As an adoptive parent, especially of older kids, you can expect to spend a lot of time trying to learn who your children are: what makes them tick, the likes and dislikes, and so on. Without the family tree to lean on, it’s kind of a new learning experience every day. What you might not expect is how much time you will also spend, inadvertently, learning about yourself: things you never knew made you tick, likes and dislikes that had been conveniently stowed away—not to mention how much of your own family tree, especially your parents’ parenting styles, will show up at the most inconvenient times. Here I present some of the main things parenting taught me about me: the good, the bad, and maybe most important, the weird.

Warm, Cool

A friend of mine once described the way a person walks into a room as projecting either round or square energy. Round energy is embracing and open to connection, while square energy sets up clear boundaries and is more concerned with announcing, “I’m here!” Perhaps not surprisingly, this friend’s experience was that women more often enter a room with round energy, men with square.

I’ve come to believe that there is something of an analogy in parenting. Any parent—at least, any parent I’ve ever met—has a combination of what I call warm energy and cool energy. It’s not that hard to figure out what they mean: Warm energy is the nurturing, huggy, caretaking side of the parent. Cool energy is the structuring, disciplining, motivating-toward-self-sufficiency side. And similar to my friend’s categories, it would be easy to assign these energies based on gender. But my (admittedly limited) experience tells me otherwise: I know a ton of dads who have way more warm energy than the other kind, and vice versa for a lot of moms.

Examples:

• If your kid gets hurt on the playground, warm energy puts the kid in your lap, gives kid a hug, asks if it hurts, and kisses it. Cool energy asks how it happened, makes sure the scrape is clean, and helps put the Band-Aid on correctly. Cool energy also makes sure there’s always a supply of Disney, Pokémon, or Justice League Band-Aids handy.
• If you’re going out for a grown-up dinner, warm energy makes sure that there’s food prepared for the kids, leaves a list of instructions and contact numbers for the sitter, and calls to check in a few times to make sure everything’s OK. Cool energy reminds the kids what they can and can’t do while the parent is out, tells them to clean up after eating, and instructs them to work it out if any problems come up, unless it’s an emergency. An emergency consists of robbery, fire, and little else.

Being—I thought—a pretty touchy-feely California guy, I was surprised to learn that where my kids are concerned, I am way more cool than warm (back to the cold fish thing). Over the years, I certainly hugged them a lot, but that was usually in the context of a wrestling match. Our time together was more fun and goofy than warm or emotional. I remember a (different) friend once telling me that his wife related better to their daughters when they were younger and needed her more.* He related better to the girls when they were older and needed him less.** Guess which stage worked better for me with my two?

(*Warm energy loves to be needed.)

(**Cool energy loves to be pals.)

I sometimes worry that I didn’t give my guys everything they needed by my lack of warm-ness. I didn’t (and still don’t) do much in the “Aww, you have an ow-ee, wet me kiss it” department. I kissed plenty of scraped knees, but as likely as not I did it in character as Scooby-Doo and made it a big sloppy dog-tongue kiss. Which, if nothing else, at least got everybody giggling.

Being a frequently guilt-ridden person (thanks, Catholic Church! and Mom), I have a laser focus—and elephant memory—for everything I’ve done wrong as a parent. I can tell you every episode of out-of-control anger, meanness, guilt-tripping, and more—even things my kids don’t remember at all. And coupled with that, the laundry list of qualities that contributed to my flops: compulsions and obsessions, self-centeredness, laziness … it’s a lot of laundry. On the flip side, it’s a challenge for me to acknowledge that, on the whole, I did a pretty good job raising these two youngsters. And that I might have a trait or two that contributed something positive to the mix.

Which brings up a few related points, especially for single parents. I think that self-awareness of where you fall on the warm/cool scale is invaluable. And when you realize your natural tendencies, I further think that you have a responsibility to balance them out both by “faking it till you make it” in your weak areas, and by filling out your village with people who favor the other side. On the other hand, don’t beat yourself up trying to be all things to one person, let alone all people. It’s a guaranteed fail. As I tried to explain to Daveon many times, doing your best is good enough.

