The Chill AF Dad

What if, as a thought experiment, we concede that everything is, in fact, "basically fine?" Even, maybe... "pretty good?" What if we're each of us intrinsically Not-A-Terrible-Father? In that hypothetical dimension of reality, would this podcast still exist? Philosopher, supremely confident father, and cohost of the Very Bad Wizards podcast Tamler Sommers is here to help us delve further into this Borgesian labyrinth of possible realities. Then, we talk to civil rights attorney and newish dad Vishal Agraharkar, who only has one (!) kid, but now, also, has one NATFITOIA. Quite a haul.

Listen and subscribe to Tamler and Dave Pizzaro's hit philosophy/psychology podcast Very Bad Wizards here. Get a copy of Tamler's newest book here. Or follow them on social media @Tamler on Twitter or @verybadwizards everywhere.

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Transcript

Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning. But what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE. 

Chris: What are you excited to do this winter? 

Julian: I'm going to try to get on my new sled and sled down some hills. Maybe go off a few ramps on my sled.

Chris: Nice.

Julian: Yeah, ramps of ice. I'm going to try to snowboard on a sled like I'm like snowboard. 

Chris: X games. 

Julian; Top my sled and then go off a ramp. Like, look, I'm standing on my sled, and then I jump off it when I go off ramp.

Chris: You're crazy, man. You're a daredevil.

Julian: So, like, I'm on my sled, but instead of sitting down, I'm slanding up. I'm standing up, and then when I go off the ramp, I jump like a hundred feet in the air. Like as high as I can. Like I'm trying to dunk a 10ft goal and then I fall like a hundred feet down right on my back. It might hurt, but it's going to be so amazing.

Chris: I'm going to say something very controversial and very brave. **** Aristotle. You feel me? If you're a relative of Aristotle and you're out there listening, this beef ain't with you. But you know where to find me if you want to talk about it. Look, I teach Aristotle, okay? When I'm forced to. And I find it tedious the way he categorizes everything. This mania for breaking everything down into, like, ascending or descending layers upon layers of definition, slicing and dicing of human experience, no matter how obvious or simple. The thing is, we have to break it down into these layers and it just gets very tiresome after a while. I'm a Plato guy. I like Plato. All right? Plato is wrong about a lot of ****, but he's wrong in a really dramatic, kind of hilarious way. Plato's fun, man. Plato's a storyteller. Plato's a weirdo. Aristotle is a nerd. Not the good kind, not the cool kind. Not the fun kind that you want to hang out with, but the really dry and dull kind. That's my take on Aristotle. However, sometimes that Aristotelian method of breaking things down into their proper categories, right? And of constructing hierarchies of value. Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes this. Can be a useful exercise.

Take, for instance, fear. Parental fear. Yeah. That ever present fear we have for our kids. It can actually be useful to break that kind of fear down a little bit. Try this out. There are three main kinds of parental fear. Fear of something happening to your kid, right? The externality fear of them getting hurt physically. Fear of them getting hurt emotionally. Fear of some injury or problem befalling them. God, we live with that one. From the moment they're born, from the instant they're born. Are they okay? Are they breathing? Are they still breathing? Is it going to be okay? To this day when my kids get fevers, if it's over 99, I'm on pins and needles, right? Even though I've been through this a million times and I know that fevers are not a big deal, and we're not living in 17 two and we've got medicine and antibiotics and everything, we need to make sure that they're going to recover fine from whatever illness they have this week. They're going to be fine. But they get that fever, they get a little sluggish, and my mind goes to very dark places, right? And I just start to feel that anxiety and that inner panic. What if, what if, what if, what if? And I want to check on them a million times to make sure that they're coming out of whatever this thing is. Fear of things happening to them. That's number one. That's probably, for me, the most common, right? I used to wake up all the time when I was just barely asleep. But I would kind of jolt upright in bed because I would start to have these dreams of Julian, usually my older one, riding his bike or whatever he had just recently gotten into, right? It was bike riding, or it was sledding or it was roller skating or skateboarding. And I would have these nightmares of him veering into traffic or going too fast down a hill and losing control, right? And they would be really vivid and terrible. And right before that moment of impact, as I'm trying to kind of catch him or catch up with him, that's where I would jerk up out of bed. So those kind of fears were always sort of running underneath the surface. Even if we'd been out that day having a great time, I'm not following behind him, shouting, Slow down. The whole time. I may be calm and relaxed about it, but that night I'm going to feel that fear, and it's going to be working on me. It's always kind of running underneath. I think the second fear is a little tougher, right? It's the fear of ******* them up, the fear of us doing something that ***** them up. Am I doing this wrong? Am I raising them wrong? Am I teaching them wrong? Am I modeling how to be a person wrong somehow? Am I just too impatient? Am I too selfish? Am I too self involved? Do I have too short of a temper? Am I ******* them up somehow? Should I be teaching him other languages? This one I think I'm a little better with. Honestly, a little better with. There have been a few things here and there. Before Nico was born, Julian and I.Used to drive around all day in. The car listening to The Beatles. That was one of his first musical loves. The Beatles. John Lennon was his favorite. Just instinctively, because he's got great taste. Right away, he figured out John's really the one to keep your eye on here because of the kind of kid Julian is. Even at three years old, he wants to know, is John Lennon still alive? And I say no. Is he dead? Yeah, he's dead. How did he die? Well and I can dodge that question. For a little while, but he asks. Over and over and over and over and over and over. And one day, finally, idiotically, I tell him, well, honey, John Lennon was killed. Someone killed him. What? Who? Why? How? And now I know that I ****** up, but it's a little too late. To go back, because with this kid. You can't just say, like, Never mind. Or that's the end of this line. Of questioning, and there's no putting it back in the bottle. So I try to kind of give him a vague outline of events here, right? But I don't do so great a. Job at that either. And the next thing I know, Julian's walking around discussing Mark David Chapman's parole hearings with people. Yeah, I explained parole, and I explained, I guess, the concept of assassination. I don't know. I don't really remember anymore. But, yeah, that one's on me. That's definitely on me. He was four, okay? A four year old. And to this day, every so often. He will sort of be lost in. His own thoughts looking out the window or up at the sky, and his fists will clench and his eyes will narrow, and he will just say, Chapman, he still wants vengeance. So this is a, you know, mostly funny example, but you can make mistakes. You could say dumb **** to your kid, and they can kind of fester, and you never really know what's going on inside their fertile imagination and their wild emotional terrain, right? And how all that's going to produce lines of thinking and feeling and ways of being and things that are so far out of your control or things that you could ever foresee. Nobody's perfect at this. But here's the third kind of fear. And this one, I think, for me, is the most insidious. Sometimes I have a fear of them just, for whatever reason, growing wrong. You know what I mean? Like imagining some version of them in the future. That scares me. And it's never because of how they are right now. It's not like I look at how they are right now, and I go. Oh, no, this is not what we want. They're great. I love the way they are right now. I always have. But every now and then, I'll look at something that they're doing at three years old, four years old, or five years old or six years old, and I'll think, God, what if they did a kind of bigger, wilder version of that at 15 or 25? And I'll project that into the future, and that is what I become afraid of. And now that's what I'm responding to. And I begin to, in those moments, respond as if that projection is reality. I talked about this a little bit with Baron in the first episode. I talked a little bit more about. It with Keith in the second episode. It's a kind of insidious projection that I can catch myself doing, and I have to figure out a way to stop that train of thought because it's harmful and it's unfair to my kids. It's unfair to look at a five year old's behavior and think, what would a 15 year old version of this behavior look like? That would be pretty bad. Let's respond as if that's the real behavior instead of this. No, it isn't. He's not 15, he's five. What it can lead to is it can cause me to try to overdetermine who they are because I'm worried about who they might become in these worst case scenarios that come to me at my weaker moments, at my moments where I'm too tired, too frustrated, too stressed, whatever, to be thinking clearly. That third kind of fear, that's the one I really have to watch out for personally. I have to trust that my kids are going to grow into wonderful people, every bit as wonderful as they are right now. And I have to live in that faith so that I can be here with them in present, so that I can just chill the **** out and be their dad and remember what I wanted as a kid which was to just feel safe, feel loved for who I was and to feel like I had the room and the space to be myself, to grow into who I wanted to grow into. That's what I wanted as a kid, and I think that's probably what my kids are going to be wanting. And I know how to provide that for them. I just have to do it. 

