wanted everyone to have fun.
Fathering in your head is a special kind of madness. You want to do better than your father, or at least different. Then one day you’re mad and you hear your father’s voice in yours. Then you realize you’re repeating the things he said. Then you come to understand you were being an ass, while he was doing his best, and you wish you could remember all the things he said when you weren’t listening to what he was saying.
The worst part is that when you’re doing your very best – when you’re trying your hardest and at the most critical moments – when you’re taking the most you’ve ever taken in your life and still holding it together - that’s when they’re most likely to look you right in the eye and tell you that they hate you… or words to that effect. And then you have to wait half a lifetime, not for an apology, but just for some sort of sideways comment that makes you believe that someday, in some sad moment of clarity, maybe over a coffin, a grave, or a parenting moment of their own when they are hurt like you are hurt now, they’ll get it.
I was 53 and living a second lifetime when Dorothy was born. I didn’t know until after she was 2 that far less than 1% of babies are born to men over 50, and that there were more risks involved. But they are relatively low. When Dorothy came I realized I was much better equipped at 53 to both do the work of parenting and enjoy the work. Not just because of experience. But because I had changed. I was kind of a fool at 30 when it came to fathering. I guess I thought if I did my part then someone else would do the rest and it would all work out. I thought I could hold some part of me for myself. I was wrong about that. You have to give it all. There are no lanes and no boundaries. If you can smell it on you right now, if you’re doing something you never imagined you would do, if you are genuinely thinking outside yourself and your mind is working in service of another, then you are probably doing it right. That’s where the meaning is for men. That’s where the joy in purpose is found. Everything else in life is trivial in comparison.
It turns out there are other good things to being an older father. If you’re looking for the scientifically backed pros here, consider this: both older dads and their offspring tend to have longevity on their side.
“The good thing about being an older dad is that you tend to live longer, and you certainly have lots of young reasons to,” says Dr. Paul Turek a men’s health and fertility expert. “Your offspring also tends to live longer. We’re evolving a lot more rapidly and this system is trying to help us live longer, which is a plus for both the older dad and his child. So, it makes teleological sense that if you are healthy enough to reproduce at an older age, you’re good.”
Now Dorothy is almost 8 and really having a good time.
When she was on the way, I asked the older kids, by then in their 20’s, what I should change, what I should do differently. They said, “Don’t give in.” In hindsight, they regretted quitting this or that activity, not finishing projects, not following through on things, not trying, getting off the hook, getting things too easily, and not appreciating how hard things were to come by. It had been my job, they now believe, to have held them to it. I didn’t. Things that made life easier at the time, have made it harder in the long run for them.
Sometimes I’ll say to Dorothy when asking her to remember to brush her teeth for the tenth time, “This is my job. I’m just doing my job.” It creates a shared metacognitive understanding between us. It takes the heat off. If I don’t do this work, life will and it might be a lot more harsh than me encouraging her to brush the top too.
Tonight, while out for an early Father’s Day Korean BBQ, with daughter Emily and Lilli, my now 3-year-old granddaughter, Emily asked if I had any Father insights. I told her I had no insights and only one question, “How do you want to be fathered from here?” She was kind of shocked it got turned back at her, but it prompted an honest response. “You’re doing a good job,” she said, “You’re there when I need you, you say what you think, and you’re my main sounding board for the really big troubles and the really out-there ideas. I feel supported. I don’t need much more. Just stay like this.”
If you are questioning your Dad skills, I suggest just asking, bold and outright. You might get some good advice from the ones who know best. And you might hear something wonderful.
So… I guess I do have some advice.
1. Listen More Than You Speak: As your children grow into teenagers, they'll start to form their own opinions and ideas. Give them the space to express themselves without immediately jumping in to correct or advise. Listening fosters trust and shows respect for their developing autonomy. Ask bigger questions. Ones where you don’t know the answer too.
2. Be Consistent Yet Flexible: Establish clear boundaries and expectations, but be willing to adapt as your child grows and their needs change. Consistency provides a sense of security, while flexibility shows you're willing to meet them halfway. Unless the facts change. Then don’t be consistent, it is the realm of fools.
3. Model the Behavior You Want to See*: Your children are always watching you. Show them through your actions how to navigate challenges, handle conflict, and treat others with kindness and respect. Be the role model you want them to emulate. This isn’t with the expectation that they’ll follow. There’s a good chance they’ll do the opposite… at least for a while. It’s just that living this way will give you peace of mind.
4. Cultivate Empathy: Understand that being a teenager can be tough and remember that you once looked your father in the eye when he asked you why you did something foolish and with guiless honesty you answered… “I don’t know.” Their world is changing rapidly, both inside and out. Show empathy by remembering your own teenage years and acknowledging their feelings and struggles as valid.
