The End of Summer

I was leaving Staples yesterday, having finished back-to-school shopping with my kids, and I was thinking about something I haven’t been able to get out of my head all week; the tragedy in Madbury, NH. This is not the place for conjecture, but the fact that a mom has taken her life after taking the life of her husband and two kids, is all I need to hear to know that the community is hurting.

The loss of a child close to you, even one you can’t call your own, is devastating, particularly when the facts point to them dying at the hands of a loved one. It’s a different type of grief from losing a family member to old age, or even a classmate from years past to a sickness. It’s a different type of sadness and helplessness. No child deserves this ending, and I’m sure I’m not the only parent who hugged their kids a little tighter when they heard what happened.

After the initial heartache, my mind has already started to shift to what government and politics can do to help families before they get to this point. I’ll freely admit that politics has overtaken a lot of what I think about on a daily basis, and it’s hard to contextualize many things today without seeing it through a political lens. I’m sure what happened in Madbury has had its fair share of online politicization and, I would hope, some discussion of what can be done to help a family when self-sufficiency and community support isn’t enough. What common ground exists in politics nowadays doesn’t appear to be powerful enough to get politicians to do anything after the shock of events like this one has run its course. Maybe the more actionable question is, what do politics and politicians owe to families? As a dad and former legislator, it’s a question I think about constantly.

If you follow Democratic politics, you may have seen Michelle Obama’s recent podcast with her husband, and his thoughts on being a dad in politics. Or maybe you remember that, during the 2023 vote for Speaker of the House, Congressman Jimmy Gomez brought his infant child on to the floor. These are both wonderful displays of parenthood, and more specifically, fatherhood, but they’re not representative of reality. The Congressman is not bringing his infant baby to every committee hearing, House session, and political event. And there’s no chance that President Obama was doing the every day tasks of the average parent while holding the most important public office in the world.

In their defense, at that high level of politics, public displays of fatherhood are more about making a point, than anything practical they’re accomplishing as a caregiver. That’s one of the big challenges with politics and parenthood. The largest voices in fatherhood, and the ones who can do the most to help parents, are either unrealistic examples (they’re “doing it all” with the help of a great deal of resources) or simply symbolic (they know that their actions need to be normalized in the public consciousness).

Strictly as a dad doing his best to raise good kids, I don’t care all that much that President Obama loves his daughters and did a commendable job as their father. I care that he values the policies that help parents raise kids with a decent shot at a comfortable life. I don’t care that a Congressman can spend a day at work with his baby. I care that when a new dad questions whether he should wear a baby carrier in public, he’ll remember seeing a powerful man doing the same thing. However, at some point, politicians who don’t think intentionally about their role as a dad become so distant from the daily challenges in raising a family, that what they have to say about it loses all meaning.

I spent a lot of time last year talking about family during my state senate campaign. Ironically, not much of that was spent talking about being a dad. I don’t have many regrets about 2024, aside from not winning, but not figuring out how to share that side of me is one of them. Typing it out is the best way I can think of doing that because doing it in a single sentence post is something that continues to elude me.

To understand my family is to understand my life as a dad. My wife and I have four kids and this Fall, two will be in middle school, one will be in the upper elementary school, and one will be in the primary school. We’re out of the diaper phase, but not yet in the high school phase. We have two kids that can still access that youthful wonder that seems to slip away too fast, and in less than a year, we’ll have two teenagers. We have dance competitions and soccer games to get to, as well as a standing order on how to get them their own YouTube channels so they can become rich and famous.

None of that really has anything to do with what it usually means to be a dad in politics. You show off nice pictures of your family. You signal that your wife isn’t doing 95% of the housework. You’re a provider or you’re nothing. You hide behind the label of “family” when deciding how to deliver policy. “You care” because it affects the people you love, not because you have a personal understanding that only comes from being a dad. It’s window dressing. It’s a label as useful as a nametag, I wish it was more, and I’m hoping that writing out my thoughts on it will crystalize that certain something that I know is missing in politics.

I want dads in politics to be able to capture a tiny bit of the magic that moms have in politics. Moms have instant credibility. If anybody were to speak negatively about a woman’s status as a mom in politics, they would be universally maligned, and rightly so. It doesn’t matter if she’s a Democrat, Republican, or an outlier on either end of the political spectrum; being a mom has power. I saw the very weird “Daddy’s Home” thing on the t-shirts of beer-bellied middle-aged men this summer. I’m not talking about that type of power for men. I’m talking about the type of trust and believability that comes with simply being a dad.

Nobody leads their political bios with “I’m a dad.” And maybe it’s not the smartest thing to do, but there’s a problem when highlighting that fact gets you, at best, a lukewarm response. Full disclosure, when I see other politicians highlight that they’re a dad, most of the time I feel nothing. I’m not inspired. I don’t feel pride. I don’t see a brotherhood.

Dads need to have political power like moms do because we’re leaving an important part of ourselves out of the conversation. We’re looking at the situation completely wrong when the big message is that dads aren’t doing enough at home. Being a dad in politics can’t simply be about the ways we’ve historically failed our wives or about “stepping up at home.” What exactly are we doing that’s unique, different from what moms do, in our role as a parent?

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a universal consensus on what those unique things are. It’s not being the sole or primary breadwinner (ask me how I know). It shouldn’t be the somewhat soulless attribute that we can fix most things in our house (even if we can), but maybe problem-solver is something that comes naturally to many of us. Is it protector of the home and his most precious people? Maybe. Is it being a role model for how real men should carry themselves? Possibly.

When we hear about the mental health crisis among boys and young men, and we wonder what happened, it should be obvious that this has been brewing since before they were born. Those of us in the Xennial generation or older should have seen the makings of this generation of lost boys. The earliest days of the World Wide Web had plenty of warning signs that boys and young men weren’t finding healthy communities to exist in. The shifting of importance in one’s life to having an online presence over the past three decades has made it worse.

Men continue to do bad things to girls and women, but in assuming a few bad apples spoil the bunch and then act accordingly, we forgot to show the path of how to not be one of those bad apples. We did what we normally do as men. Figure it out ourselves, get the result we and everyone else wants, then tell no one we’ve done it or how to repeat it. We left the teaching to grifters who only have a negative and cynical commiseration to sell in a world with no one else listening to the pain we sometimes can’t even share with the people we love. It’s not what I want to see my sons become, and it’s not what I want my daughters to have to confront. I have no answers now, but I will not stand by and let it happen without saying something.