Chris: Today on the Pod, I'm joined by Tamler Sommers, professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, author, dad and host with Dave Pizarro of Very Bad Wizards, one of the great OG podcasts. If you have any interest at all in philosophy, film, social psychology, or two guys who enjoy making fun of each other, that is a podcast for you. And if you don't have an interest in those things, you're very possibly not listening to me either. So, like, whatever bruh-bruh. Do you. Anyway, Tamler and I go back to my University of Houston days. We taught together in this big class called The Human Situation, which is exactly as grandiose and amazing as it sounds. I love Tamler. He's brilliant, he's hilarious. He's always been kind of like a celebrity to me, but one you can just send a text message to whenever you want. I'm going to explain all my mini parenting hang ups to Tamler so he can take out a little pin and deflate them one by one. That's coming up next. PODRE is brought to you by Wooden Toys.

Chris: Look, I know as a listener of this podcast, that you're a person of conscience, a person who sees themselves as a citizen of a global community. I know you don't want to contribute to this culture of waste and materialism that's harming the planet and polluting our children'S bodies and minds with harmful chemicals and toxic ideas, but if you have a baby or if you have a toddler, they're going to need toys. Get them a wooden toy lovingly crafted by hand, out of ecofriendly recycled bolsa wood by contemplative Swedes. Wooden toys are safe. They'll look gorgeous. In your home. All wooden toys come ready for instagram with no garish colors, no battery operated lights or sounds or animal noises or motors that make them fun to play with. Wooden toys are simple. They're honest, they're aesthetically pleasing. If you're someone in their 30s or 40s who knows their way around Whole Foods and the Pottery Barn outlet and once tried to read your baby that A is for Activism book, which I'm betting you made it to, what? F-G-H at most? Coming in at a price point three to four times higher than the equivalent toy made out of toxic yellow plastic, which your kid would happily play with for months, if not years. Wooden toys will never, ever be broken because they'll never ever be played with. I bought wooden toys for both of my kids, and they're still in perfect condition on the exact same shelf I put them on shortly after they were abandoned, which was seconds after my kids realized... Wait, that's all this thing does? Just ******* sits there? It's got wheels, I guess, but they seem like wheels specifically designed to frustrate me. By a Swede and angular glasses. By a tastefully sweatered Scandinavian. Okay, where's that car that takes twelve batteries and plays robot death metal? Wooden toys. You'll try em.

Tamler: Whistles for this one.

Chris: I know it's going to be easy because what I'm going to throw all fastballs. Okay, you ready? Who's a better dad, you or Dave Pizarro?

Tamler: That's a good question because I think we're both very good dads. I mean, I think I'm about as good a dad as anybody could be. I don't even mean that to brag. I just mean like I think do you really do?

Chris: Really?

Tamler: Like I'm better at being a dad than I am at anything else in life.

Chris: Really?

Tamler: Yeah.

Chris: You're better at being a dad than you are a podcast host, professor, husband.

Tamler: Professor, teacher, son, sibling.

Chris: You have siblings, right?

Tamler: Yes, sure. Absolutely. I have a brother. Yeah. I have a younger half brother that he's 14 years younger, but we're very close.

Chris: Yeah, you just took to this role and you're a natural at it, and you never had any hang ups or self consciousness about it. You just know what to do.

Tamler: Yeah, it's like the Aristotelian thing. I both want to do all the good things, and I'm disposed to do the good things. No, look, I'm half kidding, but I will say that ever since she was born, I've thought it was the most fun thing that could happen. Now she's an only child, but I just loved it from the get go. I loved hanging out with her. I loved watching movies with her since the time she was like two, two and a half years old. I've carefully crafted her movie tastes so she has all the right ones, or at least not a lot of the wrong ones.

Chris: What about her music taste? Is she allowed to discover music on her own or have you also curated that for her?

Tamler: No, if there's a way in which and I'm sure this is one of the few ways in which David is a better dad music appreciation, because music is a big blind spot for me.

Chris: Oh, I see.

Tamler: And so I don't really she should have to develop her own taste, which is, as far as I can tell, on track to be like mine. I was very enthusiastic about certain bands, but I didn't know **** about music, and that's how she is. I think she loves Taylor Swift and then the other ones, much less intensely and kind of the normal ones.

Chris: I have the same pride about the job I've done curating my oldest son Julian's musical horizons and informing him constantly as to here's all the greatest music ever and telling him about musicians and telling stories about them and really just kind of filling him up with all of this musical culture since the time he was literally in the overnight room at the hospital. And I'm playing him a playlist that I very carefully made, and the only reservation I have is like, am I doing this kid a disservice? I had to discover all this music myself, and I had to be like, holy ****, the Beatles, come here and listen to this. And it was this adventure that I was on that was mainly I was driving. But with him, I'm just feeding him I'm just feeding him all this stuff. So I just wonder if there's a.

Tamler: That's a good point. I do worry about that sometimes. She even sometimes, but she's also stubborn and pushes back against my **** a lot of the times. But I guess the reason I am not so worried about that is my mom did this with me. And my mom died very young. She died when I was 17. But for the like, starting when I was six or seven years old to all the way through high school, she would just take me to the best movies, and she just taught me to love movies. She taught me to love books and kind of shaped my taste. Not by telling, because I don't really tell her what she has to like or not like, but it was just her enthusiasm for the movies was infectious. And at my best, I guess that's what I am with Eliza. I get really enthusiastic about something. And she does, to be fair, we watch incredible things like Twin Peaks or Deadwood or The Wire or right now we're watching The Shield and Fleabag and Veep. These are all just great shows. Arrested Development and then movies has been this whole other thing that I basically kind of picked up my cinephilia around the time that she was starting to turn like eight or nine. Around the time where you can pretty much show them anything.

