Hey everyone, it's Anna.
Alright, before we start the show, I want to talk about Valentine's Day.
Because, of course, we are already thinking about it over here at Modern Love.
We're hoping you can help us out.
We want to know the most romantic thing that's ever happened to you.
Or, if it didn't happen to you, the most romantic thing you've ever seen or witnessed.
It could be something grand, a rom-com-style gesture.
Maybe someone stood outside your window with a boombox or ran through the airport to stop you from leaving.
Or it could be something small.
Like someone knows, you hate olives, so they always pick them off your plate before you dig in.
Or someone slips a note in your lunchbox every morning to remind you how much you mean to them.
Whatever made you feel that rush of romance, from the big moments to the tiny ones, we want to hear about it.
And we want to know why it was so romantic to you.
If you have a story in mind, record a voice memo and email it to us at modernlovepodcast at nytimescom by February 4th.
And we might use your story on the show.
That's modernlovepodcast at nytimes.com.
And once again, your deadline is February 4th.
Thanks so much.
We can't wait to hear from you.
Now here's today's episode.
From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
So you might remember, a while back, we had the writer Sam Graham Felsen on the show.
He told us all about trying to rekindle his old friendships with other men in his life after he realized that as an adult he felt pretty lonely.
That conversation was so full of tenderness and vulnerability and such a surprising reflection on masculinity that honestly, I was a little surprised when I saw a new article from Sam pop up all about trying to make his son tough.
I was like, tough?
Tough?
Really?
That sounds so traditionally masculine.
I didn't expect it coming from Sam, and I really wanted to know what it meant to him.
So today, Sam is back to tell us what happened when he took his eight-year-old son on a cross-country road trip to live the strenuous life, why toughness felt like such an important thing for a son to learn, and what his son taught him in return.
Sam Graham-Felsen, welcome back to Modern Love.
It's really fun to be back.
Sam, the last time we had you on the show, you'd written this big New York Times Magazine story about friendship between men.
Now, you've written another piece for the magazine.
And just to note, your wife is an editor at the magazine.
The story is called, I Tried to Toughen Up My Son, Things Didn't Go as Planned.
There's a laughter, there's a lot behind that laugh.
We'll get into what happened But first I want to know, why?
Why did you think your son needed to be tough?
So my son really reminds me of what I was like as a kid.
I was sensitive.
I had passionate interests.
I guess you could call that nerdy.
Unlike my son, I was so desperate to be cool that I forced myself to get good at basketball by spending a million hours, you know, shooting layups in my backyard.
My son has no interest in sports.
In fact, he hates sports so much.
This is funny.
The other day, he drew a picture of a ray gun, and he was like, this is called the sports gun.
It's a special kind of laser gun that will shoot all the balls in the universe, so I'll never have to play sports.
Well, that is genius.
The ray gun in this picture shoots the balls in the universe.
They disappear.
What does he want to do when the ray gun is?
He wants to, instead of at recess being pressured to play soccer or basketball or whatever he wants to, you know, do his imaginary LARPing type games or whatever he does.
But yeah, he wants to be in his world of imagination.
He wants to, you know, turn over logs and see what insects are underneath them.
I mean, I remember when I took him to a birthday party.
Mm-hmm.
It happened to be at like this indoor basketball facility.
And the other kids were like sick at basketball.
And like my son had never played basketball.
So he's like, you know, if you're listening to this, son, I hope this doesn't embarrass you.
But he was, like you know, dribbling the wrong way down the court, that kind of stuff.
Like just didn't even know what was going on.
And I realized it's like...
You asked me about toughness, and now I'm just talking about sports.
Yeah, yeah.
And they are different things.
But I think the way in which it's connected is it comes from the feeling that for boys, at least when I was a boy right.
If you're not good at sports... it's kind of a wrap.
Like you, you, you, you, you're not going to be cool.
You're not going to make friends.
It's funny.
Like when I think back, I still remember the kid who got picked last.
It's not like like, do I give a crap about like whether or not my son's going to like play college basketball or like like of course not.
What I give a crap about is that, like I just don't want him to be somebody who gets bullied or or even made fun of or just excluded from the group.
And if he wants to do theater and nature stuff and whatever science stuff he loves, science like great.
But I then had the thought I'm like I want him to at least develop some toughness and resilience, because if he gets picked on for being different, for not having the bro interest that all the other bros have, for being the kid at the birthday party that doesn't know how to play sports,
You can do that.
But I think like the way to pull that off is like you have to have a really solid sense of confidence.
You have to have a solid sense of like.
If someone tries to push me around like, I'm going to stand up for myself and be like yeah, I'm different and fuck off.
Like I enrolled him in a karate school.
And when you're first starting out in karate, um, it's basically like dance class.
Like you're just doing like 20 different movements in a row.
And so you're just practicing the movements, right?
And once you get to orange belt, it's the first time where you have to do something scary, right?
Once you have orange belt, you have to buy all this new equipment.
You get these pads, you get foot pads, you get all.
You get a helmet, because you start fighting other kids.
But like he, he couldn't do it.
Like he was afraid of it.
He was afraid of getting hit, but he was also afraid of hitting.
And it just like, it was misery for him.
It was even worse than playing basketball in some ways.
And he was just like, I'm not, I'm not.
And I, and I really tried to encourage him.
I'm like, listen, there's pads on, there's no way you're going to get hurt.
There's no way you're going to hurt someone else.
But like, He just couldn't do it.
So like after I dropped like hundreds of dollars on these pads, he dropped out like the next day.
Did he go to class?
Like was there a, were you at a class where they were sparring and he just couldn't do it?
