He Was Doing the Best He Could

When I look back at it, I realized that what was missing was the connection from him. And I didn't know that it wasn't there, and I didn't understand what I was missing until it was gone.

This is a conversation that really moved me and that I'm really looking forward to sharing with all of you. I want to say in advance that in this episode, we'll be talking about death by suicide. And I want you to know this before you choose to listen. This episode has a really interesting backstory. I was connected to Alex through a LinkedIn post he created after he listened to a podcast episode I was on where I was talking about the power of repair. In this conversation, Alex and I talk about fatherhood, about his relationship with his dad, about intergenerational change, about what success really means to him and the legacy he wants to pass on to his sons. I think this conversation is going to really move you, and I'd encourage you to listen to it all the way through, because what Alex shares at the end is something that I think you won't ever forget. I'm Dr. Becky, and this is good inside. We'll be back right after this. So I was tagged. You tagged me in a post you put up on LinkedIn. And it had to do with your relationship with your dad, and it had to do with, I think, one of my favorite and what I think is one of the most important topics to ever talk about, which is the power of repair. As parents, we put in so much into our relationship with our kid. We feel so awful when things don't go the way we want. We yell, we do this. And I always want parents to know, wait, not too late. We can repair. But also, I think it's powerful for us as parents to think about the repair we might need from our parents and kind of the way we kind of still carry with us some of the pain and the gaps. And I both believe our parents were doing the best they can with the resources they had available. And I believe that often that still did leave us with marks and scars. And that as adults, we can, some ways take matters into our own hands if our parents won't repair and give ourselves an imagined repair that can actually have a very real, not imaginary, impact. Okay, so on this theme, you had something to say. So what is your experience now of coming to this conversation?

Yeah, I had heard you on a slight change of plans with Dr. Maya Shankar, and you made a comment, something to the effect of, wouldn't it be great if your parents reached out and Just kind of said, oh, I. I'm sorry.

When we're trying to establish a closer relationship with our kids or anyone, repair is often, like, the best starting point. If you just imagine your own parent calling you, like, hey, like, I've been thinking a lot about our relationship and the way I did things. And I just. I know there were a lot of things that felt really bad to you, and I get that, and you were right to feel that way, and I care about you. And I know we can't do a complete 180 right now, but I'm willing to listen, and I want to do things differently. I just don't know one adult who's like, yeah, it's too late. Like, that would do nothing.

And I thought to myself when I heard that, that would be great, but it can't happen to me. And I think it was sort of a defensive. You know, I felt sort of victimized by that. But after a minute, I said, well, I actually have the choice of what he would say. And it's something my wife has really helped me with, is the idea that since he's gone, I get to choose the narrative. And I can't prove one way or another that that isn't what he would say. And so I can pick a narrative where I'm the victim, or I can pick a narrative where it really comes from a genuine place and wanting that repair. And so I kind of let it sit for a night, and then the next morning, I sat down and I wrote it a letter of what I thought he would say if he knew what pieces of it I needed to hear. And it was 10 minutes, one shot. I looked at it, and I thought, yeah, that's about right.

I think there's so many people listening, whether it's their mom, their dad, a caregiver, who is important in their life. Where we do. We carry kind of. We carry pain with us of patterns. Sometimes it's very specific interactions, specific moments, and that really does play out in different ways in our life. And I think it actually probably plays out in our interactions with our kid. And yet at the same time, this kind of pausing and thinking, wait, like, what are the words I needed to hear if my parent did call me, if my parent did write a letter, if I found a letter because my parents are already deceased. And I said, wow, I can't believe I never read this. What would it say? Those words are often the exact words we're waiting to hear. And even if they don't come from the mouth of our parents, they actually have this very powerful impact. So I wonder if we could dive a little deeper if you can share a little bit more about your relationship with your dad. Right. Obviously there is this awareness, wow, I'm not going to get that repair. I could have used it. But if we rewind 40 something years, could you tell us a little bit more about what was, what's behind that need for repair?