Chris: I was just about to ask because my guy is my oldest is seven, and there's been such a long kind of holding pattern that we've been in where I'm like, yes, we will watch that. But maybe when you're seven, I keep kind of pushing things back a little bit. Did you ever show her something too soon or have to kind of turn something off or how did you know when it was time to really just dive into all the best stuff?

Tamler: I always erred on the side of showing her something way too soon. There was rarely a time where I was like, yeah, I don't think we should. She's too young for this. There were a couple of times where we had to turn something off. I remember, I think when she was six, seven, we put on Bad Santa, you know, that movie? And then, I don't know, about halfway through, there's like just graphic **** sex halfway through.

Chris: How did you make it through the first 20 minutes?

Tamler: Yeah, she'd seen a lot of movies where people are swearing and there's some mild nudity.

Chris: Billy Bob Thornton going my **** stick. Yeah, talk about my gear. If my kid heard that, he would say that every single day, a thousand times at school to strangers at the grocery store.

Tamler: Well, boys might be different. I've been showing her a South Park since she was five or six, and she just knows how to handle it. She gets the jokes she gets, and she has an incredible sense of humor. She's one of five or six funniest people I know, but she just would never do something like that in school. Whereas she has a little cousin and when he watches South Park, he'll be like, pressing pickle in the school. He'll just whip out his **** and go up to the press. It against the window. So it might really be different for boys than girls. But Liza could always handle whatever we showed her. I don't know, dog dying for a while, maybe.

Speaker B: Boys and girls, it's also just kid.

Chris: To kid because it remains to be seen what my youngest, how he's going to kind of handle this stuff. But Julian has always just been he's been a sponge and he kind of has an ear for what is controversial or provocative. Like, he picks up on that and then I mean, I have videos of him in his crib, so like two or younger saying like, **** **** repeating the word that he heard me say down the hall. And being like, that feels like one I'm not supposed to say. And just running with it. Right. He's always had that mischievous kind of instinct.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Tamler: Eliza we have people here, friends of ours, who say that I'm like this evil genius of parent raising because I've always let her do anything and have all the freedom she wants. And because of that, she rebels by being really dutiful and following all the rules and following the norms. But I remember once I offered to pay her to say **** or ****. Like, I said, $5 for ****, $10 for ****. And for years, she just wouldn't take it. And then finally, I don't remember what year it was, she's like, I'll do it. I'll say, okay. She goes ****. $10.

Chris: Tamler Sommers. No notes. He gives himself no notes.

Tamler: I do think because we're such a close family, I don't know if she's as ready for the world as she might be. I do think that there is a downside of her being really close, her feeling very comfortable with us, her really enjoying to hang out with us is you do it's like what you said for music, but just for life in general. And I was pretty close to my parents, but I still feel like when I was about to go off to college, which she is, it's not that I was competent in taking care of myself, because I definitely wasn't that, but I don't know. She sometimes will just not be able to handle life, things, being out in the world, just not being able to find a parking space before her friends recitals somewhere downtown. And she'll call us and be upset. I wonder if not that we've smothered her or anything like that, but we've definitely probably other parents make their kids take care of themselves more than we have.

Chris: But, I mean, nothing that you've described about your family's vibe, none of it has to do with conflict or strain or tension. You always sort of describe it as this sort of this is an atmosphere of warmth, of fun, of openness, of transparency, and of sort of shared appreciation for life. And that's all that's that there's nothing. Healthier than that for a family, for the way family relationships can. That's not necessarily how I grew up. Right? And the idea is that if you have those relationships that are primary in your family, that you at least have learned what good, healthy relationships are like, and then you'll eventually seek those out and build those for yourself out in the world, like, the parking space thing will come, right? Like, you'll eventually learn to deal with disappointment, but you have these models and sort of archetypes of how to treat people that you've grown up and you've been nurtured by. So if there's a trade off, you're definitely on the right side of things.

Tamler: But I think so.

Chris: I mean, then again, you've got Paul Bloom, right? Your your friend who says that we don't matter at all, right. That there's parents, there's no such thing as parenting. Right. It's really just your genes and your.

Tamler: Peer group that I don't find those studies compelling. I think we argued a bit about that, but in any case, what I think you're right. Whether we make a difference in terms of how they are once they leave the nest. It is just good to have a house where we're laughing constantly and there is a lot of warmth and openness. People get along.

Chris: That's rare. That's not the norm, I don't think.

Tamler: Yeah. And that extends to, like, Jen's family, with the exception of one member?

Chris: Well, there's always the one.

Tamler: Exactly. And even though my family now is small because my dad and mom both passed away, but I have my stepmother and my brother, they're so close to Eliza and to us, and they're close to Jen's family, so it's really nice. We don't live near each other, unfortunately. That's the trade off of our business. Right. Like, you don't often live necessarily near where a lot of friends and family live.

Chris: Well, tell me, what was it like growing up? I know that your father was an imminent philosopher, which is something I hope we can also talk about right. The influence that he had on you and the direction that your life took. But what was it like? What was the atmosphere like in your house and when you were growing up as a kid?

Tamler: Well, my parents were divorced, but they both stayed in town, so I would spend like three days at one person's house, three days at the other's. We'd alternate Saturdays, something along those lines. So my mom lived alone. My dad married my stepmother when I was very young, or at least they started living together. And yeah, I had a good there's definitely parts of middle school and high school that can be a little rough socially, but overall, I think it was par for the course. But in the house, my mom and I were close because I was her only child, so we just spent a lot of time together. And my dad was close to retirement when I was growing up. He's 48 years old when I was born, so by the time I was twelve, he retired. And even when he didn't retire, he was old school professor. You go in Tuesday and Thursday and that's it. He was home all the time. And I see we were very close as well.

Chris: So you weren't sitting in the back of the seminar room at Brandeis, like, coloring while your dad lectured?

Tamler: At times, yeah. Every once in a while, especially earlier in my career, I would run into somebody like a guy named Don Loeb at Vermont, and he would say, oh, my God, I used to toss the football around with you when you were, like, ten years old or six years old? Yeah, on Brandeis, because he was a student of my dad's, I think my dad, ironically, did not push me to go into philosophy. He was very angry and bitter at the profession. By the time he retired, he felt like what he did, his work, never received the attention it ought to have. Which I think is very well could be true. Maybe not quite to the extent the.

Chris: Whitehead stuff like the sort of the.

Tamler: More like language analysis, the algebraic term logic. Like, he came up with this kind of new logic that was algebraic and that it could be solved. Like a lot of you could derive proofs through algebraic notation. Yeah.

Chris: You come up with a new system of logic, you think you're going to get a lot of credit for that kind of thing.