Or was it, is there a memory you have of something like that?
Yeah.
I mean, he wanted to quit right away and I and I kept, I kept pushing him to go back, but he would just kind of stand there.
Another kid would be hitting on him?
Yeah, there would be like another kid just like punching punching punching, and he would just kind of stand there until the sensei was like, all right, the other guy won.
And I probably even like said from the sidelines, I'd be like dude, you got to go on the offensive too.
You can't just stand there like getting hit.
You do have – that's the sport.
You have to hit back.
You have to defend yourself.
Yeah, and then he would just do like a very tepid kind of like – tap type thing and go back to just standing there frozen.
Like he really didn't want to punch or kick.
You could also kick in karate.
He didn't want to do either.
And I was just like, all right, okay, okay.
You don't have to do this stuff.
One thing I want to get into a little more specifically here, something you're bringing up which I think is interesting, which is the sort of interplay between toughness and violence.
Right,
Because in this karate situation, you're not only encouraging him to hit back, you want him to protect himself.
Why did you feel like...
Or did you feel like your son needed to be able to fight, or was it not about fighting?
So this is like.
The central question for me is like can you instill a sense of resilience and toughness and self-confidence, and even maybe swagger, in a boy?
And...
Be against violence.
Right.
Be totally against violence.
Right.
And so the question I had is like, I also abhor violence and yet like.
If you teach your kids martial arts, it's not just learning how to block.
Yeah.
What is your actual position on violence vis-a-vis raising a son?
Do you actually think that it is the right thing to do to tell him that he has to be willing to punch someone in the face and break their nose and cause blood to stream out of their nostrils?
If it That it's never okay to harm another human being?
And what are the ramifications for either of those choices, right?
If he is the punch the guy in the nose and break his nose and wash the bloodstream out of his nostrils guy, there are some serious consequences to that.
And if he is the turn, the other cheek guy or the runaway guy, which is what I was like as a kid there's also some serious consequences to that.
You were the turn-the-other-cheek kid growing up.
Yeah.
Paint me a picture of that.
What did that look like for you, young Sam?
When I was younger, like And maybe I'm being too hard on myself and my memories but when I was younger, I feel like when there were inflection points for me, like when there was a scary thing, I would run away or I would just avoid the situation or I would quit.
The moments that fill me with the greatest shame and I don't have a lot of shame in my life, but I do have shame about certain moments from my childhood.
Like, I remember...
There were these kids.
Some of them were in this like gang, quote unquote.
Maybe it was a gang.
Maybe they just called it that.
I mean, these are like 13-year-old kids, right?
I think the group was called the JP Dog Pound.
That was their nickname.
But me and my buddies, actually, Rob.
Oh, my God.
God, Rob features heavily in our previous conversation.
Yeah, for those who listened to the last part, you know I wrote the essay that I wrote a lot of.
It was about my best friend from childhood, Rob.
And we were playing basketball with them and one of the kids from the dog pound kept calling foul on like bullshit things like when no one was fouling him.
Like, basically, he was cheating, right?
He kept being like foul foul foul like, so that he could get the ball back and get an advantage.
And Rob just called him out at one point.
He's like, bro, that's bullshit.
Like, no one's fouling you.
And the kid got, like, really riled up by that.
And he grabbed Rob and like kind of throttled him and like pressed him up against this chain link fence.
And he basically was like, I'm going to beat the fuck out of you.
And I didn't run away, but I remember, like, I... just stood there frozen.
And the kid didn't end up beating up Rob, but he held him up against this fence, throttling him.
It was a scary moment.
And I just didn't do anything to try to defend him and step up and help him.
And he felt abandoned in that moment.
And justifiably, he gave me a hard time about it.
But that is one of the moments where I look back on my childhood and I'm like, I...
My fear of violence in that moment led to me doing the wrong thing for my friend.
Like, I abandoned my friend because I was afraid of violence.
And there were other incidents where... Like, look, I grew up in the city.
I mean, I don't know what it's like nowadays...
But like there were a lot of fights.
There were like a lot of fights.
There were fights at the bus stop.
There were fights like in the schoolyard.
And there were like group fights at parties where like people got badly hurt.
And I just never participated in them.
I would always find a way to like slink off somewhere and just like make myself scarce when a fight broke out.
And my friends all knew it and gave me a hard time about it and called me all kinds of names.
What would they call you?
Pussy.
Gay.
Wow, yeah.
Bitch.
Bitch probably more than anything else.
And when you were walking home from the basketball court or the party or whatever where you didn't get involved in a fight, you didn't stand up, you didn't do it.
What thoughts were you thinking about yourself?
My thought was...
Sam Graham Felsen is a little bitch.
You're a bitch.
You're a bitch.
You're a bitch.
Like, I was beating the shit out of myself.
I was going to say.
Internally.
I felt like a piece of shit.
I felt really like there was this phrase in Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography that really struck me where, after he had been mugged as a boy, he said I felt like a predestined victim.
And I just, I really related to that.
I felt like I was a predestined victim.
Like, no matter what the situation was...
I was a bitch, right?
I was not going to be the guy who stood up.
And I'll tell you like this is why, like I cared about thinking through this stuff in raising my own son, because I felt really bad about this stuff growing up
And it affected other areas of my life.
How?
Yeah.
I was... afraid to dance on a dance floor.
With girls or just even dance in general?
In general, but especially with girls.
I was afraid of girls.
And like not only was I terrified of asking a girl out, but I was afraid to say yes when a girl asked me out.
Because I think on some level, I was just like...
Well, I'm a bitch, so a bitch can't have a girlfriend.