5. Encourage Independence: Give your kids the freedom to make choices and learn from their mistakes. This builds confidence and prepares them for adulthood. Step back a little and let them take the reins on smaller decisions to build their sense of responsibility.
6. Stay Involved: Even if they seem to push you away, make an effort to stay involved in their lives. Attend their events, know their friends, and take interest in their hobbies. Your presence and interest show you care, even if they don’t always admit it.
7. Teach Financial Literacy: Equip your teens with the knowledge to manage money wisely. Teach them about spending, saving, investing and charity – the four things you can do with money. And teach them where wealth comes from – we fish it from the sea, grow it on the ground, dig it from the ground, or manufacture it. All the rest is just churn - trading hours in our day for money is an industrial age dilema that won’t follow us into the next century. Financial literacy – not being afraid of math and numbers - is a crucial skill that will serve them well throughout their lives.
8. Keep the Lines of Communication Open: Encourage open and honest communication. Let your children know they can talk to you about anything without fear of judgment or punishment. If they are too high to go to class, it should be you who they call (real life example). Being approachable helps them feel safe to share their thoughts and concerns with you.
9. Teach them some sort of critical method: We live in the information age, but also the disinformation age. We all need some sort of way to decide who and what to believe and to what degree. It won’t happen in school and they are unlikely to pick it up along the way. Without it children can be paralyzed. Without any beliefs. Sour and suspicious of everything.
10. Share some aesthetic experience: We all need to play (as opposed to play games, which have rules). We all need to spend time in wild wonder, in quiet contemplation of the spiritual verities and the natural world around us. Show them the world and the things in it so they will love it and feel some responsibility for what happens to it. The esthetic experience is the organization of our feelings - the search for and the creation of orders in our affective life. The contemplation of some kind of beauty and order is to enrich ourselves so that we have something to contribute to the lives of others.
11. Show them how to enjoy people, to enjoy the company of anyone and the places they find themselves: The world is filled with folks who differ profoundly from us in mind and manner. Teach them it’s almost never a threat. It’s a challenge to their capacity for understanding. Let them know that people who believe the world is a good place, that there are good times out ahead, and most of the people they will meet are good, those have happy lives no matter what happens to them.
Love their mother: My gradmother somehow and for some reason had a little poster on the wall in her kitchen. It said the best thing a father can do for his children is love their mother. She loved little verses like this. When I once asked her about it she said, “A man who loves one woman loves all women, a man who loves many loves none.”
Celebrate creativity, even if it means taking apart the lawnmower to see how it work and not being able to get it back together again: USN Admiral H.G. Rickover said, "The deepest joy in life is to be creative. To find an undeveloped situation, to see the possibilities, to decide upon a course of action, and then devote the whole of one's resources to carrying it out, even if it means battling against the stream of contemporary opinion, is a satisfaction in comparison with which superficial pleasures are trivial. But to create, you must care."
*Note – My father was a flat-out “Don’t do What I Do, Do What I Say” father. And it worked. I couldn’t be happier with his admonishments. But in the end, I don’t think he felt so good about it for a lot of complicated reasons I won’t go into here except to say he did not enjoy my success at becoming who he wanted me to be.
The children are going to disappoint you no matter what. They’ll find a way. Neil Young sang Only Love Will Break Your Heart and everyone nodded along. But that’s only for a minute. He didn’t mention love is also going to frustrate and vex you in a million other little ways yet never diminish itself. They’re gonna let you down and not show up. They’re going to make fun of your social media choices. They’re going to laugh at your tech skills with no sense of irony even though you taught them how to use a fork when they really didn’t know how. At passing points they’re going to hate you (seeing that even just for a flash on someone’s once-loving face is hard), they’re gonna ghost you, they’re gonna hide stuff from you, and lie, and be mean, or at least impatient with you. They’re not going to be the kind of person you wish they were. And it’s gonna hurt. Some of it for a long time. I can’t say just love them anyway. That’s childish. It’s all a kind of vanity to expect more. They don’t owe you anything. And it could get you all turned up inside like it’s your fault if you expect anything.
Still. It’s the greatest thing there is. There is nothing that compares. Each child is like a ride at the fair. It’s scary and you have no control but when it’s over you just want to get right back on. The only problem is the tickets cost all the money you’ll ever make - along with all the time you have, and your total capacity for effort. But it’s worth it. It is the thing. Everything else is just in service of this thing.
Being a father.
All you can really do is hang on - knowing that somewhere, at some point in your life, you served somebody - somebody who needed you and wouldn’t be here without you. That bonds you to them more than love or blood.
Some day, they’ll laugh and be surprised to hear your laugh though you’re years gone, and they’ll rummage through the mental closet filled with half-remembered things – your stories that are now theirs - and think, through tears, all the same things you’re thinking now.