Tamler: Yeah. And he had this kind of Jewish immigrant thing where he was never accepted. He thought at, like, the Harvard philosophical royalty, the Quines and the Putnams, and always felt a little bit slighted. I think I've been influenced more or less. A cautionary tale is not to have my self worth too bound up in what other philosophers are thinking of my.

Chris: Work being led into the elite club.

Tamler: Well, it's just like I really think he felt that he should be treated better, should get more respect, and when he didn't, it made him so not just disappointed, but angry and resentful.

Chris: Did he share that with you, or does that feel like something that you observed? No.

Tamler: Oh, God, yes. To a point where everybody would try to say, I don't understand. Look, you were a named chair at Brandeis. Like, what do you want? And he would say, no. He was, overall, I think, a happy person, very good father, and just he had a good time in his life, but it definitely darkened his last 30 or 40 years. The fact that he felt like this, and it's mind boggling to me that I would just get that worked up over what a bunch of philosophers thought of my work is just I can't relate to that. But that's just it was a bigger part of his identity than it is of mine.

Chris: What drew you to philosophy? It certainly wasn't wanting to have the career that he had or follow necessarily in his footsteps. What was the pull?

Tamler: Well, I don't know if you know this, but I went to school for playwriting at Columbia for a couple of years. Not right after college, but the year after.

Chris: I didn't know about the playwriting. I knew that you were going to be a writer and that you were going to be a novelist, I thought was the ambition. But playwriting for Columbia is a big deal.

Tamler: Yeah. And I enjoyed my time there. It was a little too hard drinking. I'm not sure I could have I could have kept. Up the pace that I was on in my years there, and I really enjoyed it. And when you're at a grad school, you know this, although maybe not as much because mine was more collaborative. You have great actors, great directors doing your stuff, and so it was just amazing to see the work that they could do with your text. It was so much fun. Then when I got out of that and I was already thinking, I don't know how you can't really how are you going to make a living at this? But also then I got a couple of things like staged readings and one play off Off Broadway, and the level of actor that you get when it's now just they're not doing it for their degree at Columbia. They're doing it just they need a gig. Yeah, they need a gig. And you are the biggest unknown nobody, and they're going to be in your play. There's a reason. And that's something I guess you have to work through. But I was just too not sure I wanted to travel at that point. And I had some money because my mom's life insurance. My mom had some life insurance and I was pretty determined to just burn through it in my twenty s and travel. And so I just kind of left. And then I think I had some ideas about being a novelist, but really never got like I wrote a few short stories, novels that I would be just mortified if I looked at them today. I'd be mortified about a lot of the thing. Even though I had a great time, there's not a lot of memories where I'm like, oh man, yeah, that was good quality.

Chris: You don't feel that way about the plays, though, it sounds like. I mean, you had to play off Broadway I don't know. That's a big deal.

Tamler: I actually don't feel that about the plays. It was like 92, 93, 94. I don't ******* have them. I want to know. I want to go back. I do not want to have anything to do with the novel or the two novels that I wrote. I want them to be burned from existence.

Chris: If anyone is out there who acted in Tamler Sommers' play off Off Broadway in 1994, first of all, he apologizes. You were great. He thought you were an incredible actor. Please send us at least your sides. At least if we could see those, if not the whole the whole script.

Chris: More with Tamler Summers after a quick break.

Chris: So I wondered though, if if teaching books like The Iliad and the Odyssey and the Bible year after year after year for as long as you've done it, ever kind of messes with your sort of parent mind a little bit? Does that ever kind of get in there and rewire you a little bit or make you think? For me, it's just that having that sort of 4000 year window on human culture as a kind of point of contrast, I guess, with like I'm obsessing over how much screen time my kid needs to get today. And as I'm like, teaching Gilgamesh and there's something sort of comical about that, but I just wondered if that ever occurred to you.

Tamler: Well, I did take Eliza up to a hill one time and almost sacrifice her. So I guess it influenced me in.

Chris: Doing rite of passage.

Tamler: Yeah.

Chris: You wanted to prove to her that you're a knight of faith.

Tamler: I guess. Yeah. Especially in the if there's one thing that maybe isn't the same, it's parent child relationships. I don't know. In the Iliad and the Odyssey. Although the Odyssey has with Alcinious and Arete and what's her name? The daughter?

Chris: Nausicaa.

Tamler: Yeah. That's a more kind of traditional but a lot of the time they're sacrificing, like killing each other. Murdering each other in the bathroom.

Chris: In the Bible. Yeah. And in the tragedies, for sure. But in Homer, I think it's a little bit more of a there's more sentiment to it. Right. There is more like familial attachment. Those are more emotional attachment.

Tamler: Yeah. Like Odysseus and his father or prime and Hector beautiful.

Chris: Yeah.

Tamler: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Chris: There's tear jerkers in Homer.

Tamler: Yeah. And what's the Hector's mom's name, too.

Chris: Andromache, no, is it Hecuba, **** .

Tamler: Hecuba. 

Chris: Cut this. 

Tamler: Anyway, she has a very beautiful scene with and heartbreaking scene with Hector, so that's true.

Chris: Yeah. On the wall.

Tamler: Right.

Chris: Like, you need yeah, you need to stay here and protect us. And he's like, sorry, that's not what we do here in Troy. I'm going to go die on this battlefield and get my chaos and you guys are going to be thrown from the ramparts and enslaved by which is how we feel when we go off to work in the morning. Right. Like, sorry son. This is what a man does in our culture.

Tamler: Exactly. It's our duty. We're honor bounds to do I'm honor.

Chris: Bound to pass you over to the strange woman at daycare as you scream like, please, no, please don't leave me.

Tamler: Oh my God. You got to treasure those times. My daughter just had her last day of school yesterday of ever going to school here in her life.

Chris: Wow.

Tamler: And it was a very emotional day for me yesterday.

Chris: You're in a world that I can't even really fathom or imagine right now. I mean, I'm in the land of like, kindergarten and daycare. And you're sending your daughter off to college. What does that feel like?

Tamler: It feels great. I'm so excited for her. I think she's going to love taking classes. She's going to really appreciate the school side of it in a way that I didn't fully when I went to college. And like I said, I think she's ready to sort of live on her own. And I think I'm very excited she's going into film, so I'm very excited about that. She's going to the film program at UT. Oh, wow. And so she'll be close, but not too close. Perfect. Yeah, it's kind of perfect. So I'm really excited for her, but it's heartbreaking. We're close friends. We're friends with our kids these days, and we binge watch TV shows together. We go camping together. We spend so much time together that to just all of a sudden have that not stripped away because you're home a lot when you're in college. But for it to be.

Tamler: Freshman year she'Ll be home a lot. But you got maybe one year of reprieve here before it's like or maybe another pandemic.

Tamler: That's what I can only hope.

Chris: Oh, that's nice, Tamler. How many people have to die so you can watch The Wire.

Chris: When the monkey pox outbreak happens in Houston. I know exactly where to ******* turn.