Only a man, someone who's really secure in their masculinity can have a girlfriend.
And probably on some unconscious level, I'm thinking, am I even going to know how to kiss a girl?
Am I going to know how to do all this shit?
But it all comes from the idea of being a physical coward.
Yeah.
And, you know, if I'm physically afraid to fight, maybe I'm physically afraid to dance.
Maybe I'm physically afraid to kiss, too.
Like, it had all these different effects on the way that I saw myself.
But I'll say, like, it extended even beyond that.
Like, I was not a good student as a kid.
I was in danger of flunking out of my high school because I didn't have the confidence to... learn.
Like I thought, I thought I'm like a loser basically, or I'm like a victim.
I'm a coward.
So like when something was hard for me, like math, for example, I was just like I'm not going to be able to get it.
And this is all because you felt weak or because you couldn't fight.
All of those things came from that core.
I mean, If there was like a professional therapist in the room they might say well, it was really about all these other things.
And of course it always is.
It's about your mom.
Yeah, it's about a million other things, too.
But I think that the core thing was that I had low self-confidence.
And now as an adult who's really into fitness and really into like, self-improvement and lots of other ways.
The kind of cornerstone of like how I live my life is that like you actually can get better at pretty much anything, but you have to deal with like doing some painful practice and sucking at it at first and then being okay with that and continuing to go and like not giving up.
And so my whole life is built around like strategies for not giving up and believing, like having this faith that practice makes you better.
As a kid, I just didn't have that.
And again, like is it all because I was afraid to fight?
No, but there was something fundamental about the idea that, on the most elemental level, when it really came down to it, on the streets, in the schoolyard, on the basketball court, I was not going to rise up and protect myself.
And all of these memories that are clearly so vivid to you from your childhood are present with you as you're raising your son.
And so, to me, knowing this backstory puts such a different valence on the scene of you watching your son get punched in karate class, right.
It's not just about him getting punched or him not defending himself.
I mean, you tell me, but you're probably thinking of yourself in that moment.
You're thinking of him.
I mean, there's all these...
There's all of this stuff that's being brought up by raising a son.
And I remember, I have a daughter too, but my son is me and my wife's first kid.
And I remember when we saw the sonogram image and realized we were having a boy, I immediately I was very moved by the idea of the challenge, of what it's going to be like to raise a son.
And I immediately thought, the minute I saw that sonogram image, I thought...
The challenge of my life as a father is going to be how to raise a boy who becomes a man, who is a good person, who feels good about himself.
And having someone who feels good about himself, I think, increases the likelihood that he will be the kind of person who can take care of other people and respect other people and radiate goodness and kindness.
And once I started to see my son's personality come out.
When you know, like kids, when they're Before they're two, they don't really have a personality.
They're just like blobs of blubber, basically.
But once he started to have a personality...
I'm like, all right, this kid is a chip off the old block.
Like, he's really like me in a lot of ways.
And my daughter, by the way, not like that.
Like, she doesn't walk around afraid of a lot of stuff, but he does.
And I said, all right, you know, he's really like me in a lot of ways.
And I want to help him get to the place where I am now a lot faster than I got to it.
We'll be right back.
Thank you.
So what was your plan to... You know, train's the wrong word.
Let's just say your plan to sort of toughen up your son, to teach him resilience.
So...
It wasn't totally premeditated.
It was a little bit premeditated.
I'll start by saying my son has always had an obsessive personality.
His current obsession, which has been an obsession for like a year and a half, is national parks.
He loves national parks.
And as he got more interested in the national parks, he started doing more of his own research and really fell in love with Teddy Roosevelt, who
I hadn't really known this, but Teddy Roosevelt is kind of seen as the godfather of the national parks, because he didn't found the national parks as an idea but he like basically expanded them like crazy.
So my son got more and more interested in Teddy Roosevelt.
And how old is he at this time right now?
Eight.
Eight.
I'll let you pick any park.
And he was like, I want to go to the Badlands.
I want to go to Teddy Roosevelt National Park in the Badlands.
And where is that?
That's in North Dakota.
And I was like, great.
And then like very quickly clicked for me.
I'm like, first of all, the Badlands, like I'd never been to the Badlands.
I'd always dreamed of going to the Badlands.
It's...
It's a badass place.
Sounds like it.
It's the Wild West.
It is the Wild West.
It's in the middle of nowhere.
There's nothing nearby.
You have to drive for a while to get out there.
It's the frontier.
It's a hard land filled with...
Rocks, basically.
And it's a place where, this is where Teddy Roosevelt actually went when he was in his 20s.
I mean, it's like masculinity kind of embodied, right?
There's like rocks and bison and like sheer faces of big drops.
It is exactly that.
It's like, I mean, it's what you think of as the Wild West.
Right.
And so, like you know, there was something like kind of amusing to me about like going to this iconic place, macho place with my son.
But what really started to get my wheels turning was reading about Teddy Roosevelt and what happened to him out there and knowing that, like Teddy Roosevelt, like me, like my son, was actually a huge nerd as a little kid and a hugely fearful little kid.
Teddy Roosevelt got his ass beat and as a little kid he was so scared to leave his house that he needed his little brother to walk around with him for protection, right.
So teddy roosevelt now, like we think of him as like the iconic man right, like the guy with the big mustache and like the hunter's rifle and like all the like trophies of animals on his wall and like, if you listen to any of these bro podcasts, people quote teddy roosevelt all the time.
Huh, LeBron James writes a Teddy Roosevelt quote on his shoes before basketball games every night.
Everything comes back to basketball.
It really does, yeah.