I think what happened in my childhood was sort of paradoxical. On the one hand, it was very happy, it was very surface level. I had lots of things given to me, I had lots of opportunities. But I think when I look back at it, I realized that what was missing was the connection from him. And I didn't know that it wasn't there and I didn't understand what I was missing until it was gone.

You know, how do you think about the difference with your dad between connection and presence? Because they're different, right?

Yeah. He was hardworking, he had stayed late at work, he would come home, he would swim for an hour. I don't have memories of sort of family dinners or things like that. He was the one who always took me to soccer games. I do remember that. But he would be sitting on the sideline reading a book and I always remember thinking, why isn't he watching? And I even asked my mom, I think once upon a time, when I was probably 8 or 9 years old, how come dad doesn't watch the soccer games? And her response didn't mean much to me at the time, but she said something to the effect of he's doing the best he can. And didn't mean a lot to me as an 8 year old. But again, looking back, knowing that he was terribly depressed, understanding that it was hard for him just to be there, just to be a part of it, it makes a lot more sense now.

Wow, he's doing the best he can. So can you share a little bit more about your dad's depression and kind of what you knew then and I guess really what and what you learned later?

Yeah. So in a lot of ways, the story starts with my grandfather. My dad's dad, he is sort of the classic American story, was the first to go to college, went to work at a mail room, worked his way up to literally being considered for the CEO of a major US Corporation. He left my dad and my dad went to boarding school when he was 13. And this was sort of at the time, my grandfather living what success looked like. He had made lots of money, he'd made lots of opportunity for himself, for his son. And that was really the life that my dad was handled. My dad was an only child and this was sort of his legacy was, I've done so well now you take the baton and you do it. And my dad did. He was very successful. He went into fundraising. He was very good at it. He eventually started his own company and that was doing well. And that sort of afforded me the childhood that I experienced, you know, privilege from just about every standpoint you could look at it. But I didn't know that. The second piece of it was he had been depressed for a very long time and his business stopped being quite so successful and all of a sudden he was gone. He took his own life. And for everybody else, it was a tragic, but not terribly unexpected because they were privy to his depression. People who are closest to him really knew that that's what was going on with him. But for me, at 11 years old, I didn't know any of that. So I had a very different experience of his passing, the grief. Because sort of the closest people to me and him, they had been looking at it from sort of a long term disease standpoint. But to me it was a total shock.

There's so many different things. First of all, I'm so sorry that that happened and sorry for him and I'm sorry for you. That's, I mean, a massive loss in a tragic way for a kid. And it sounds like also like you were in the dark. Like you were just in the dark about this whole depressed internal life. Your dad was kind of playing out. But I think one of the things you're insinuating is something that I think about over and over with kids is our kids are figuring out the world and kind of coloring in, you know, their coloring books as they live in the world. So what does it mean to have a dad that's like a coloring page? Well, I have a dad, and this is the way he dads and he works very hard and seems very invested in his job and has a hard time kind of really being present and connected versus just being present and disconnected. And that's what fatherhood is. Right. And the adults around you who've lived a more nuanced life probably could have said, well, that's not what every dad does. And your dad is depressed and here's his family history. And so that's what's going on for him. But that's. That's a very big gap from your probably early experience.

Yeah. And I certainly think about that a lot with my kids because of the Messages that I took home from this experience were all wrong. And there were people there trying to correct it. And some of them helped me a lot do that in time. But like you said, I had to fit in the stories around the events that were happening and the ones that I came up with probably didn't make a lot of sense. But I was 11. That's how it works. And I think it's a really important thing. Lesson that I've taken as a dad is to recognize these kids are taking home messages from everything I do. And you really got to check in and ask them, what do you see? How do you feel about that? What did you learn from this? You know, just even simple questions like what do you think mom and dad do for their jobs? And to hear their descriptions. You know, parents who ask those get probably hilarious answers. I know we did when we ask our kids that.

Yes. And part of your role is making meaning if there's something that feels dangerously off. Right?

Right. Yeah. And digging into why is that the piece of it that you picked up on and where, where did that story come from?