Tamler: I thought I was actually really coming to terms with it in a smooth way until yesterday, and then when she was her last day of school, and now she's at the beach for a few days.

Chris: Hold on. Paint that scene for me. Where were you? You don't drive her to school, I'm assuming.

Tamler: No, she takes my car to school.

Chris: She takes your car, and she left.

Tamler: In the morning and you gave her a hug? My wife gave her a hug. She was crying. I was definitely not dry eyed myself.

Chris: What did you do after she was gone? Did you go stare at a tree in the backyard and have, like, a montage in your head or I had.

Tamler: To go edit my ******* podcast because I hadn't finished that yet. And then I was prepping the podcast is a lot. Are you sure you want to do this? Because it's a lot of work.

Chris: You hear that, John? It's a lot of work.

Tamler: Yeah. So that distracted me. But I'm telling you, I was not in a great frame of mind. I recorded a bonus episode with these other people on Lost Highway, and I feel like I was just a little off because I was just, I don't know, emotionally unstable.

Chris: In your feelings is what is what the kids call that.

Tamler: You were in my feelings. I'm an emotional person overall and open about it, as you can tell.

Chris: It's good, though, isn't it? Good. It's good to have that feeling. And it sounds like you're having it for kind of all the right reasons, like you're mourning the end of what sounds like a really wonderful stage of life as a new one is beginning.

Tamler: You have a very nice way of very generous way of framing my attitudes and behavior around parenting.

Chris: At least around parenting, you seem to be someone who is coming onto the podcast with no darkness whatsoever and no real problems and nothing even remotely ****** up going on in your past or as you sort of conceive of your role now. So obviously you're hiding a lot from us.

Tamler: But there hasn't been darkness. It's been a pure joy. I've enjoyed every stage of Eliza's life, like from when she was a baby. She was a very easy baby. She had her little bratty two and three year old phases, but they didn't last long. And then she's been always just smart, funny already just clearly a better person than I am. Her heart is her generosity, her kindness to others. She's not as mean spirited as I think maybe I could be drawn out to be pretty mean spirited and she just can't.

Chris: I have a working theory that as it's no longer been possible to sort of do this American Dream notion where your children are supposed to have a better life economically than you, we've had to transfer that into the moral and ethical realm. We will make our children better people than us and that they will have better lives or more enriched lives and more sort of be more virtuous people than we were, especially when we were younger because they basically will have no more climate or economy to.

Tamler: Yeah, right. But they'll be really good people as they're wandering.

Chris: Super open minded and tolerant and patient and caring and compassionate and aware of global issues, all of which are in crisis and beyond the hope of repair.

Tamler: Yeah. Are you feeling like do you feel a kind of darkness that things are despair? Yeah. Something's just kind of unraveling. There's something not going well.

Chris: Yeah. No, it's contemporary unraveling is exactly it because it's that image of like, you're trying to get the tape back on the reel and you're trying, trying and that was the Trump years. We're like trying to we're really, really busy, busy, busy, busy, busy trying to get this ******* reel back put together. And at some point you just back away from it and go, oh, there's no ******* that thing's just going to play out. That's the way it feels right now. It felt like that, oddly enough, like there was maybe a honeymoon of like a month or two after Biden's election. But ever since then it has felt, this thing's going to unravel and there's nothing it's not even worth watching anymore as it happens. That's how I feel.

Tamler: It's just that we don't have people who are remotely up to the task remotely. It might not even be possible even if you had people who were good, but we have ******* Biden and nobody who will probably run again against Trump. And the only difference will be that they're both four years older and more demented. It's unbelievable that that's going to happen again in whatever the most annoying take.

Chris: On that, which I agree with. But the most annoying take is that people will tell you we're supposed to be the ones to fix it, right? It's like, you Tamler, don't wait for Joe Biden. You fix climate change, you go fix it all. And it's like, I'm tired, man. I'm ******* tired. I tried to, like, stop the Muslim ban, you know what I mean? Like, that took a lot. I need an administration break. I needed some time off.

Tamler: You're doing this podcast now!

Chris: I got a podcast to worry about. You can't be putting the Brunt Signal up in the sky every ******* day. Like, come save the world again.

Tamler: Pretty disillusioned. I mean, already disillusioned, really? It's the bail out of the banks. When Obama bailed out the banks, that was it. It was like you just lost so many people. I think the credibility of American institutions, to the extent that they still had them after the war, was just all gone after that. And now you had these two disastrous wars that nobody can defend, and you have the bailout of the banks after the Anna, this financial collapse. It's like nobody has any faith that these people will do anything good for anybody besides corporations and rich people.

Chris: I don't know, man. Have you been picking up on this sort of discourse around fatherhood that's out there right now? There was a book by Michael Chabon that came out a couple of years ago. There's a brand new book by Keith Gessen called Raising Raffi, and it's probably not on your radar because it's mostly like it's about him being a father to his son who's, like, five, six, seven years old. So there's these new books that have come out by male novelists that are memoirs of parenting, especially parenting younger children. And there's just, like, the kind of Atlantic article mill has sort of turned its sights on this notion, like, the institution of fatherhood right now as a country, as a culture. Like, in this crisis of masculinity, right? The very notion of masculinity is becoming a sort of toxic idea. And so the question then is like, well, what kind of footing does that put fathers on? And as fathers are trying to learn how to be these nurturers and caregivers and exist in partnerships that are not with strict gender roles. And it seems like there's a lot of kind of, like, getting tied in knots and wrapped around the axle about what fatherhood is right now. And I wondered if that any of that had kind of come your way or if you think about that at all.

Tamler: Yeah, no, not at all. I have a visceral just dislike for any parenting discourse, period. I never was influenced by any of it. I just feel like I'm not trying to optimize being a dad either morally or, I don't know, in terms of setting my child up to succeed.

Chris: What do you mean what do you mean optimize being a dad?

Tamler: I feel like a lot of these books are like if you're not reading to them, like this many minutes a day, then people are looking for studies and stats that will set their child up to succeed and be a productive member of society and have self esteem and all of that. And I think this is purely my view just based on being a parent to one child, being a child myself, you have that kind of unconditional love in the family and transparency and a kind of honesty with each other, and that's all you need. I don't have a boy, although I have a lot of little nephews, but it would never cross my mind to think I need to teach him how to be a man.

Chris: I think it's usually aimed more at the fathers themselves. Right. Not so much about should you try to mold some sort of masculine persona in your son, but what does your own kind of relationship to masculinity mean for you as a father?

Tamler: We're yellers in my family, and my mom was Israeli, and so basically our communication was just us yelling at each other a lot of the time. How I communicate with people, how I communicate with the television. The Celtics tonight is going to be.

Chris: Me, your students, you just stand at the front of the room and.

Tamler: Just pouring abuse on them. Personal kinds of insults.

Chris: This is why you have such a stress free way of moving through it. You're just constantly yelling at everyone and they're terrified of you.

Tamler: Exactly. It's so cathartic for me, so easy.

Chris: Everyone just does exactly what you want all the time.

