Being a Dad Is Weird Read online

  DEDICATION

  To my wonderful daughters, Vivian and Georgette—

  thanks for teaching me so much.

  To my lovely wife, Mooch—thanks for

  sharing the fun of being a parent with me.

  To my brother, my mom, and of course my pop—

  thanks for everything. Much love to you all.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword by Melissa McCarthy

  Preface

  1 HAVE GOOD TIMES

  or The Value of Adult Friendships for the Sanity of Parents and Children Alike

  2 IT’S ABOUT WHO YOU KNOW

  or Why Having Feathered Friends Will Keep Your Kids from Worrying About Your Crappy Job

  3 TAKE IT ALL IN STRIDE

  or Nothing Is Too Big of a Deal

  4 THE BIG SKY THEORY

  or Sometimes It’s Okay to Lie to Your Kids

  5 RIP OFF THE BAND-AID

  or The Argument for Truth Once in a While

  6 PARENTING THROUGH HYPOCHONDRIA

  or The Time I Thought I Might Be Gay

  7 NOT ALL VACATIONS WITH YOUR CHILDREN ARE MAGICAL

  or Never Take Travel Advice from a Bird-watcher

  8 NAVIGATING BREAKFAST CONVERSATIONS

  or My Dad Never Had to Deal with This Stuff

  9 HAVING CHILDREN OF THE OPPOSITE GENDER

  or My Mom DID Have to Deal with This Stuff

  10 PARENTING THE PARENTS

  or The Art of Waking Up Your Dad When He Falls Asleep on the Can

  11 ADMIT YOUR FAULTS

  or Don’t Mutilate the Chocolate Bunnies

  12 ALL HAIL THE ROAD WARRIOR

  or Being Grateful for What Matters

  13 HOW TO BE AN INSPIRATION TO YOUNG ATHLETES

  PS: Maybe Skip the Mimosas?

  14 ADMIT WHEN YOU HAVE SAID, DONE, OR COOKED SOMETHING WRONG

  or The Apology Fish

  15 HIGH SCHOOL—LET IT BE A TIME OF POOR CHOICES

  or Forgive Them, for They Know Not What They Do

  16 MY DAD’S NOISES

  (Oh Holy Shit, I’m Making Noises)

  17 IT’S OKAY TO LET THEM SEE YOU SWEAT

  but Sometimes I Sweat a Whole Bunch

  18 MUSIC MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND

  (This One Is Easy)

  19 STOP FEELING GUILTY

  Your Kids Are Never Really Bored

  20 FORGET COUNTING SHEEP WHEN YOU CAN’T SLEEP

  One of the Many Reasons It Helps to Have a Sibling

  21 FOSTER POLITICAL IDEAS

  or The Time I Was an Asshole for Halloween

  22 LEARN THE RULES OF THE GAME

  or Never Leg-Whip a Priest

  23 ALWAYS SUPPORT YOUR CHILDREN

  Even When They Lose Their Way and Take Their Waiter Job Way Too Seriously

  24 TEACH YOUR CHILDREN THE VALUE OF MONEY

  Spend It Now

  25 FIND A GOOD LADY TO SPEND YOUR LIFE WITH

  but Be a Good Husband

  26 APPRECIATE EVERY GESTURE

  For Example, The Meal That My Daughters Made Me for Father’s Day, 2014

  27 IT’S OKAY TO CRY

  or The Art of Gathering Wine

  28 CHOOSE HAPPY

  and It Is a Choice

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  WHEN BEN FIRST ASKED me to write the foreword for his book, my immediate response was, “You wrote a book? When did you have time to write a book?”

  In typical Ben Falcone fashion, without any pomp or circumstance, he had secretly, quietly written a book.

  I was, of course, honored and excited to write the foreword to my fella’s first book, but then a searing hot panic and intense sense of dread began to set in. How on earth could I sum up my better half, the father of my children (as far as we know) and my best friend in a mere page or two? I began to develop the same nervous, clammy feeling I had when Sister Illuminata, an imposing Fransican nun, barked out that all of us 6th graders were to explain “what Jesus meant to us” in a haiku. Impossible!

  To truly translate the gentle kindness and supreme weirdness that is Ben Falcone is no small task.