So once I like started thinking about all this, I'm like I just got kind of tickled by the idea of, like this is going to be a real full weekend-to-weekend nine-day road trip, a father-son road trip.
And I was thinking like, let's do this.
Like, let's have a road trip where I get to explore what it means to be like a man with my son in a place that was this iconic place, You know, site of masculinity and an iconic formative location for my son's hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
So it just felt like... It has all the ingredients.
I mean, it really is.
It's like the austere landscape, the harshness of the physical tasks to navigate that landscape.
When you finally get to the park itself...
What are you hoping will happen?
What is your dream outcome for this trip with your son?
So I had some early fantasy of like, oh, let's live like Teddy Roosevelt did.
Let's go find some dude ranch and ride around on horses and get dirty and do the tough things that Teddy Roosevelt had to do on the land.
Then I realized that would not be a very fun vacation for my son.
I'm like, I'm not going to force him to do that.
I don't think it would have been fun for me either.
Really what I, what I wanted to do was like, he is eight at this point.
And I'm like, he's old enough to start going on real hikes.
Like before.
It was like a hike would be like walk around a pond.
That took like 15 minutes, right.
So a lot of it was just i want to push him to do harder hikes than he's ever done and see if he can deal, because it's not because that's the discomfort, that's the resilience, so let's go on this hike.
That is pushing it a little.
It sounds like first.
I mean, it's kind of young to be going on a i don't know how, how.
You know, The first hike that I tried to do with him was three miles, which is a fair amount.
Eight-year-old, yeah.
So tell me how that went.
Did you tell him how long it was going to be?
Not really.
I pulled the like trick that my dad used to pull on me being like, oh, it'll be fine.
Up and back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That kind of thing.
So you set out.
And within minutes, he's like, I'm hungry.
Let's go back to the visitor center and get another snack.
And like, dumb dad, I like forgot to bring a snack.
But I'm like, I'll buy you a double snack back at the visitor center if you do the hike.
I'm trying, like, every bribe in the book.
I'll buy you an ice cream sundae if you do the hike.
And he's just complaining, and he doesn't want to do the hike.
And then...
He's also scared because there are wild bison in this park and bison are like aggressive animals and they can charge at 35 miles an hour.
And my son is a big nature nerd.
So he knew the fact that they could charge 35 miles an hour.
And like we were hearing rustling in the bushes and we had not seen a bison yet.
And I was like, I really, really, really want to see a bison.
So when we heard the rustling in the bushes, I'm like, let's go check it out.
And at that point, he, like, grabs my hand.
He's like, Dad, what are you doing?
You're scaring me.
Like, get over here.
And he, like, really squeezed my hand.
And I was like, all right, I'm overdoing this.
Like Well, I want to say that I was being really subtle, but the truth is, at times I was not being very subtle.
Like, I was saying things to him...
Like, we were reading a kid's biography.
Like, if you go to, like, Barnes & Noble, there's, like, a whole section called, like, Who Is?
It's like, who is Abraham Lincoln?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there are these little kid biographies with, like, cartoon pictures of him and stuff.
So we were reading Who Is Teddy Roosevelt?
And there's this famous quote from Teddy Roosevelt where he talks about like living the strenuous life.
Yes.
So I kept saying to him, like, come on, let's live the strenuous life.
Let's live the strenuous life.
Like, you got this.
Like, I know it's a little bit of a long hike, but you got this.
You're going to feel really good when you're done.
And then finally, he just kept complaining.
I'm like, all right, let's call it a day.
Like, it's the first day.
He's not into this hiking stuff.
And I'm not going to push it too hard on the first day.
But then interestingly, the next day... he like totally surprised me.
We drove to another part of the park, like a much more rugged part of the park.
And he was like, let's go off trail.
And you were like, it's your newest life.
Yeah, I was like, okay.
And then he got really into the idea of like climbing up.
They're called buttes.
These are like uh, like try to picture like the grand canyon, but like upside down yeah, where huge rock formations yeah, these beautiful, like layered, like multi-colored rock formations that are like plateaus, and he was like let's go climb that butte.
And then, like he climbed this butte and i'm following after him and he he insisted in being in the front, he wanted to be the trailblazer.
He's like i want to be the trailblazer.
And then I'm thinking like all right, we're getting really far away from the beaten path here.
Wait, pause.
What do you think changed from one day to another to make him be like dad?
You're scaring me to now this day, running ahead on the butte, being the trailblazer.
What do you think it was?
So we did read every night we were reading parts of the Teddy Roosevelt book and we did read a part about when Teddy Roosevelt got beat up as a kid.
Whoa.
And so we talked about like that Teddy Roosevelt was not brave as a kid and he was not strong as a kid.
And you know again, I'm trying at this point to like be a little bit more subtle, but I'm basically saying to him like Teddy Roosevelt changed, he was not naturally tough.
Like, he made himself tougher.
And I did the same thing myself.
And I think he was probably inspired by that idea, more by Teddy Roosevelt than by me.
But, like, it did surprise me, though.
I started saying to him, I'm like, you know, we are getting really far away from the trail.
When he's running on the buttes.
Yeah.
And he kept finding another butte that was even higher than the last butte and like going higher and higher and higher and kind of like scrambling on these rocks.
And at one point, like not only are we far from the trail, but we're on this narrow ridge and You're going to scare me again.
Okay.
Yeah.
And, by the way, the weather in North Dakota is famously mercurial and it changes on a dime, and it is one of the big places for tornadoes.
And just in general, like crazy weather just comes out of nowhere out there.
So the sky started to change and like the wind started to pick up and I'm like we got to go back down here.