Tamler: No. Look, I don't know. It's simple. It's like hang out with your kids. They're fun. They're really fun to hang out with and do fun things with them and joke around with them and love them and show that you do and show that you support them. I don't see what that has to do with any masculinity related thing. I don't feel like a man should be more removed. So am I too effeminate in how much I take care of her or it's just stuff that I don't know. Look, there are discourses like that that are probably just have just as much value, but that I actually really like and like to participate. I've always thought in The Atlantic is exactly the thing that if you weren't.

Chris: Worried about it, just read The Atlantic and now you can get really ******* worried about it.

Tamler: They're always like the number one. Number two. I published a book. The last book. I did. Why? Honor Matters. And I remember talking I had a lunch with the editor and the publisher, and I said, well, this was already like the first draft had been done and I was doing revisions and I don't know, maybe it was a jokey kind of question. So any advice? How to turn this into a bestseller. The publisher said, unless you can make it seem like if parents don't read your book, like, they're letting down their kids. It's such long.

Chris: That's not even as extreme as I thought it was. Like, unless you can turn this into a crisis which only your book can solve.

Tamler: Right, yeah. No, right. In this, it was just an individual. Parents need to read it, and there's still hope for their children. The last thing I could possibly do would be put out something like that and also just read any of that stuff. I get that people are that it obviously generates a ton of interest. It's just not to my taste. What about you?

Chris: I can't not read that stuff. I think that I overthink all of this, but I have two boys. I was parented in a really traditional way from an authoritarian model. Why can't Tamler be my dad? I just want to hang out and talk and watch cool movies and laugh and use profanity. 

Tamler: I'll be your dad. 

Chris: Thanks, man. Where were you in ******* 1989 when I needed you?

Tamler: Yeah, sorry.

Chris: You were trying to be a playwright.

Tamler: Wait, how old are you?

Chris: I'm 39. Yeah. So, I mean, I came from that like, that my upbringing is always kind of in the background of who I am as a parent, mostly as you're trying to make sure that you've evolved, but it's always there. And when I raise my voice or when I lose my temper or when I get really frustrated and when I feel my authority just utterly crumble to the will of a four year old, five year old, six year old, my first thought is my own dad and how that never happened to him. So this kind of discourse is really.

Speaker B: Annoying.

Chris: And I think very often in that Atlantic way, just sort of hand wringing their way into a word count. But also there is a value to it, to me, to try to think through what's different about fatherhood right now, what's different for me as a dad than the experience that my dad had. Some of that is a kind of retrospective, like, reevaluating the kind of dad that he was, given the conditions he was parenting in. And I do think there has been a shift, like, the kind of pitch for Gessen's book. I'm really one of the first generations of fathers, at least in this country, to sort of approach fatherhood on a more or less equal footing as a caregiver with my partner, with my son's mother, and that there is something novel about that and worth kind of looking at and thinking about.

Tamler: Yeah. Those were the days, right, when the woman just cooked all the meals and cleaned up. 

Chris: the Don Draper Days.

Tamler: Come home and grab a few beers and yell at the TV and kiss the kid good night. They'd hold the kid down for you, and you'd kiss them.

Chris: There's a generation where you'd hear people, I guess more Gen X, right, who had fathers, not even baby boomer, but even older generation of fathers who deaf.

Tamler: That's me. Yeah, exactly.

Chris: Yeah, you right. But your father was a bit more of an exception, right, as a professor. But the dad who came home at 06:00 or 630 and literally put their feet up, right? And you hear that line about, like, my father was so gentle. He never raised his voice. He was so kind, and it's like. What the **** did he have to do? All he did was read the paper. What sort of raise his voice about?

Tamler: He didn't deal with all he didn't have to check email or something. He was done. Work was done for the day, and so he could just fully relax then. Yeah.

Chris: You're playing the roles as a father now that were traditionally maternal roles. At least you're doing some portion of that very often, like, a lot. And yet you're also a big, dumb dude with too much testosterone who yells when he's frustrated. So there is a kind of structural tension in play.

Tamler: Look, the yelling and I don't know if my wife would agree with this, but I don't think yelling is that bad. You're frustrated, you yell. It's like you're honestly expressing how you feel. If you're angry or you're disappointed or whatever, and you yell. And if the kids do their fair share of yelling, why can't you yell? And it's not like you're hitting them or something, right? If you're just yelling at them, that's a good, honest signal as to how you're feeling. But it's easy for me because that's just baked into my DNA. It's in my blood that yelling is a fine way, because as quickly as I can get mad about something, I can get over it. And some people, if you get into a yelling match with them, they're like, okay, that was good, and then they're still ****** for days. And I've been in a couple of relationships like that or just even just friends or things like that. It's like wait, what? That was, like, 15 minutes ago. It's cool now. We said what we had to say. Let's move on.

Chris: I mean, I probably shouldn't say this on my podcast about parenting, but I do think that you can kind of look too closely and kind of ascribe too much consequence to parenting style and the kind of like, yeah. You know, because there's one thing that became clear to me having having a second kid, like how little effect I actually have on who these people are.

Tamler: Yeah, I've seen that in a lot of families. And the children are so different and a lot of the yelling kids. Eliza is a babysitter.

Chris: She is, or she has a governess?

Tamler: She is a babysitter. 

Chris: Do you even see your daughter? 

Tamler: In our two-one bungalow there's a governess.

Chris: Parenting is so easy I mean, you just hire someone to raise your kid for you.

Tamler: No, she's a babysitter herself. And some of the kids are just nightmares, and they're just yelling constantly. The parents aren't yellers. Parents don't like the parents didn't do that to the kid. Meanwhile, their sister is just a purely well behaved angel. So yeah, it's just that they got messed. Your first one got messed up. Genes, maybe. He was swapped out at birth. 

Chris: He's he's a superstar, man, this kid, you know, he's just he's got the biggest personality in the world.

Tamler: He's gonna go places.

Chris: Yeah. This is his show. I'm just kind of, like, filling I'm filling in for him. Tamler when I bring people on, it's like I bring people on to tell me what I need to hear.

Tamler: Life coaching.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. Keep it simple. Have a good time with your kids. Love them, accept them, and don't drive yourself crazy second guessing every single decision. So I appreciate that, man. Yeah, thank you.

Tamler: That's, again, another well articulated expression of what I believe, so I appreciate that.

Chris: Yeah, thanks a lot, man. Thanks for being here. I appreciate it.

Tamler: Sure. Thanks for having me. I'll talk to you later.

Chris: He loves it when you sing to him.

Julian: Barges, have you treasures in your hull, do you fight with pirates brave and bold. Out of my window looking in the night I can see the barges from my bed, I will see you in the morning in the morning let's have some fun. Let's go Nico now.