What were some of the lessons you think? Kind of 11 year old Alex, kind of. What did he draw from his early interactions with his dad?

I thought that certainly dads worked a lot and their job was to make money and be successful. And you know, my dad, I lived that experience from watching my dad. But my grandfather was even more explicit about it and you know, he had lived that life and now he was directly telling me, this is what you do. We have set you up for success. You'd better go out and capitalize on that. I remember him telling me a story has probably around the same age, maybe I was even a little bit older after my dad had died, that the way that wealth works in America is the first generation makes it, the second generation sees all the hard work that goes into it, and the next generation after that is the one that blows it. And he said, you're not going to be that. You're going to work hard. And I remember thinking, okay, you know that that's what I have to do. You're right, I don't want to do that.

Can I ask you another question? I'm curious. It might not, you know, obviously tell me if I'm wrong, but was this part of the lesson learning too, around men and fatherhood, that you give privilege to your kids through financial success?

I think for my grandfather, that was the only metric that mattered because he grew up without that. And so he viewed that as that's what success was. If I can send my kid to a fancy boarding school, I've set him up for his success, I've done my job. And I think my dad probably struggled with the midpoint of understanding that that was what was important to him, but at the same time recognizing that maybe that wasn't all right, that it had set him up for some types of success, but maybe there was more to the picture. And we'll never know for sure. But I have to feel like that struggle of what is success probably was in the mix for him a lot of steps of the way.

You know, Alex, it's so interesting we're having this conversation because just a couple nights ago in my home with my, interestingly enough, 12 year old son, we were talking about the word privilege and he had been talking about in school and so many different types of privilege, right? And he actually has a bunch of them. And one of the things I said to him is, you know, there's another form of privilege that isn't talked about as often, but I, I personally think is a massive privilege is the privilege of growing up in an emotionally connected, secure home. And he said, you know, of course, like, what do you mean? And you know, we talked about how the early years impact the way you see the world and what you expect and how you kind of feel about yourself going about the world and how when you grow up in a home where the parents 100% are not perfect and still make efforts to connect, be emotionally present, talk to you about your emotional life, kind of both hold boundaries and validate the reality of your emotional experience. You, you really enter the teenage years and the adult years with a sense of wow, I can tolerate a really wide range of feelings. I feel like it's okay to be me amidst a wide range of feelings. I feel like my worth and my value is separate from my accomplishments. And actually that gives me the strength to pursue a ton of different things and work really hard and take on challenges and bounce back from failures. Because I actually don't t one metric to kind of my identity or my sense of self and that we're just talking about all the different ways that would show up. And so it's just interesting that here we are talking about privilege and the idea, I think that is inherent, I don't know about in other countries, definitely I think in American masculinity or fatherhood, that my job is to give my kids this financial success, financial privilege. And yet I think so much of your story is, I don't know if It's a questioning of that or an expanded, more nuanced view of that.

Yeah, well, and I think it's interesting because it takes a very sharp turn at this point. I would say up to that point I hadn't been a particularly emotionally connected person, but I am a deeply feeling person. And so this really opened the door to kind of having no choice but to start tapping into that part of my life because there was so much pain. And I went from then on and even really before that, in a lot of ways I was raised by a single mom who is highly emotional, was very good at helping me understand my emotions, and could not have been better suited for what I needed from that moment onward to help with that. And so I have the vision of dad, but then I also have this sort of offsetting vision of mom who is always there to support, always curious about my feelings. Obviously she was dealing with her own host of them. And as a result of that, there were things that were missed or conversations that maybe probably needed to happen and didn't. But I think I really did get that. And in some ways it kind of only came out of me because of what happened with my dad.

Yeah. You talk about in your post the power of most generous interpretation with your dad. Can you speak a little bit about that? Because I have to imagine after he suicided at point, some, some point, I don't know if you felt mad, all types of feelings came up. And I'm curious, you could speak a little bit about that and then how that idea of MGI was. Was useful.