Like we could get literally get blown off of the Butte and like.
There's no one out here to help us because we are way off the beaten path at this point.
And I'm starting to get scared.
But he wasn't scared.
He was like, he actually turned to me and he's like, come on, we're living this strenuous life.
Like, come on, come on, Dad.
So I let him go for a little while longer.
Were you proud?
Yeah, definitely.
You were scared and proud.
Yeah.
And these things were happening at the same time.
And then, by the way, on the way down um, this is like a good lesson for why it is actually important to stay on a path rather than to like just go trailblazing.
It was really steep on the way down and i slipped at one point and like kind of badly cut up my leg on on the gravel, but i slipped and like slid down part of the butte and like he was ahead of me and i actually like slid into him and i was worried that not only was my leg bleeding, but i was worried that like i had hurt him, because i hit him kind of hard And normally he freaks out at the sight of blood.
Like me, he hates shots.
Like every time it's flu season, he's like, if there's not flu mist, I'm not doing it.
I'm not getting a flu shot.
So I'm like, oh God, now he's going to freak out at the blood.
And he was just like, you're good.
You're okay.
You're okay.
You're going to be fine.
So I'm thinking like at that moment, I'm like, this is happening way faster than I was expecting.
I'm like, this guy like is changing so quickly.
Like this is incredible.
You're like, I did it.
Mission accomplished.
I really like was thinking to myself as I'm like limping down the mountain, I'm like this is really working out according to plan.
This is incredible.
And of course, like, you know, kids change on a dime.
So like things took an interesting turn after that on the trip, which we can get into when you want to.
But it wasn't like this steady ascent of like braver and braver and more strenuous life.
And, you know, where he emerged from the badlands like a macho man.
Yeah.
There were some big curveballs.
We'll be right back.
If the story were to end here, the title of your piece would be different, because right now it's it's.
I tried to stuff myself up.
Things did not go according to plan.
But if you just ended with him, you know, scrambling down the Butte and being like come on dad, catch up.
It would be, I tried to stuff it up my son in the Badlands and it worked.
So what was the, it would have been how I made my son a Badlands badass.
Yeah, exactly.
And by the way, I click on that too.
But what, but what, so what happened?
So what next?
So, I'll give a few examples.
Like, um... there's a lot of native people in North Dakota.
And actually a lot of these national park sites are on wholly native sites.
Hmm.
Which is not cool, right?
And, like, Mount Rushmore is on, like, a holy mountain, and we just carved some faces into it.
Like, that wasn't cool.
So, like my son is seeing this and like starting to realize that, like the thing that he loves more than anything else in the world, national parks has this kind of problematic Huh.
There's like a flip side to that coin, which is that, like a lot of these places that we see as like this beautiful idea of a public space for all, were in fact someone else's land that got taken away.
So I'm like explaining that stuff to him.
We actually drove through the site of the most infamous massacre ever in the history of the genocide of Native American people, which was at Wounded Knee.
So that's in South Dakota.
And it's a place where, like over 100 Native Americans were just shot at point blank by US soldiers.
So he starts asking more and more questions.
Like, he says to me, he's like, Dad, like, did the Native Americans do anything to deserve this?
I'm like, no, they didn't.
Actually, they didn't do anything to deserve this.
That was a hard conversation.
Just to be like yeah, a very bad thing was done to these people and there's no way about it.
There's no way of excusing it.
And by the way, your hero, Teddy Roosevelt, wasn't exactly great on this stuff either.
And he starts to ask questions, like He says to me at one point.
He's like dad, was Teddy Roosevelt a bad guy or a good guy?
And I'm like, and I paused for a long time and I'm like, man, uh, what am I getting?
You know, what do I say here?
Teddy Roosevelt was a massive imperialist.
Teddy Roosevelt believed that non-white people were inferior and that it was kind of all right to go take their shit.
Teddy Roosevelt loved violence.
That's the dark side of Teddy Roosevelt, the masculine guy.
And I sometimes think, what if Teddy Roosevelt hadn't been mugged as a little boy, right?
Teddy Roosevelt had planned to become a scientist.
Like he was going to be a naturalist.
Like he had planned to.
His ambition was to like go around collecting like moss samples and like salamanders, and like looking at them and putting them in museums.
Mighty have just turned out like that instead of like an imperialist.
So if Teddy's falling...
Is anyone rising in the ranks for your son in terms of role models to be obsessed with?
So we did a lot of driving on this trip and he's doing a lot of hiking and I'm proud of him for having a really good attitude.
And he's getting through the hikes better?
Yeah, he's getting through the hikes better.
Okay.
He is doing a lot better.
And I'm proud of him for that.
And I'm starting to be like, all right, you can have your iPad time.
And he had watched.
He probably watched Home Alone for the 900th time, because he's obsessed with Home Alone.
And I'm like, you know what?
Let's download a new movie.
I just saw that Pee Wee's Big Adventure is available.
And that was one of my favorite childhood movies.
So basically I pulled over, like load this movie up for him.
And then like we start driving and then I just start hearing him cracking up in the back seat.
And he's just like, I've never heard him laugh so much.
And he's like, dad, he's like, oh my God.
And he keeps rewinding this one scene where um This bully, this arch-nemesis of Pee-wee's named Francis, has stolen Pee-wee's bike, and Pee-wee gets revenge on him by like, asking him if he wants a piece of gum, and he gives a piece of gum to Francis.
And Francis is like, oh, that's so sweet of you, Pee-wee.
Thank you so much.
And Francis chews it and turns out to be trick gum and, like, this black ooze, like...