ChrisL It's time again to confer the Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award. You know, one thing we got to be sure about here on PODRE is. To lift up the new fathers among us. Not every nephew can be an old hand, a veteran. We LeBron's have to give it up for the Ja Morants, the Donovan Mitchells. The Young guns, those dads who are still like, holy ****, a baby. What do I do? So in that spirit, this week's NATFITOIA goes to a very special person in my life whose name is Vishal Agraharker. Vishal is a civil rights lawyer and a staff attorney at the ACLU of Virginia. In other words, he's part of the DC deep State. He's also a newish father to a beautiful one and a half year old girl named Annika. Vishal and I grew up together. He's one of my best and oldest. Friends, and I love him dearly, to no one's surprise, he's a great dad, but we got to keep him modest, as hard as that'll be given his gigantic ego and the haul he's about to get, this NATFITOIA hardware. Okay, here we go. Calling him up.

Chris: Hello?

Vishal: Hey, man, what's going on?

Chris: How's Annika? What's going on? What's going on in babyland?

Vishal: It's good. She's talking more and more. She's even getting into some letters, which is cool.

Chris: What do you mean getting into letters. What is that?

Vishal: That's her main area of interest right now. A through G. A through G. She's really big on those. She's not big on E because it looks a lot like F. So she just gets confused. She's like, well, that's an F. And I said, no, this is an E because it has the third extra little prong at the bottom.

Chris: She rejects that. She's like, no, you ******* idiot.

Vishal: It's still an F at bass.

Chris: She doesn't have time for those kinds of nuanced distinctions. A lot of songs, like alphabet songs, it's bath time.

Vishal: A lot of it is during bath time. And sometimes I'll put it to music. Other times it'll be like Jeopardy style questioning. You play Jeopardy with her, she's 20 months old. Thinking about.

Chris: This is more about you or more about her?

Vishal: This is about us. And I'm passing around the idea of making these cute little buzzers and having her and her cousin whack at them, just try to whack at them and then get them to kind of give the right answer. This is obviously something that no one else in my family wants to do.

Chris: I think you should do it, and I think it should be a wrong answer buzzer that you get when they get the answer wrong.

Vishal: I'm going to actually add that. That's a great idea.

Chris: Yeah, I think they'll like that. I think they'll appreciate the honesty of that.

Vishal: Yeah. Kids are all about very mean.

Chris: Kids are all about, like, fairness, truth, honesty. They don't want you to sugarcoat ****. They just want it straight up.

Vishal: I think that's right.

Chris: Until they're like, four, and then everything has to be sugar coated, literally and figuratively. Sugar coated.

Vishal: Yeah. No, things are good. How are you?

Chris: Julian started karate, so that's what's new. Yeah, karate. That's what's happening. I just took his Ghee to the Tailor so that they could sew on the special Okinawan patch. So he's like, super official. He's become, I don't know, sort of like a Kardashian. Like, it's like he leaves the house and he yells at his mother, like Don'T forget to make my hair appointment with Caroline. And then he sees me he's like, don't forget to take my gee to the tailor. Okay, bye. And it's like, we work for him. We're his staff now.

Vishal: That sounds like Julian.

Chris: Yeah, man. 20 months old. That's a lot to have a 20 month old.

Vishal: It's a lot less than having a 2345 or six month old. It's actually a fun time now compared to what it was like.

Chris: Oh, you feel like things are getting easier. You're on, like, a downhill right now.

Vishal: Oh, yeah. Things are a lot easier than they used to be, that's for sure.

Chris: Because you're getting so much better? Is that what it is? Your skill set?

Vishal: No, that might be part of it, but your mentality when a kid is able to sleep and eat that. Just makes all the difference, and then it relieves the pressure on everything else. It makes them happier. You're just not as stressed out all the time.

Chris: Isn't it ******* bizarre that human babies. Are born not knowing how to sleep?

Vishal: Don't you think they can't sleep?

Chris: Shouldn't that have been included in the original software? How did we evolve to become people, to become these creatures who have to. Be taught how to sleep?

Vishal: Have you ever seen a video of a giraffe being born?

Chris: No. And I don't know they want to see that.

Vishal: You should actually Google that immediately after this call. But you love they fall go ahead. Well, they fall like, six to 8ft, obviously, because they're being birthed by a giraffe. Just slam on the ground, and then the giraffe kind of leans its neck down and kind of hits them over the head until they stand up, and then they're walking immediately, and then that's it. They're good. It's basically the exact opposite for human.

Chris: How much giraffe **** would you say. That you tend to watch?

Vishal: Those first few months, I was watching a lot with Envy. Less so now.

Chris: Yeah, man, I remember those first few months. I've done them twice.

Vishal: Didn't you tell me at one point that was it Julian who had a milk protein allergy?

Chris: Yeah, they both do, actually. Both my boys have that.

Vishal: They both do.

Chris: Technically. Milk protein sensitivity, I believe.

Vishal: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. It's like a misnomer. It's not an allergy. It's really more like an intolerance or insensitivity to dairy, a prejudice towards protein, a bias towards the cow's milk, cow's milk in particular.

Chris: Julian will still walk up due to trick or treating.  He will hold up the whole line. At every house and sort of scrutinize the basket of candy, and he'll be. Like, which of these isn't cow's milk? And the person at the door would be like, what? Okay. They're just like, you know about cow's milk. And they just sort of deal with him on that level for a while.

Vishal: So he still has the trauma of does he still have the allergy? Still? That's it.

Chris: Dude, he's seven and he kind of still has it.

Vishal: Wow. Well, Annika's grown out of it, and I think most kids grow out of it. And she really just had it for a few months. But as you probably know, it's a huge pain when they do have it because it means that she was just in pain all the time. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't eat. We didn't know that even breast milk was hurting her. The other big problem for her was that we couldn't for the life of us, get her to take a bottle. The only kind of nipple shaped thing that she would accept in her mouth was my wife's nipple.

Chris: Genuine article.

Vishal: Yeah, exactly. Or there was one other thing, which was, incidentally, my pinky finger. And you probably I mean, you've seen my pinky finger, but it's shaped kind of very similarly to a standard nipple, has a good texture. And so she would take that for soothing. M was basically doing all of the feedings and I was almost entirely useless for all critical tasks except for helping get her down after her feeds with my pinky pink. So that was a lot for M.

Chris: Did that make you feel a certain way, being that useless, or are you used to that kind of feeling?

Vishal: I'm not used to that, but I wasn't used to anything with respect to children. So, yeah, it was a bummer. It was a bummer. But it was a lot worse for M because she had to do mostly everything. So then maybe I think it was about three months in three months into her life that M still hadn't spent a single night away from Monica. She obviously needed a break. She seriously needed a break. And she had been invited to a bachelorette party, one of her good friends bachelorette parties. And she was thinking about skipping it. She was worried about leaving Annika alone for even a night. So I wanted to kind of let her have at least this one night. So I was pushing for her to go and she kind of reluctantly agreed. So we drove out to her parents place in New York and then she went out to Long Island to kind of meet up with her friends. Her parents had plans that night, so it was really just me and Annika for the night. And M went out to Long Island and tried to have a night where it was just her and her friends.