  Do I address his incessant fear of being poisoned by anyone and everyone, and, very often, yours truly? Do I mention that he moons me at least three times a day and yet, after 11 years of marriage and 18 years together in total, I still never see it coming? How do I salute the fact that he has upwards of 11 blood pressure cuffs squirreled away in his closet?

  Ben is my Maria from The Sound of Music (God that’s two nun references—sorry): “How do you hold a hypochondriacal, toxicophobial moonbeam in your hand?”

  Ben’s kindness and his humor are woven into the fabric of his stories. His take on the world, his family, our kids and his own remarkable parents cannot be separated from the man he is. Ben and his stories are the sum of so many wonderful and weird parts. His love for our girls is baked into every word he writes about them—the same love I see in his eyes every day when the girls are climbing all over him and essentially trying to destroy him.

  The world is crazy and sometimes overwhelming, but Ben has always had the gift of seeing humor and love in the smallest of moments, and heroes in the most unlikely of characters (I mean, He married me).

  So it’s okay if things sometimes get stressful in our life together. I know I can always soothe him by softly whispering in his ear, “My love, I promise that I have not poisoned you today” as I gently present him with a shiny new blood pressure cuff.

  —Melissa McCarthy

  PREFACE

  I AM SITTING AT my daughter’s school concert. Vivian, my oldest, is just nine years old, and she and all the other kids are lined up singing their brains out in the small chapel that doubles as an auditorium in their school. My wife and I are struggling to actually see her sing because of the phalanx of eager parents in front of us, holding up their phones, recording each and every moment. Some of the parents have their devices fully over their heads to get the perfect angle—it is a sea of phones as far as the eye can see, and phones are all my eyes can see. Every time Melissa and I look for Vivian, we see approximately six thousand devices, but not our kid. I am doing what I normally do when something irritating is happening: I am pretending to be calm while my blood pressure rises sharply.

  As I stare at all these phones and finally catch a glimpse of one-sixteenth of my daughter’s head, I am struck by a series of thoughts. When did I become this guy? I’m a full-fledged dad, upset to the point of yelling at the fact that he can’t see his daughter sing on the stage. When did I become a person who raged at a bunch of crazy helicopter parents who are so busy trying to video their kids that they never actually watch them? When did I get this old? When did I get this cranky? Wasn’t I just eight years old and singing in my own school concert not so long ago? Wasn’t my dad just the guy watching me with a dazed smile on his face, much like the dazed smile I have plastered on mine? Did he catch my eye and whisper, “Good job, buddy,” just as I did to Viv, somehow through the sea of Steve Jobs’s legacy? And I think to myself, “When did things get so weird?”

  Because let’s face it, being a dad is weird. As the father of two daughters in Los Angeles, I am constantly put into weird situations that make me wonder how the hell I got there. The other day, I walked in my door and my dog was wearing goggles and there were two strangers in surgical scrubs holding her.

  My daughter Vivian calmly informed me, “Gladys is getting a cold laser treatment. Don’t worry, Dad. She likes it.” My dog did indeed seem to be enjoying the attention, so I smiled and
walked toward the kitchen to grab some grapes. My own unique set of circumstances being a father is mostly wonderful, sometimes maddening, and certainly weird. Was it all this wonderful and weird for my own dad back in the 1970s and ’80s, as he sat there fresh out of graduate school in Southern Illinois, watching his child sing songs that celebrate the seasons? What would my dad have done if he couldn’t see me sing because everyone had their stupid cell phones and tablets in front of his face?

  Of course in the 1980s there were no cell phones. But if there had been phones and tablets at that time, and if people were holding them in front of my dad’s face at my concert, I am quite certain that he would not have remained silent, as I have. Instead, he would have said something subtle like, “Put those goddamn things away before I shove them up your ass.”

  As I stare for what seems like forever at that glowing wall of phones, thinking about my old man, I see the truth.

  I AM A DAD. I’m not even a young dad. My daughters are nine and six, and I wasn’t a teenager when they were born. And in many ways, I’m nothing like my old man. I would never tell people to stick their phone where the sun don’t shine, or something equally cutting and frank, even though sometimes (let’s be honest, often) I really want to.