Comes like out of his mouth.
The classic trick gum move.
And he's like horrified.
And my son thinks it's like the funniest thing ever.
He's like, oh my God, trick gum.
That's amazing.
And he just fell in love with like a lot of what.
A lot of what happens in this movie is like Pee Wee, who is a really wimpy guy.
Mm-hmm.
Definitely the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt energy.
Like he kind of gets by on his wits and he gets by with like little tricks, and he gets by like not by punching people in the face but by giving people like trick gum and stuff like that.
And my son just really, really, really, really vibed with it.
And um, Like later on, when we're hiking again, like he just starts like asking he's like dad, like can you buy trick gum anywhere?
And I was like, you know, when I was a kid, I had trick gum.
He's like, wait, you had trick gum?
Yeah.
That's incredible.
It's like, tell me.
I was like, yeah, it was just like that.
Like when you chewed it, it made this black ink ooze out of your mouth.
He's like, how long was your tongue black for?
I was like, probably like two hours.
Your tongue was black.
He's like, oh my God, who did you trick with the trick gum?
I was like, I think I tricked my little brother with it.
He's like, oh my God, you tricked Uncle Joe with the trick gum.
So then he's like, did you have any other tricks?
I'm like yeah, I had this hand buzzer where you could pretend you were being friendly and shaking someone's hand.
Yeah.
But then they would shake your hand and it would buzz them.
Totally.
It felt like a shock and they get really scared.
And I had this other thing where they open a can of popcorn and this crazy snake thing pops out.
Yes.
He's like, oh my God.
And he's like, his mind is blown by this.
He's like...
I'm not kidding.
This conversation lasted for like an hour, where I told him about all of the tricks that I had as a kid.
Yeah.
And for the rest of the trip, like he must have rewatched Pee Wee's Great Adventure six or seven times on this trip.
And he started like going on.
When I would like turn my back or go to the bathroom, he'd like get on my computer and go on Amazon.
He would like look up Pee Wee Herman outfits and like wanted to buy like a red bow tie.
And like he's getting really, really into it.
And I will just note, even though it's pretty obvious, if you know these two men or you can see them in your mind's eye like Pee, Wee is very, very not the rugged Wild West archetype we've been talking about.
He's sort of...
I would say kind of genderless.
He's witty.
He's wily.
He's weird.
He's like very authentic, but he's, he's strange.
He's doing his own thing.
And it's interesting.
I mean, like he's not tough.
He's not tough, but like, yeah, he's, he has a kind of high pitched voice.
He, he walks around in kind of like a, almost like balletic way.
Yeah, yeah.
But he's a man.
He's a grown man.
And I don't... My son is not looking at Pee Wee being like...
Well, he's not a man.
Yeah.
He's just like, yeah, that's a different kind of man.
And he's like, I want a bow tie for myself.
Yeah.
He is clearly like moving in the direction of like he's got a new hero, and it's not Teddy Roosevelt, it's Pee Wee Herman.
And mostly I'm tickled and even moved by this because, like, I was a big comedy nerd as a kid.
I loved Pee Wee.
That's why I showed him the movie.
Like, my bigger hero was weird Al Yankovic.
Like, comedy, I still love comedy.
My wife and I can never agree on a movie because I always want to watch a dumb comedy.
But you're feeling connected to your son in his obsession.
But at the same time, can I just ask like him becoming obsessed with Pee Wee?
Were you worried about that?
Like, if he started to emulate someone who... is different in these ways, like Pee Wee is.
Were you worried?
I mean to bring it back to the beginning of our conversation.
Just straight up, were you worried he'd get beat up if he started wearing the bow tie?
Yes.
And here's the thing, right?
In the movie, which again, I highly recommend people watch.
It's a great movie.
But in the movie, it's a beautiful fantasy because Pee Wee doesn't really get bullied there is one jerk named francis who steals his bike but like there are these bros in his in his little fictional town who are these alpha mountain biker bros and like they give him high fives he gets respect he's not a loser and he's not a geek and he's not a wimp and he's not a bitch like he's just he's peewee everyone loves peewee right he's completely himself He dresses in weird outfits.
At one point in the movie, he puts on these high-heeled boots in front of a biker gang.
And he does a crazy dance, but the biker gang loves it.
And they're like, you're the man.
We love you, man.
And so he spellbinds everybody with his charisma.
And the charisma is born of an absolute belief in himself as an idiosyncratic person powerhouse, individual and just like.
He's like a diva.
He just is who he is proudly, totally individually and idiosyncratically, and he gets respect from the world for that.
And And what was sad for me watching that, especially seeing my son starting to idolize Pee Wee Herman is thinking like well, wouldn't that be amazing if my son could be like a total idiosyncratic weirdo and proud of it and dress however he wants to dress and not play sports and instead do weird dances and wear whatever you know.
But, like, in the real world, wouldn't peewee get his ass beat?
In the real world, wouldn't people be calling peewee nasty homophobic words?
And in fact, like my son, doesn't know this, but in the real world, peewee did get fucked over by homophobic culture and had his life ruined by it.
Yeah.
Right?
And, of course, like, my son doesn't know all of that.
Of course not.
But I am thinking, like, okay, I'm willing to, like, let him go all in on this.
And, by the way, he literally like, if it was up to him, he would wear a suit to school with a bow tie every day.
I have told him, like, he can do it sometimes.
Like, he's got to wear regular hoodie and jeans most of the time.
Oh, my God.
But, like, he does dress like Pee Wee now.
And you're telling me, like you're looking at this and you think it's wonderful, and you also are like this is not the real world.
