The Bear Dad

Did you have one of those dads who "never raised his voice?" No? Us either. What is a bear dad and is it ok to be one? If you have more than one child, are you a different parent to each one? PODRE discusses these and other pressing items with Keith Gessen, cofounder of N+1 and author of RAISING RAFFI (Viking 2022), a new book on dadhood and raising the little maniacs we adore so much. Then, we honor the very first recipient of the Not a Terrible Father in This One Instance Award (NATFITOIA), author and physician Dr. Ricardo Nuila, who regales us with his heroic tale of fatherly improvisation, provides some tips on flying with your children, and explains what a baby cop is.

You can get yourself of copy of Keith Gessen's RAISING RAFFI here, here, or here.

You can read one of the essays from RAISING RAFFI in it's original publication, some little zine called The New Yorker, where Keith is a frequent contributor, here.

Ricardo Nuila's excellent new nonfiction book THE PEOPLE'S HOSPITAL is available for order here.

Then head over to podrepod.com for more information about the show and to sign up for email updates so you never miss an episode or that moment in the near future when we blast out the special patented PODRE secret instructions for how to be the perfect dad.

New episodes every Monday.

Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning, but what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE.

Chris: I'm a millennial parent, so I basically document every single day of their lives in photos, in videos. I like to share a lot of that, too. I mean, I like to show friends and family how funny they are, how cute they are, what cool kids they are. The thing, though, is that of course, that content that I'm sharing is curated, right? Like, I'm showing you the good stuff. Case in point, last November, we drove out to Letchworth State Park, this place where the Genessee River flows through this gorge and drops about 600ft. It's an incredibly beautiful place. It's not too far from where we live. We'd never been there before. We parked the car, and I'm excited, and I'm thinking, this is going to be pretty great. And we get to the edge, and it took my breath away. How tall do you think that waterfall is, Julian? 700ft. It was stunning. I'd never seen a waterfall that big. And I said, Julian, come here. You got to see this. I couldn't wait for him to see it. And he runs over, and he's just like me, has the same reaction, just astonished. And I'm I'm looking over. I'm kind of doing the parent thing. I'm seeing, like, where are the dangerous spots? Where can somebody slip and fall? And I'm thinking, this is pretty open. They don't have a railing up or anything. But he climbs up right at the edge, and I'm saying, Whoa, hold on there. Just sit right where you are. He sits long enough for me to take one photo. He looks at me, I snap the photo. The waterfall is raging behind him. There's this mist catching sunlight. It's a beautiful photo. And then it's over. I put the phone in my pocket, and he's climbing farther and farther out. And I'm telling him not to. And I'm getting scared. I'm saying, hey, man. Hey. And he's arguing with me. He's saying, no, no, no, I can do it. I'm fine. I got it. And now I'm getting really scared because it's it, you know, it's it's tapping into that kind of primal place as a parent. So, of course I'm just reacting. And I grab him, and we're doing this kind of dance where I don't want to startle him. I don't want him to fight against me because then he might really lose his footing. Finally, I can't do this. And I pick him up and I take him away from the waterfall. And he is furious. And he's yelling at me that he's not going to fall. He knows what he's doing and to let him go and let him go back there. But now I'm dug in, and I'm saying no way. I'm not letting you go back there if you're not going to listen. We're not going to do it. And I find myself walking back to the car as I'm holding him, and I'm carting him away, and he's trying to get away from me. He's kind of kicking and thrashing and wiggling his hips. He's trying to break my hold on him. And I get him in the car, and I put him in his seat, and I don't even try to buckle him up. There's no way that's going to work now. He's irate. We're both angry where our adrenaline is up. Then I get into the front seat, and I sit there, and I say, we're done. This is it. I'm not going back out there. And, I mean, it was just miserable. We're both miserable. It took a while for our anger to subside. Finally, it just kind of wears itself out. And I say, you want to go find Mommy and Nico? They're probably hiking down the trail. Let's go find them. And we get out, and we spend the rest of the day playing around in the park. But we never really recover from that. Neither of us were in a great mood for the rest of the day. And I posted that photo of him smiling in front of the waterfall. And every time I would see it, and I thank God this post has nothing to do with what that day was really like. The hurt feelings, the second guessing, just the wishing. It had all gone down differently. Was I too hard? Yeah, probably. Did I overreact? Yeah. Did I just get stubborn and refused to budge? Yeah. Is that what my dad would have done? 100%.