  But in some ways, I am a lot like my dad. I have carried a lot of my father into my journey as a parent. He definitely taught me some things, and many of his ideas rubbed off on me.

  But how many? Has my somewhat unusual upbringing affected how I raise my daughters? And will I ever have the courage to tell people to shove their electronics, like my dad would have done? All of this requires some examination. Hence, this book.

  First things first, let’s start off by taking a look at my father. Here he is:

  His name is Steve Falcone and he is a truly great guy. He is fearless, thunderously loud, ferociously funny, and has a propensity for wearing hats. This is a fairly recent photo of him, and I think it sums him up pretty well. Please note that though he is wearing a track suit and a sparkly hat, which would imply that he would not take himself too seriously, he is also holding his glasses jauntily to the side and looking importantly into the camera, which implies that he is indeed someone serious—and not to be trifled with. This simple yet complex essence sums up my father. Yet in another way, it only scratches the surface.

  I learned a lot from Steve Falcone—good things, bad things, weird things, and some in between. My dad is seventy-three now, and he’s been a good father to me and an excellent grandfather to my daughters. He’s taught me many things, among them that advice given sparingly is advice likely followed. (When I began to get bad grades in high school he pulled me aside and said, “Getting shitty grades is no way to get out of this little town, son.” Boom! Good grades followed immediately.) He taught me to always say what’s on your mind, which is advice I actually never took—my mind is a sea of unsaid thoughts sometimes pried loose with too much coffee or scotch. He taught me that being there for your child was the best thing of all—whether times were good, bad, ugly, or just plain weird.

  This book is a collection of stories about the great, albeit strange adventure of fatherhood. Some of the stories are about my experiences as a dad, and some are about my experiences with my dad. There are recollections from my childhood in Southern Illinois and my life now in Los Angeles. I will try to capture the things I’ve learned from my dad and about being a dad through stories—many of which are embarrassing. Did my father used to semi-regularly fall asleep on the roof of our home? Of course he did, dear reader. Why? Because he had imbibed a few Jamesons and wanted to see the stars, of course. Have I personally ever peed in a closet? Yes. Of course. Why? Because I was so exhausted as the father of a newborn that I was convinced it was the bathroom. You see, I am willing to embarrass myself to help out my fellow dads, so they feel less alone in their own weirdnesses, as we all should. I’d also like to help mothers, because I am not sexist. I’m just not. So I truly hope that some of the parental advice found here will be useful to all the parents out there. But mostly, I hope that you, dearest reader and my new best friend, will laugh a few times as you read these pages. At the very least, know this: if you are the guy with the phone held high at the school concert, chances are there are parents around you who want to shove it up your ass.

  1

  Have Good Times

  or The Value of Adult Friendships for the Sanity of Parents and Children Alike

  MY DAD LIKES GOOD times. Good times are important to him. His idea of a good time is being over at a friend’s house, laughing and drinking with all of his other friends. He likes to sit around, listening to his friends tell stories and telling stories of his own. If someone has a new story worth telling, all the better. If not, someone will tell an old one and get laughs like it was the first time they told it. That seems the perfect recipe for a good time with friends, if you ask me.

  I grew up in this series of my parents’ friends’ houses, in the “Little Egypt” section of Southern Illinois (why they named it that, I do not know). These houses were full of laughter and booze. I remember my childhood as being at someone’s house every weekend, sometimes on weeknights too, and being surrounded by loud and funny adults. For a quick review of the cast, we had Dan Seiters, who would write semi-erotic short stories and sign them “Rosemary Finnegan” because she was the only member of the group who thought the stories were a bit too lewd. Everyone laughed and told Dan to stop, as they simultaneously hoped to hell he never would. (He never will. My favorite story involves a female character who constantly is drawing rabbits on her boobs. I forget why. Maybe I’ll ask Rosemary Finnegan.)

  My parents met all of their friends while they were in graduate school in the English Department at Southern Illinois University. They met some of them at a great bar in Carbondale named The Pinch Penny Pub that was perfect for poor grad students. After a short, disastrous attempt at living in Texas, my parents put down roots in Carbondale, and most of their friends from grad school did the same. This group all led the simple yet fun lives of educated upper-middle-class people who lived in a liberal college town in a semirural conservative area of the state. In a land in which gun racks adorned the back of many a truck, these were the people who read The New Yorker, drove small Hondas, loved Greek food, and knew which bars had jazz bands on a Tuesday night.