Yeah. I think probably once the shock wore off, I was very mad. Think that the real, probably first decade of dealing with my dad's passing was how could you do this to me? How could you leave me? How could you think that this was better? And that was the real first stage of anger in the grief recovery. And it took a long time for me to get to it's okay that he left. And to get there, I had to really understand he didn't do it to me. It probably was a much worse experience for him. It was a sickness that he was afflicted with, not a choice that he made. And that allowed me to say, if he was in that much pain, then I wouldn't want him to stay for me. I wish he wouldn't be in that pain. I wish there was another way. But if that really was the choice, I'm accepting this.

Yeah.

And I thought that that was the end of the line for processing in a lot of ways. And then when my first son was born, it switched again. And I didn't see it coming. It wasn't something. I don't have an aha moment around it. But I sort of thought to myself, there is nothing in the world that would take me away from this child that would make me choose to leave him. How could he do this to me? And I kind of went all the way back to the beginning again of now feeling this for my son. This is outrageous to me again. And the journey there, fortunately, went a different direction this time, which was very quickly. I probably. I think my son was one. And I remember thinking, you know, I would never leave this kid. But if my brain was so sick as to think that was the best option, there is something really wrong. And the journey to my dad of getting to that point now, it really was empathy. It really was. I cannot fault him for anything if that's really where he got to. And I think that's where the most generous interpretation I really was opened up to that at that point in this really was just about him. This was his pain, this was his illness, and this was the only way he could deal with it. And it wasn't like he didn't try. He had been in therapy. He had tried many different medications. But it was the 1990s. We didn't know nearly as much about it today.

And I think men were probably even more closed off than they are today about their mental health.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah. And I think that was probably, especially given what I know about my grandfather's reaction to it. There was probably a deep shame that he felt around it.

You know, one of the things you're saying, Alex, that resonates so strongly is I think there are probably a lot of people listening to this who hold a lot of pain and anger with their own parents. You know, I hear a lot from parents. I feel so proud of the parent I'm showing up, you know, as for my kid. But I can't help as I work on this, to feel that much angrier toward my parent for what they didn't kind of seemingly work for to me. Right. And I think anyone listening who has that anger that is so common. And one of the things you're saying, Alex, is kind of this idea of the solutions and the problems. My problem is like, how. How could my dad not have been there for me? How could my mom have been so absent? My dad who struggled with depression or addiction or left us or, you know, these things that were, of course, and still are so painful. And what I mean by the solutions. And the problem is this shift you made or just this addition of. Wait a second. I know how much I love my kid. I know the kind of natural draw I have to my kid. So if my own parent had such a big struggle that it got in the way of this connection with me, like kind of, holy moly, that must have been so massive. Because if I'm going to assume they had the same connection to me as I had to my kid, then that tells me something about the magnitude of the thing they were struggling with. And to be clear, for anyone listening, this is not a way of saying, so you shouldn't be upset. No, we think, you know, one of the big ideas I always try to put out, there's multiple things can be true at once. Two things can be true. Wow. My parent was suffering in such a deep, deep way. And wow. I'm also still allowed to have feelings about it. But when I really can sit with both of those things at once, it probably stops being purely anger and it starts to be, wait, wait, that's weird. There's anger and empathy. There's frustration and understanding. Like, kind of these things can all be there at the same time.

Yeah. In thinking about how I have processed it, it really is like that moment in Inside out when all of a sudden the balls have multiple colors. Right. That one memory can share those multiple emotions at the same time. And for me, actually, there's a very clear moment around that, which was. I remember thinking before I had kids, even at some point, I was really grateful for the struggle that my dad left me because it had opened me up to my emotions in a way that I don't think anything else in my life really would have caused. And that was what opened me up to the best friendships I had, you know, my marriage, all of these really positive things. And then sort of my immediate reaction to that was deep shame. Right. What kind of a monster are you for being grateful that your dad died? How could you be that way? And that was a, you know, bury that deep. Don't tell anybody that for a long time, until I read the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. And he talked about how actually, when things affect you that deeply, you kind of have no choice but to see it both for the good and the bad. And it doesn't mean there's anything wrong. It just means that that was such a fundamental piece of your life that you couldn't help but grow from it. And that that's what. What your statement kind of brings up for me is the recognition of, I don't know that I'm happy or sad or angry about my dad going the path that he chose. I'm just me. And I have had to deal with the suffering, and I have had to grow from the pain. And there are good things and bad things that have come from that. But it's really up to me and my choice of do I want to make myself the victim in this situation, or do I want to make sure that I'm the end of this line, right? That this train stops with me and I do the best I can for my sons.