Chris: Yeah, it was harrowing. It was harrowing. That's ******* harrowing.

Vishal: At the time, I was nervous. I was trying not to kind of show that because I was trying to kind of say, this is all going to be fine. Just have a good time. Don't think about us even looking back. I was trying to pull up some photos and text messages of that night because I think, I don't know if you do this, but I tend to forget all of the kind of the bad or not so great moments and kind of play up all the good ones. Kind of like a gambler, just like exaggerating their winnings, kind of underplaying their losses. It's kind of the same way for having a kid, I think. I like that. And it's pretty clear now that it was actually pretty rough and I was kind of trying to paper it over. She left and then she must have texted me every half hour or so while she's trying to enjoy this bachelor party, asking me, Status update? Yeah, how's it going? Is my child able to eat anything that she's starving now?

Chris: She's become her child, right? Once she's separated, it's like, Where is my child? Do you have my child?

Vishal: Right?

Chris: Yeah.

Vishal: And I was sent texting her back, telling her everything, basically trying to reassure her, telling her not to worry. I saw one text exchange where she was like, how is everything? And my response is great. I'm about to give her bath, and we're listening to music. And that's technically true. Behind the music was me desperately trying to have her eat anything, have her take anything from the bottle, and screaming.

Chris: Her face off at you.

Vishal: Screaming her face off. I would spend maybe an hour to try to get a half ounce of formula in there anytime that I wasn't trying to feed her. I was just trying to rock her on this little baby rocker, try to calm her down. And she's got this from the video evidence from that night. She's making this very sad sound where she's, like, trying to self soothe, and it's just not going well.

Chris: The whimper, the baby moan.

Vishal: There's so many photos that I'm trying to take, just trying to find any kind of split second of where she looks.

Chris: She doesn't look like she's not agony.

Vishal: Miserable, but she's, like, taking a breath between cries and so she looks like she's not crying.

Chris: Photoshop at this point, you're just like, **** it, just dump this into the software.

Vishal: Because I had a lot of time at that time to play around with. Adobe Photoshop or just filter man. Instagram filter.

Chris: That's what you should have done. Just give her, like, a cute dog nose that covers up.

Vishal: She looks like she's from the 1840s, but also terrible. No. I was taking photos and kind of just sending them to Emily as, like, just a proof of life video for a kidnap victim. And she's responding back and saying, oh, she looks so cute. I'm glad things are going well. But that's not what was happening. I guess eventually I got her to take the bare amount that she needed to fall asleep. She probably had 8oz or so in like, 36 hours. I think a kid that age is supposed to have like, 24 or so in a day. But she got to sleep and went to her bachelor party. She was able to use most of that time to pump and frantic text.

Chris: Messages home right, every half hour or.

Vishal: So, telling her things just, things are going great. Gaslighting, things are going swimming. The most obvious gaslighting. But both sides wanted it the next morning because I was trying to avoid having calls with her. It was just text messages. I wasn't even taking her calls right, because I didn't want her to hear what was happening. But the next morning, she did call on her way back. And at this point, her mom was back and she said something like, well, has she been eating? I heard her mom start a sentence with, wow, ran over. And I was like, no, everything's fine. She's eaten so much.

Chris: She's eating so well. That's what your mom was trying to say exactly. Oh, man, it's so stressful. So stressful. And then it is. You know what the nice thing is, man? When you have the second one and this happens, you're just like, yeah, they'll be fine. But 8oz, that's plenty. 8oz for months, probably.

Chris: Yeah.

Chris: That first time through, man, it feels like the stakes are to go back to your gambling metaphor, right? You got all your chips on the table. There's nothing more important.

Vishal: It's just her, and she looks so.

Chris: Sad and came back home. And were you just, like, triumphant? Did you continue the long con when she came home, or did you just. Break down weeping at her feet?

Vishal: I was so happy that she was home at that point. The con was over. Everyone was on the same page where, okay, we have a thing, but she had her night away. She had a good time with her friends. I was able to do the absolute bare minimum for one night of keeping our child alive.

Chris: Modest. I know she needed that, man. I mean Mom's ******* need that. Especially when the baby's still a baby and they're the thing keeping that baby alive, right. They're the entire source of nourishment. It's so hard for them to get any kind of break.

Vishal: I barely remember the first three months. I have a few kind of moments that I can remember. Enjoyable moments, but also a few really not enjoyable moments where everything else is kind of gone.

Chris: Your brain is just not making a lot of long term memories when you're that sleep deprived and overwhelmed all the time. So it makes sense that a lot of it just gets kind of washed away with the tide. But you remember the beauty and you remember the love that the three of you have for each other and those. Moments where you got through something right. You got through something hard. And nothing really all that bad happened and all of your worst fears didn't come true.

Vishal: It was fine.

Chris: Yeah. That's what it is, man. And, hey, I've got something, actually, that kind of speaks to that. You know how since ever since we were kids, I've been making the argument that you are terrible at stuff?

Vishal: Yeah, that rings a bell. I think I make the same argument about you, but yes. 

Chris: I have a surprise for you.

Vishal: Really?

Chris: Vishal, it's my honor, on behalf of. PODRE, to present you with the Not A Terrible Father in this One Instance award. 

Vishal: Wow. 

Chris: For serving with distinction as Annika's dad. Congratulations, my friend.

Vishal: Oh, my goodness. I'm so honored and looking forward to the envelope containing some money that goes along with that prize.

Chris: Congrats, buddy.

Vishal: Thank you.

Chris: You seem to be doing a pretty Good job as a dad.

Vishal: Well, I appreciate that.

Chris: How much of that do you attribute to following my lead, the example that I've personally set?

Vishal: Almost none of it. Almost none of it. I think I'm going to get some tips from your podcast.

Chris: You're blazing a trail, man. You're doing it your way, and it's beautiful to watch and listen, man. You really are a great dad, and I love you. And keep doing what you're doing, man.

Vishal: Love you, too.

Chris: We'll get through this together, okay, buddy?

Vishal: Yeah. 

Chris: We'll talk to you soon, man.

Vishal: All right. Thanks, Chris.

Chris: All right, that's our show. Thanks to my guests, Vishal Agraharkar and Tamler Sommers. Remember to go check out the Very Bad Wizards podcasts if you've never heard that longtime hosts Tamler and Dave are a delight to hang out with. And you'll learn about things about ethics and honor and David Lynch and sex robots. Delight. That's the word of the episode. Take delight in your children, Tamler reminds us, for they are delightful. Join us next Monday when I'll be. Talking to Moth storytelling champion and prince of the one man show, Jamie Brickhouse. We talk about queer identity and families. We talk about the importance of telling your story in different forms. We talk about how loudly you should cry while you're writing your memoir. It's PODRE, baby, you know what to do. 

PODRE is created and produced by me, Chris Brunt. Original artwork for the show is by David Wojo. Original music is by Charlie Harrison. Special thanks to Brad Franco, and Julian and Nico Benz-Brunt.

Julian: But this episode is now over.