  They hung out together, partied together, saw movies together, and celebrated the birth of new kids in the group. When a family in the group had a new baby, they didn’t disappear as parents today tend to; they simply kept going out with giant bags underneath their eyes and a tiny baby in tow. I admit that when the girls were first born, I “disappeared” for a while. Melissa and I didn’t really see friends for a few months, but through grit, determination, and the desire to see the sky, we got back on track. But for my parents, there would be no hiding. The group was the social outlet that made the rest of life better. These people counted on each other for support, but mostly for fun.

  My dad emerged as the de facto ringleader of this group and he revels in his role to this day. When he senses that the group needs to get together, he plans a party, which my mother then of course executes. When the party inevitably occurs, he will laugh loudly and often. If no one else has a joke, he’ll laugh at his own.

  One time I distinctly remember was when we were over at our friends Kelly and Cheri’s house. Kelly, a big Chicagoan with a wonderful mustache (basically, he had the big, bushy king of all mustaches), worked for Budweiser and had a vending machine full of beer on his porch. It was a hot late-summer afternoon and we all sat on the porch as the adults drank beer and the kids drank soda. My father was wearing shorts but no underwear (he couldn’t be bothered with underwear) and he was telling a very long story about growing up in Philadelphia. Cheri, a funny red-haired lady with a quick smile who married Kelly after they met working at The Pinch Penny, casually looked over at my dad and said, while he was mid-story, “Hey Steve, your ball’s out.” Dan Seiters, the wonderfully
weird gray-haired writer whose greatest claim to fame was that he could “balance a fifty-pound owl on his cock” (I’m not sure how he came upon that discovery. Some things are better left unanswered), immediately broke into hysterical laughter. Dan Finnegan, Rosemary’s husband, a quiet, kind, and dry man, said, “I just assumed that we were all supposed to have our balls out—I was concerned that I was late to the party.” Everyone kept laughing and piling on. Dan Seiters’s wife, Judy, a gray-haired, unassuming woman who is quite surely the sharpest person I’ve ever met, laughed so hard she snorted beer out of her nose.

  My dad let them finish with a pious look on his face, and then quickly adjusted his shorts and resumed the story with not a word about the offending testicle. He wasn’t one bit embarrassed, though he was perhaps a touch annoyed to have to restart his story at a crucial point. The mark of my father’s power is that though I’d make fun of him about that moment later, I let him continue through his story that night—because he was really enjoying himself, and he just couldn’t (and he really shouldn’t) be distracted by the fact that his testicle was out in the open for everyone on the porch to see. Perhaps at the time, he was a bit perturbed that his story got a few less laughs than his testicle did. But when his friends bring up the story today, which they still do, he’s thrilled to be the center of a good story that gets a good laugh.

  (My dad is definitely not wearing underwear in this picture.)

  That’s my dad in a nutshell (KA-BOOM). And he helps keep the gang together. Even now, the group gets together twice a week to tell old stories, to laugh about their kids who are now spread all over this country like wonderful cream cheese, and to share pictures of their grandchildren on phones that they don’t understand.

  Here is a picture of some of my parents’ friends from way back. I am the barefoot kid.

  My life today is very similar to that of my parents’ back in the day. People may think that because I married a lovely lady who often makes movies, we live in some kind of ridiculous Hollywood scene where fabulous people are singing and dancing into the wee hours, and maybe there are trained acrobats and martial artists who also sing and dance, and nobody has even heard of mashed potatoes, but the reality is far different. We met most of our best friends at a comedy theater in Los Angeles called The Groundlings—I guess that was our version of grad school. It is a grad school for funny people, and my wife and I made friends there who we remain connected to because, well, they are loud and funny, just like my parents’ friends. My idea of a perfect weekend is having all of our friends over for a barbecue. We’ll tell jokes and drink scotch and eat good food, and all of our kids will tell us to let them play by themselves, because the adults are “too boring.” We let them so we can drink more scotch and tell more jokes.