And if you were to truly wear your suit and your bow tie to school every day, you might get picked on beat up.
There's this scene that you have in your piece where you can kind of sense you grappling with, like wanting to encourage this authentic part of your son, but also trying to remind him of the kind of real world dynamics that you want to have him protect himself from.
Can you explain and you do it via like a bit of role playing actually can you explain what happened towards the end of the trip?
So on the last night of the trip, We had this road trip.
A lot of stuff happened.
He clearly moved from getting really excited about the strenuous life to getting more excited about the peewee life, which is fine.
A classic.
He's who he is.
And he also showed me on this trip in a lot of ways.
That he may not be as physically brave as other kids, but he's very emotionally brave.
He's the kind of kid... Who will point out the thing about Teddy Roosevelt.
Yeah.
And, by the way, also will talk about his own feelings very openly in a way that like I can I mean unless I'm on a podcast with you.
I can never talk about my feelings.
But basically yeah, he'll say things like I'm feeling sad because I'm feeling lonely because of this or that.
He'll actually articulate those things out loud.
But anyway, it's the end of the trip.
He's turning in that peewee direction.
And I am thinking in the back of my head, like...
Look, I'm a creative professional.
Like, I want him to be unique.
The last thing I want to do is have a normie as a son, right?
Like, I love the idea if he's the idiosyncratic.
Like, I don't want to raise a conformist.
I love the fact that he's different.
And he even says to me, he's like, he knows that he's different.
He says, Dad...
I'm different.
I'm not like the other kids.
And I love that.
I don't want him to be like the other kids.
I really don't.
But I also don't want him to get his ass beat at some point.
And so, like, I'm thinking so much for the strenuous life.
He's already moved on from that.
So it's the final ending of the Airbnb.
Like, we packed everything up.
I'm tugging him to bed, and I'm like...
But I just have this feeling I'm like all right well, I want to like have a more direct conversation with him about bullying, because I'm still worried that, like he might get bullied at some point.
And you know I'm thinking to myself if he's really going to go in this direction, like And it's not like he's never been picked on.
He has been picked on.
Nothing severe, but, like, he's still pretty young.
And I'm thinking, like, he's about to go into fourth grade.
Like, it was the summer.
It was last summer.
He's about to go.
He's now in fourth grade.
I'm like fourth grade was when I remember real bullying started to begin, you know, and soon he'll be in middle school.
So i'm like, all right, i can't quite give up on my mission to toughen him up.
So i say like, all right, i want to do like a role playing thing where i'm going to pretend to be a bully and i want you to like, basically stand up for yourself and um and stand up to me.
So just pretend i'm a bully and you be you and i'll be the bully.
What did he say to that?
He was like, that's kind of weird.
And I'm like, just go with it, man.
All right.
So I come up to him.
I'm like he has this idea that he wants to start a technology company including, you know, making a ray gun that will destroy all the sports balls.
He wants to build a time machine.
He wants to build a machine that will replicate money so that he can be both the richest man in the world and successful give money to all the poor people in the world.
It seems like a very exciting company.
So his company is called Clementine.
Shout out to Clementine.
And he's got his own logo that he draws of like an Apple logo, but with a Clementine.
So anyway, so I come up to him like. bro, like, Hey man, Clementine sucks.
Clementine is never going to succeed as a company.
And like, you're a loser.
I'm like going a little far, but like, I wanted to create a realistic bully scenario.
I'm like, Clementine's a failure and you're dumb and you're a loser.
And then he's like, that's not true.
Clementine's a good company.
And I'm like, that's how you're going to respond.
And I'm like, so then I'm like doubling down.
I'm like, You're a coward.
Like, I'm going to beat you up.
You're a loser.
You know, like, no one likes... Can I pause you for a second?
Were you speaking from a place of...
Where were these words coming from?
What were you drawing on to be this bully?
The things people said to me.
Okay, that's what I thought.
So I'm not saying the word bitch in front of him, but I'm like when I told my wife that I role-played and even used the word loser, she's like that's a little harsh.
I'm like, yeah, I guess it was, but I was trying to prove a point.
Kids talk to each other in really nasty ways.
So I'm like, you're a loser.
Nobody likes you.
Like, basically, like, you're different in a bad way.
And then he's really like, no, I'm not.
Like, I'm good, you know.
And I'm like, keep trying.
And finally, I'm like, all right.
Like, at one point, I, like, gave him a fake shove.
Was that uncomfortable for you to, like, even just play act?
Yeah.
Being a bully to your own side?
I mean, it must have been hard.
It didn't feel good to do that.
Uh-huh.
I don't recommend this to, like, listeners at home.
I don't think this is, like, a great parenting moment or whatever.
It was, like, it was an experiment.
Yeah.
And then at one point, like he hit me, but in this like really soft way, where like he didn't punch me with a fist.
He just kind of like tapped me him, and then he hit you back and i didn't really show yeah, of course, like a fake show yeah yeah, but but he like taps me and i'm like all right, this is like a very stupid activity and i'm gonna call it quits and like this was uh, you know, a fail and uh, not a like good parenting moment, but i tried it, it was a failed experiment, yeah.
And as I'm moving on, he's like oh wait wait wait, wait.
I thought of a good way to fight back against the bully.
Be a bully again, Dad.
Be a bully again.
So I'm like, all right, fine.
I'm like, hey, you're a loser.
Nobody likes you.
Your company's going to fail.
And he goes, well, I'm glad you feel that way.
I'd rather be friends with you than fight you.
Can I offer you a piece of gum?
And I'm like, really?
That's nice.
I wasn't expecting that.