That is so well said. I mean, so beautifully, poignantly said. You know, I'm wondering if we could end with this letter you wrote, if you'd be willing to read it. Right? This is the thing that stuck out to me the most on your post that really introduced us in this type of way, not just on a podcast, that you had actually taken the time to. To move from this imagined repair from your father to something. You actually created this letter, these words that you needed to hear, probably then. And if we needed to hear something at age 11, we still need to hear it now, regardless of the source. So would you be willing to read that?

Yes, of course. Dear Alex, I know this letter cannot ever make up for the pain I've caused you. You needed a dad that was able to love and support you, and I wasn't able to be that dad in the way you needed. I'm so sorry. I didn't understand that love could exist outside of success. I believed that if I failed at my business, I would not be loved. I see now that was wrong, but I couldn't see it then. I didn't recognize that by ending my life the day after Father's Day, you would take this action so personally. I wish I had been able to think about others and the impact this would have. And I tried. But at the end, that wasn't how my brain worked. I genuinely believed the world was better off without me. But that was not a reflection of how much I loved you or your mother. It was a reflection of how sick I had become. The only thing I felt at the end was pain and suffering. I had lived with it, fought it as best I could for years. It was my struggle to manage, and I failed. That is my biggest regret. I'm so proud of the person you've become in spite of the situation I left for you, dad.

What was that like for you to write? Was it painful? Did it take a while? Did it feel like when you gave yourself the opportunity, the words kind of came out from you.

Yeah, it's probably 30 years to figure out the words. And it took me 10 minutes to write them. I sat down honestly, and I wrote it in one pass. And I looked at it and thought, that's pretty much it. But the pieces that went into knowing what to say were suffering through the therapies and pain and taking it personally and harming others because of how much pain I was in all through the years.

Yeah. You know, I. I often think that intergenerational change. Right. Cycle breaking, intergenerational change does not start by changing the way we interact with our kids. It starts by changing the way we interact with ourselves. And I feel like this is such a poignant example of exactly that. I just, I just want to say. I want to say thank you. Thank you for sharing it here. Thank you for sharing it with so many people through LinkedIn. I know this is going to hit so many people in the exact place they need to hit it. And I, I think it really will inspire people to sit down and, you know, people have said to me, you literally mean sit down and write a letter. And I'll say, yeah, I literally mean that. Like, I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it. And reading your letter is just, just more healing than, like, than probably anything else someone's, someone else's words, you know, would be able to impact. And so I think it's amazing that you did that and that much more amazing that you're inspiring. I hope you know you're inspiring so many other people to have that same type of healing. Thank you for being willing to share your experience and your story with so many.

Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks to Airbnb. Remember, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out more@airbnb.com host and thanks to Mommy's Bliss. Check out their new pain and fever medicine@mommy's bl.bliss.com thank you for listening. To share a story or ask me a question, go to goodinside.com podcast or you could write me@podcastoodinside.com parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world and you deserve resources and support so you feel empowered and confident for this very important job you hold. I'm so excited to share Good Inside Membership. It's the first platform that brings together content and experts you trust with a global community of like valued parents. It's game changing and built for a busy parent who wants to make the most out of the few minutes they have. Good inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom at Magnificent Noise. Our production st staff includes Sabrina Farhey, Julia Knapp and Kristin Muller. I would also like to thank Erica Belsky, Mary Panico, Brooke Zant and the rest of the good inside team. And one last thing before I let you go. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves, even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain good inside.