And finally, enlist your kids to the extent that it makes sense. If you’re not a hugger, ask them to tell you when they need a hug. If you’re an extreme hugger, ask them to tell you when to back off. Then respect what they say. And then don’t be surprised when the kid who just asked you to tone it down starts initiating hugs more frequently on their own.

Weird

If you’ve ever met me, you know that I can talk about my kids all day. But talking about myself—not about what I do, but who I am? Unless you’re one of my closest people, that’s way outside my comfort zone. But there is one quality I want to share that I consider to be my secret weapon in keeping our family interactions relatively light and free-wheeling.

I’m pretty weird.

Being a pretty weird dad has had two terrific consequences. One, as a family, we laughed a lot, especially when the kids were younger and our senses of humor were more aligned (i.e., before they became teenagers and no longer had a sense of humor). And two, even though I hope and think my kids have developed pretty sparkling personalities along the way, our home was definitely a three-person show, and I claimed my fair share of the spotlight. This helped avoid the “it’s all about me” kid perspective that makes so many parents and family dynamics miserable.

How weird, you ask? A few examples:

• For a long time, when I would say good-bye to the kids—for example, when they left for school in the morning—my standard line was every (probably inaccurate) version of “good-bye” I could think of: “So long, see you later, don’t forget to write, auf weidersehen, sayonara, au revoir, adios, ciao, arrivederci roma, vaya con dios, aloha means hello and good-bye.”
• For about an equally long time, I spoke to them in the voice of Scooby-Doo—which translated as (a) starting every word with an “r” and (b) referring to them (either one, it didn’t matter) as Raggy: “Rood rorning, Raggy.” “Row are roo, Raggy?” “Rinner’s ready, Raggy.” Etc.
• When they were stuck on a problem: “You got this, Sherlock Einstein!”
• And when they did something noteworthy: “Wunderbar! That’s German for, wunderbar!”

(And let’s not forget our world-famous bedtime hits, which were a long-standing tradition that I explained in detail earlier.)

So yeah, weird. The good news is that it kept the boys guessing— always a useful strategy for a parent. I also think that it encouraged them to enjoy and express their own quirkiness, so everyone could feel comfortable being himself. Not that they really needed much help with this.

So what the heck. You’re an alt-family anyway, right? Ret your reek rag ry!

Job

One thing I’ve struggled with over the years is remembering that parenting is partly a job, and partly just being with your kids. Actually, the struggle applies to only half of the equation: For better or worse, the job part of parenting came pretty naturally to me. Dinner on the table every night? Of course. Doctor’s appointment? Will be there right on time. Driving? I’m on it. And even more subtle forms of the job: “Let’s check in about your biggest feeling today.” “Let’s go to the bakery so you can pick out the cake you want for your birthday party.” I was so there.

It was only after the first few years of doing the job that I realized, “Wait a minute. There’s another piece here that I’m missing.” And even that happened only after I had dozens, hundreds, thousands of experiences around parents who could just be with their kids: laughing, goofing off, being together doing a whole lot of nothing. It took a lot before that lightbulb finally went off.

Of course, lighting the lightbulb, and acting on the lightbulb, are two different things. Even something as simple as dinner. In one of our beautiful realities, for most of our years, the boys and I sat down to dinner all together almost every night of the week—easy enough when they were little, no small accomplishment when they grew into active teens. But pretty much from the time I picked up my fork, my head—and mouth—went straight to, “What did you get done today? What do you still need to do? Any homework? Anything you need my help with? Whose dish night is it?” The job-me kicked in—or should I say, stayed kicked in—without my even thinking about it.

Even for something like our movie nights, which were a good just-being tradition while they lasted. The whole reason they existed was that job-me decided that movie nights would be a good way to create a family ritual. So even when I’m not in job mode, it’s because of job mode.