But like, sure, yeah, I'll have some gum.
And so he like hands me like a pretend piece of gum.
And I like pretend to unwrap it and I put it in my mouth and I start chewing.
And then he's like, I have news for you.
It's trick gum.
Yeah.
And then i'm like no, i'm like i can't believe it's trick gum.
And then i like, you know, pretend.
But again, like when he said that, i was just like that, i played, i role played for a little while of like pretending.
You know, black ooze was coming out of my mouth and like fell on the floor and i'm like, oh my god.
And then afterwards i was just like that was a really like you got me, man.
That was it.
Like you did it.
You did it.
You got the bully.
That was it.
I was not expecting that at all.
I'm feeling like really... I never thought that, but I'm very moved by the trick gum.
Because there's something He's obviously kind of directly copying a scene from Pee-wee's Playhouse.
Let's just say that.
What did you see him doing there?
You know, it was interesting because I guess, if I'm going to like analyze it, i feel like he was like, of course, really like consciously, he's just imitating peewee herman and doing something that he thinks is funny, but like, On an unconscious level, he's doing something kind of profound, which is he's saying like you're way bigger than me.
And I'm not going to be able to beat you with brawn or fists.
And I'm going to use my wits to beat you.
And I'm also going to use.
You know, it's not like.
The thing about trick gum is that it is harmless, right?
It doesn't it just it's just kind of embarrassing.
Yeah, it's just black ooze.
And, you know, it doesn't even taste that bad.
And but he's like I'm going to use this other weapon, which is humor to like diffuse the situation.
And it just struck me as like what he was actually offering was a third way.
And he's saying the third way is you can stand up for yourself without physically hurting someone.
You can use your wits.
You can be yourself.
You can use the tools that you have at your disposal rather than the ones that society tells you you're supposed to have right.
And it was just something that showed me okay, this kid can't fight but, like in his own way, this kid is kind of a lion in his own way.
You know, like he's got something deep and he's got a kind of inner belief in himself that I actually didn't have as a kid.
And I'm not crediting myself for that.
I think a lot of this is just innate.
But here I was, like I wanted to teach him some lessons so that he could avoid a lot of the painful stuff that i felt as a kid not having self-confidence, and like i saw in that moment i'm like he actually already has it.
And when you see something like that, like you realize that your job as a parent is to like walk away and just let him do his own thing.
You know, and um, Like one of the hardest things you can do as a parent, but most important things I think you can do is like believe in your child and know that they got this.
You know, and that was like the moment where I just felt like he's got this.
He's got this.
And like I don't have to mold him into anything.
He's got this.
Do you still worry about him?
Yeah.
I mean, he got his class picture back yesterday.
He is the only person in the class picture wearing a suit.
He's wearing a peewee suit?
Is he wearing a bow tie?
I wish for the sake of this show.
I think we told him, if you're going to wear a suit, please wear a tie.
But he has a bow tie, and we learned how to tie a real bow tie.
So he's wearing a tie in that one, but he has some bow ties and vastly prefers to wear bow ties.
But I do still worry about him a little bit because he is different.
And there's no way you can be different without bumping up against society.
In a frictionless way.
Yeah.
I mean, and so I know that pain is going to come his way, but I guess I just I'm not up at night about it because I I just feel like he kind of has this peewee quality of just like Not giving a fuck.
That's the thing I really realized is that what I want for my son, for my daughter, for myself, for all the people I love, is just to walk around with a sense of freedom that you can be.
Yeah.
And, like, that's the quality that I care about.
Not, can you kick someone's ass or can you, like, get back up if someone kicks your ass.
It's just can you be yeah, can you be a peewee and ride your red bike around and, like you know, feel good about that?
Yeah. his superpower.
And I don't know.
Look, let's see what happens, you know, like when the rubber meets the road, like if he actually gets horribly bullied, I don't know what's going to happen.
And, by the way, like I here's another thing that that has happened since the road trip is like I really didn't.
I don't care if he doesn't want to play sports, but I did feel that like I don't want him to just be in his head.
So I'm like, you have to pick one physical activity.
So I thought of like, after I saw him climbing on those buttes, I thought like maybe he can get into rock climbing.
Yeah.
And so I signed him up for this rock climbing class and he was really really, really scared at first and he was not good at it.
And he's really taken to rock climbing.
Amazing.
And that's been a cool thing to watch.
And that's like an example of something where like...
He doesn't have to fight anyone.
He doesn't have to hurt anyone or punch anyone.
But it is a thing in which he has to do a scary thing.
And the thing about rock climbing is once you conquer one kind of wall, then you do a harder wall.
So he's doing a thing where he is confronting his fears and he's showing that he's willing to go back at it and go back at it.
And that's been really cool to watch.
And that was not something he... would have been capable of last year.
So, yeah.
I want to see him climb a rock wall in a suit.
That's probably his dream.
That's probably his dream.
He's on the phone about Clementine.
Yeah, exactly.
Sam Graham-Felsen, thank you.
Thank you very much.
The Modern Love team is Amy Pearl, Davis Land, Elisa Gutierrez, Emily Lang, Jen Poyant, Lynn Levy, Reva Goldberg and Sarah Curtis.
This episode was produced by Davis Land.
It was edited by Lynn Levy and Jen Poyant.
Original music in this episode by Pat McCusker, Marion Lozano, Diane Wong, Carol Saburo and Dan Powell
This episode was mixed by Sonia Herrero.
The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones.
Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects.
If you'd like to submit an essay or a tiny love story to The New York Times.
We've always got those instructions in our show notes.
I'm Anna Martin.
Thanks for listening.