Chris: Is that your best radio voice?

Julian: No, it is not.

Chris: Oh, that's nice.

Julian: No, it is not my best radio voice.

Chris: That's a lot better.

Julian: This is my best radio voice.

Chris: Oh, I like that. That's nice and resonant. Yeah, you have a very low and resonant voice.

Julian: you have an even better voice.

Chris: You have a lovely baritone.

Julian: Yeah, you do too.

Chris: Thanks.

Julian: Thank you.

Chris: No, thank you.

Julian: Okay okay okay okay. Thank you!

Chris: Today on PODRE I'm talking to writer, critic, and father of two, Keith Gessen. Keith has a new nonfiction book called Raising Raffi, which I recommend to all the dads out there. It's a book that raises questions that I'm interested in working through on this show over the long haul. Questions such as what do you do when your ideals about fatherhood and parenting meet with the sometimes sobering reality of what your kids are really like, what you're like as a parent, who you really are as a human being. Why am I like this? Can I change? How do I change? You know? By the time I first born was three, what had seemed so easy and natural and joyful became much harder, much more fraught, laden with all kinds of psychodynamics that I frankly did not see coming. Like that day at the waterfall, I kept failing to meet these moments, and as my kid became more and more challenging to parent. I saw myself getting farther and farther away from who I wanted to be as his dad, and so I had to start reevaluating everything. And it was difficult and confusing and sometimes it was a little alienating, but it was necessary. Here's me at home on the couch a few months ago, giving a status update. I think what you're hearing here is the aftermath of some minor disciplinary incident with my eldest son. Thankfully nowhere near the kinds of volcanic ordeals we used to find ourselves in on an all too regular basis. He and I have both been making progress on keeping those at bay, but an incident nonetheless. Anyway, it's me at home doing some quiet podcasting, and you'll hear in the background what Julian is doing to work through his feelings. He plays his ukulele even when he's angry or in trouble. He runs upstairs, grabs his ukulele, and we hear it all throughout the house. It's pretty good. We go skateboarding just about every day. He's in love with it and it's terrifying, but it's amazing to watch him get better so quickly. And most importantly, he's become a really great big brother. Super sweet. But if I had been making this podcast a year ago, the vibe would have been very different. We were pretty close to despair every single day. It just felt like an endless sort of battle, and everything became adversarial and there were just tantrums and blow ups and quarrels galore... and then the little guy made his presence known. End of recording. I don't do a lot of podcasting when they're in the building because it's physically or at least aesthetically impossible. But I wanted you to hear that clip because I know there are parents out there listening right now who may be going through a hard time with their kids, and I certainly know what that's all about. But you can hear it in my voice on that tape. We can come through those hard times if we do our part. And when we do, even if the good weather doesn't last forever, we can luxuriate in those moments. We can lay back and enjoy the music. So Keith and I are going to talk about that journey we have to go on the long road we dads must travel, of self knowledge and self understanding, of discipline and acceptance and what we're really trying to do here. We're going to talk about anger, what it's like to be a bear dad. Bear dad. That's Keith's name for it, but I like it. I think I'm going to keep using it. Keith Gessen. Great guy, terrific writer. And I think the two of us had a great conversation. Stay tuned. That's next.

Keith Gessen: That has happened to a certain extent. I've gotten to talk about parenting on my doing events, but also there's a lot of podcasts. No offense. Yours is the best.

Chris: Yeah, no, obviously that goes with that.

