Of the two things that I can claim any great paternal accomplishment for, one is that my daughter, age 3, drinks a collard-and-dandelion-green smoothie almost every morning. The other is that she loves Gene Kelly. You see, we’ve reached the point where she’s old enough for me to start showing her the things I love, which thrills me in the same way I get excited to tour my own city when someone comes to visit. “This guy sells the best carrots and strawberries at the farmers’ market.” “This is the shrimp taco from Mariscos Jalisco.” “This is Singin’ in the Rain.”
If anything was going to spark my daughter’s fascination with Kelly, it had to be the greatest movie musical of all time. We began about 30 minutes into the film, with Donald O’Connor’s rendition of “Make ’Em Laugh,” the slapstick number in which he runs up and crashes through walls—and soon she, like O’Connor, was thrusting her elbows and skating across the carpet on her knees (she calls the song “Dancing on My Knees”). She asked for it over and over until I insisted that we watch something else, and skipped ahead to the song the film is named for. This time, Kelly was the star, and my daughter was transfixed—the pronounced jaw, the twinkle in his eye. “Who is that?” she asked.
The next night, we started the movie from the beginning. It wasn’t long before Kelly’s character, Don Lockwood, became smitten with Debbie Reynolds’s Kathy Selden, and then he was off, gliding around lampposts and stomping in puddles. But on this viewing, something changed in me. Watching Kelly through my daughter’s eyes—his bliss in the soundstage downpour, his body a flexile stack of lean musculature and joyous masculinity—I felt a heavy swell in my core. It reminded me of being too drunk in my 20s, overreacting to something beautiful and becoming somehow enraptured and despondent all at once. A flood of adrenaline spread from my rapidly beating heart and exited as moisture from my eyes, and I realized that maybe I wasn’t okay.
I might have forgotten that reaction as a mere aberration, but the next night my daughter asked, “Can we watch more Gene Kelly?” Although she also liked having Mary Poppins and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on repeat, she had never asked to see “more Julie Andrews” or “more Gene Wilder.” In fact, I still don’t think she has registered that Mary Poppins and Maria from The Sound of Music are the same person. But for her, Singin’ in the Rain was not about Don Lockwood—it was about Kelly. We watched again, and it was as if a protective seal had been peeled off my chest cavity, like the lid from a can of Pringles. We watched Anchors Aweigh, and although my daughter was bored through most of it, she sprang to life when Kelly taught the cartoon Jerry Mouse how to sing and dance—and I felt as if I were floating and sinking simultaneously.
Another night, I put on Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Jacques Demy’s underappreciated masterpiece—a French New Wave homage to American musicals—and although my daughter admired the bright colors of The Girls in the Hats, as she called it, the rest was beyond her. So I tucked her into bed and kept watching alone. The movie thrust forward, and I felt my body nearly levitate when Kelly, now in his 50s, showed up, dancing through the streets, exuding athleticism and glee. But that levitation was quickly followed by a steep decline. And the emotions kept hitting.
Perhaps, I thought, this was simply paternal pride—my wonderful daughter, dancing along to Golden Age musicals!—opening a floodgate of emotion. Or maybe I was just becoming a cliché, another “man of a certain age” who gets suddenly teary at the sight of old, elegant things. But no, somehow, these sensations felt deeper, like something dormant awakened: Why the hell was Gene Kelly making me feel so much?
I had expected fatherhood to change me. I knew it would make me care about my family more than myself. But becoming a parent doesn’t automatically remove ego or selfishness. Your baggage carries through even after your kids are born (my wife and I also have a 1-year-old son), even after you think you’ve grown up and gotten through the worst of it.
I had a tendency toward depression in my 20s and early 30s. But historically—and here I’m certain I’m not alone among men—I also tended to bottle it up, to put my head down and deny its existence. I was typically the last person to recognize that I wasn’t doing well. Yet as I entered my 40s, I had become quite sure that I had sort of passively balanced out my emotions, that my condition had taken care of itself. As I watched Kelly gracefully leap up walls and swing from rooftops, however, I realized that balance and stability are related but not the same.
This whole time, I had figured that I’d reached an even keel by just getting through it: prepare breakfast, pack a lunch, take them to school, meet your deadlines, cook dinner, show up, show up, show up. But what you do and how you do it are very different things. Singing and dancing perfectly, but without joy, does not make you Gene Kelly. Or put another way: “Doing everything” but being in a crappy mood while you do it does not make you a good husband or dad. When I didn’t complete a task perfectly, I would overreact and beat myself up. Sometimes I would get a little too mad—at my daughter, at myself—and beat myself up all over again. Kids pick up on energy, and my energy was awful. I sensed that I was standing with one foot shaking on a pinpoint, waiting for the tiniest burst of air from a single jeté to knock me sideways. Kelly, of all people, was the enthusiastic breeze who blew me over—a bellwether more than an instigator of my emotional state.
