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Netflix “The Dads” - Comments and a story about my own dad (longish) - Freija - 11-22-2023
The Dads is a new 10-minute documentary on Netflix featuring six dads on a fishing trip in Oklahoma which isn’t actually about fishing at all. Over a shared breakfast of waffles, they begin to reveal the love, hopes and fears they have for their children.
As different as they are from one another, they all are connected by a common thread: the unconditional love they have for their transgender and gay children but, The Dads isn’t about advocacy or politics. It’s about a handful of fathers who once felt lost finding community and connection.
Quote:“I hope that other dads see the importance of not just going through things in an isolated way, but to build community and the importance of having other men, brothers, people from different geographies, experiences, and races to connect with around your children. That you shouldn't have to go through such experiences alone, and that by building community, there's strength there.” Fatherly
As a former trans child, it’s hard to watch something like this without relating to experiences with my own dad and do a little bit of wondering if things would have been different had I grown up in these times of more understanding and awareness of even the concepts and language to talk about these things that were so completely non-existent in the 1950s into the ‘60s when I was little.
My dad, a macho war veteran Marine was tolerant to a point until he wasn’t. I was not what he expected or wanted and was more of an embarrassment to him than anything so when my differences came to the forefront causing difficulties once I started Kindergarten and he had to publicly deal with it, it was all too much and he booked.
I saw him intermittently and sometimes spent a weekend with him but it was never without a lot of pressure and policing of my gender and not so friendly or good natured teasing of just about everything I did that in retrospect, was pretty abusive and damn insensitive. His nickname for me was "sugar tits", mocking my girlishness. Eventually he moved across the country and I moved all over the place so I didn’t see him often.
The summer between the 2nd and 3rd grade we ended up living in neighboring states and my mom put me on a Greyhound bus headed out to see him with the intention being I would stay there a couple months but the first thing he did when I got there was practically shave my head with a “proper boy’s haircut” and I came completely unglued. I lasted a week of hiding and crying the whole time before I got put back on a bus and sent home. After that was when I was allowed to start growing my hair out which would cause its own set of problems down the road in school but that’s another story.
I saw him sporadically off and on and it was never fun for me. I remember once when I was 8 or 9 and had moved back East again, I hadn’t seen him for a while and he had come from California to visit his family and to see me. Being clueless and still wanting to make a “real boy” out of me, he gave me a baseball glove and we proceeded out into the barnyard to play catch. It was only a matter of time, being totally awkward and un-athletic, that I was hit in the face with a hardball that broke one of my two front teeth in half. My mom went nuts and I was not happy as one might expect. Things would have been a lot better if he had just brought me Barbie stuff! (later my tooth was partially corrected through orthodontics but it is still not like the other). I don’t think I “played baseball” ever again!
By the time I turned 13ish, I was totally into looking like and expressing myself as much like other girls as I could get away with (which was a constant battle) and after again not seeing him for some time, when I finally did, it was his turn to go a little nuts at my appearance and behavior but by this point in my life I was done taking his shit and verbal abuse and in a very ugly exchange, told him I never wanted to see him again and didn’t until over ten years later when I was 24.
I would probably have never him seen him again ever if it wasn’t for my mom. She knew she had very little time left to live and unbeknownst to me, she made it her mission to reconnect my dad and I before she died not wanting to leave me alone with no family. I had no idea where he was or even if he was still alive and didn’t care but she tracked him down through some relatives back East and called him with a conversation I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for as she had some pretty heavy things to lay on him about all the things I had been through and who I had become.
From her, he learned I had started living openly as a girl at 15 and went by a legally changed name he didn’t know, began taking hormones at 17, had assumed care of a newborn at 19 I was mom to and had had sex reassignment surgery two years earlier at 22 which I’m sure was pretty mind blowing? Because my mom pushed the issue, he agreed to a meeting and she planned a road trip. I was oblivious to all of this until she called me at work to see if I could ask for a couple days off. When she told me what for, I think I was the one to go a little nuts this time but she assured me he promised to be nice and would keep an open mind.
Her and I and my rambunctious 5 year old loaded up her Chevy van and headed across the desert to Cali. I was a mix of scared and nervous but did my best to quell the dread of a potential disaster but my fears were unwarranted.
I’m sure he was pretty nervous too but was overwhelmed and blown away by the attractive and confident young woman that was there to meet him and he was cordial and interested and together we went off to talk alone without a kid crawling all over me and my mom listening in. There was a lot to catch up after not seeing him for over ten years which is an understatement.
From then on, we remained in contact. We wrote letters back and forth and a year or two later with my mom finally gone, I again went to visit. I leaned then from my step-sister that in spite of seeming okay with everything, he was pretty upset and began seeing a counselor but I never let on I knew this. One time, he came to town to visit me and took my daughter who was about 9 or 10 by then and I to a Phoenix Suns game and out to some nice restaurants and we did some sightseeing. If nothing else, we were going through the motions.
A few years later I was married and he got to do something my mom never did – he met my husband and they really hit it off talking about cars and guns and guy stuff. Because we went to California a couple times a year for motorcycle racing, they got to meet several times and I genuinely felt my dad was happy that a good man was looking out for me. We continued keeping in contact until once again something flipped the switch and we faded apart.
From what I can tell, it was his disappointment at the failure of my 12 year marriage? When he found out, he pretty much went silent like he was angry with me and in response, I shut down too. I learned years later that sometime around 2004 as I recall, he had passed away. The way I found this out really pissed me off but that’s another story too.
So, with this short Netflix film, it made wonder if more had been known about kids like me, if there were resources or groups or even information available back in the day if would have changed the strained relationship between us? If he had other dads going through the same things to talk to would it have made any difference?
Who knows? At least it is all water under the bridge now and not something I’m going to lose any sleep over as I have learned to stop asking myself questions there are no answers for and to stop being concerned over what ifs but this show did make me think about things a little and prompted me to write this. At least in life I have learned the difference between conditional and unconditional love so there’s that and my hope is that parents faced with a trans or gay kid or anything else outside of their expectations will know which road to choose.