I do think things changed—at least a little bit—as we got closer to being a one-kid-under-the-roof family, looking ahead to a no-kid empty nest. Something clicked in my brain that let me shift into just-be mode at least a little more often. It was often as simple as goofing around with the kids for a few minutes in the morning before they headed out to school.* It was—sometimes—letting dinner conversation, or lack thereof, flow naturally from whatever the kids brought up, instead of my laundry list of topics we needed to cover. When I was really on my game about not being so on my game, it was, “What do you guys want to do for dinner tonight?” and then heading out for a meal that most likely involved French fries—spontaneously, even!

(*As with much of my goofing-around time with my kids, this generally involved putting them in a headlock.)

I’m guessing that anyone reading this who falls more on the just-be side of the spectrum is thinking, “Wow, what a nut.” Point taken. In my meager defense, I do think that we job-centered parents get a lot done, and we probably provide a lot of benefit to kids who need a lot of structure. I’ve seen plenty of nonjobber parents whose kids run pretty wild much of the time, and I can’t say I’ve ever thought, “Gee, I wish my kids were more like that.”

I’ve also seen parenting couples where one is the job parent and the other is the just-be (also known as: fun) parent. Based on a small sample size, I have a pretty good idea how well that turns out. Not very.

So as with most things, the single parent needs to find ways to balance good cop/bad cop, enforcer/nurturer, and all the other dialectical roles involved in parenting. As I mentioned in “Warm/Cool,” this means learning one’s natural predispositions and working to incorporate the opposing side. All while being yourself. Piece of cake.

Relentless

This section is arguably more about parenting in general than about me in particular. I’m including it here because it answers the question, “If Joe could describe parenting with one word, what would that word be?” And as with most psychology pop quizzes, the answer reveals at least as much about me as it does about the topic in question. Analyze the following as you will.

A few years ago, one of my alterna-dad friends and I were bemoaning how challenging and difficult this whole exercise of single, gay, adoptive, (etc., etc.,) parenting is. And then one of us—I’d like to take credit, because I think it’s brilliant, but I can’t really remember—said, “You know, it’s not really all that hard. It’s just relentless.”

For me, that statement is so, so true. Most of what you do as a parent—the driving, the meal prep, the “how was your day?” recitations—is not difficult. Some of it is mind-numbingly easy to the point of zombification (folding laundry, anyone?). That’s not what makes parenthood the single most ridiculous pursuit any sane adult could choose. It’s the endless, repetitive, relentless nature of the work.

When you’re a dad, you’re . . . a dad. Always, round the clock, at home, at work (or working from home, as some of us are lucky enough to do), at the gym, on vacation with your kids, on vacation without your kids. Dad. It just . . . is. Even when your kids are safely tucked away at school, and you’re having Friday lunch with a friend, there’s always the possibility of the phone call that says your kid is in trouble, and could you come pick him up right now?

“I’ll need the rest of this wrapped to go, please.”*

(*Not that this ever happened to me. OK, yes it did.)

I remember once, toward the end of the first year the kids were here, waking up early on a very cold, gray Saturday morning. Looking up at the ceiling, and thinking, “Wow. They are going to be here . . . every single day . . . for the rest of my life.”

That was deep.

Truth be told, as the kids got older, some of the relentless nature of the deal let up. I did a ton less driving as they grew more independent—and after Mark finally got his license, I barely drove at all. Even for things like meals, a lot of summer and weekend dinners became based on the principle, “You guys make it work.” Good thing they know how to cook.

And of course, at a certain point they weren’t here-here (as in, under this roof), and the relentlessness died away completely. But they will always be here-here—in some portion of my brain, my heart, my hope chest, my anxiety chest—until one of us keels over. Which I tell them needs to be me first, because it would be too sad for me to live without them.

In a way, I feel grateful for relentless. It means that the norm for us was the boring, repetitive stuff of daily life. The actual crises—which we had as well—were few. By comparison, relentless didn’t look so bad.

Next Chapter: Actions Speak Louder