It was clear to my wife that something was wrong long before it was to me. One afternoon, I made a mistake while trying to help her with a project, costing her a couple of thousand dollars out of her own pocket. It wasn’t an earth-shattering loss. But my error crushed me. I started hyperventilating, so I quickly hid in our bedroom—and then the tears came. When my wife eventually discovered me and held me, I collapsed.
[Read: Dad culture has nothing to do with parenting]
I spoke with my doctor about this episode during a routine physical. She had not seen Rochefort, but she did refer me to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the famous, long-running analysis of human well-being, and to research describing some people’s tendency to hit an emotional rock bottom in their 40s. Much of the research indicates that such declines can happen gradually, or even at different times, rather than coming on as the all-of-a-sudden shock of a stereotypical midlife crisis—which made me think that had I been more emotionally aware, I might have seen my own breakdown coming from a lot further off. Learning about the research was a comfort, in a way, but it didn’t exactly cure me. Depression doesn’t work that conveniently.
Many years ago, I read the actor and writer Stephen Fry discussing depression as being “similar to weather,” as something that comes and goes on its own. This taught me it was something that you have only so much control over and something that you can’t explain by just looking at your circumstances or failures. I’ve since found that the most nefarious thing about depression is that it doesn’t simply feed you lies about yourself to make you feel sad. It takes the things that you already feel and are afraid of—you’re rotten inside; somehow, that rottenness will seep into your family—and supercharges them, so that they seem undeniably true. The Harvard study said of depression that it could “take people who started life as stars and leave them at the end of their lives as train wrecks.” The question I needed to answer, now that I was a father, was how to avoid the wreck.
As I worked through my Kelly-tumbled feelings, I thought back to that famous number in Anchors Aweigh, when he dances with the cartoon mouse. People can watch the clip on YouTube and marvel at it, out of context. But the reason it exists within the narrative of the film is what strikes me now. Kelly’s Joe Brady is a sailor on leave after having received a medal during World War II. He visits the class of a young boy, who asks Joe how he got his award. Rather than tell a horrifying truth about the war, Joe makes up a fanciful tale: One day, he happened upon an animated kingdom where the Mouse King, ashamed that he didn’t know how to sing or dance, had banned his subjects from doing either. Joe takes it upon himself to teach the king how to do both, delighting the king and spreading happiness to the land, earning his medal. It is perhaps the most joyous suppression of trauma in cinema history—Joe’s obfuscation a touching way to shield those young kids from whatever had happened. I, less healthily, was moving through life in a fog, suppressing my emotions in a way that allowed them to grow like mold.
This all twirls in my head as my daughter twirls in front of the TV, hammering home what I now understand as an obvious truth about parenthood in general and my own fatherhood in particular: You can’t take care of your family without taking care of yourself. Or, rather, you—no matter how much weight you are capable of withstanding—are responsible for the weight you make your family carry too.
[From the July/August 2022 issue: Why is Dad so mad?]
Many thousands of words have been written by people worried about the state of “men today” and tussling over conceptions of masculinity. Frankly, I’ve been less concerned with those arguments and more with figuring out for myself which parts of masculinity actually matter, especially when it comes to fatherhood. For instance: “Providing” for your family—a traditional tenet of masculinity—is, to my mind, about so much more than money. Fathers provide their children with an example of the type of person we want to exist in the world. It is not inherently masculine to come home angry from work or to drown your emotions in brown liquor. A “real” man is someone strong enough to admit his faults and mistakes, and to strive to improve.
The Harvard well-being study notes that “the happiest and most satisfied adults” in midlife were “those who managed to turn the question ‘What can I do for myself?’ into ‘What can I do for the world beyond me?’” This reframing has also made me think more about what helping really means. Yes, it helps the people I love when I cook them dinner. But it helps them a great deal more if I am engaged and present—never mind if dinner winds up running 20 minutes behind schedule.
It’s still an absolute point of pride for me that my daughter wants to stay up late watching Gene Kelly. She doesn’t know that he was a maniacal perfectionist, that he practiced for terrifyingly long hours to make everything look easy. She doesn’t know that balance and stability do not just emerge naturally, but require lots of regular, hard work. Those lessons will come. For now, as my kids grow older, I know what I will keep working to show them: that admitting our flaws and failures is necessary, that showing vulnerability is a kind of strength—that ultimately, a joyful and openhearted home is even better for you than dandelion greens.