Keith Gessen: Thing that actually just being able to do these kind of conversations has been very satisfying. But in this particular instance, there's always been a bit of a kind of irony about dad, me writing a book about Raising Raffi. Right. Which has not always been the most popular activity here at home.

Chris: The writing of the book, you mean?

Keith Gessen: Yeah. I didn't do this a lot, but there was one when I was kind of finishing a draft. And I really like when you're I've found that you can kind of muddle along writing things, like piece by piece. Right. And then at a certain point, you really need to clear a certain amount of time and just be able to read the thing all the way through, like in two days or whatever, however long it takes. And you need kind of uninterrupted time without the kids. So there was like a three day weekend where I went upstate to a friend's cabin for three days. But even that, it was like, I'm writing Raising Raffi. But actually, Emily is raising Raffi. So in this particular case, with this particular book, I'm okay with not doing like a multi city tour and abandoning my family.

Chris: That's funny.

Keith Gessen: Talk about what a wonderful father I am.

Chris: Parent writers, man, there's things that you don't think about until you're knee deep in it and you're like, how the **** are we going to do this? But it all works out somehow. It all works out somehow. Well, Keith, I thought I would just try to kind of recite our many points of connection that you and I show. This is the first time I'm actually meeting you, which is kind of surprising to me because I've been hearing about you for like, 20 years. But we're both graduates of the Syracuse MFA program, which means that we both worked with George Saunders and we both, I think, to this day, still have to explain ourselves to Mary Karr. We're both the beneficiaries of Mary's mentorship and friendship and honesty. And you co founded N Plus One. I built my whole personality, at least in my 20s, around N Plus One as a reader. I wanted to tell you, man, when I first got to graduate school, I've already been reading N Plus One forever, from the beginning, and I loved it. And I just moved and got into my apartment in Syracuse and my subscription lapsed because I was just so broke. I was just like a first year, you know, living on that stipend. And I was talking to Mary Karr's sister Lecia, and I'm on the phone with Lecia and I'm telling her, like, my N Plus One subscription lapsed, hint, hint, I'm so ******* broke. So Lecia sends you guys an email and she copies me on it. And I think she sent it to you and to Mark. And she says, hey, guys, you're doing great work. Here's a check for $500. This ought to be enough to get this broke *** poet a lifetime subscription. Love you, Lecia. And it was just this baller *** move and I was like, hell yeah, Lecia, I got a lifetime subscription N Plus One. It was great. You guys hooked me up for like a year and then you asked for more money.

Keith Gessen: So it just it all I got you was a subscription. It's a very expensive one year subscription. Okay, good, good, good for N Plus One.

Chris: So, yeah, and then you get a.

Keith Gessen: Gotta keep the lights on.

Chris: I wish I could talk to you about the magazine and how that all started, but that'll have to be for another interview because I just read this amazing book of yours, this brand new book, Raising Raffi, and it's a beautiful book for so many reasons that I'm going to ask you to talk about. But once again, it's just that the way that I relate to it on a personal level is uncanny. I mean, your boys are roughly the same age as mine and roughly the same years apart. And the titular character, your eldest son Raffi, reminds me so much of my oldest son, Julian. At every step that you describe, at every kind of stage of development, it was like reading like my own dad diary or something. The only reading experience I can compare it to. And sorry if this is weird to you, but it was a little bit like when I started Recovery and the very first time I read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and I was like, holy ****, someone else has had these thoughts. Someone else has gone through what I thought were these unique and very private experiences with these very personal ways of looking at this deeply complex thing. And here it is laid out in black and white, and it's exactly how I felt about it.

Keith Gessen: Wow. I don't know what the Big Book is.

Chris: It's the book that they give you when you join AA. It's the big book that's got all the stories and all the ideas about the program. And it just sort of tells you, like, this is what an addict is. This is what an alcoholic is. And for me, the first time I read that, I didn't know other people felt that way. I didn't know that my experience could be so perfectly and lucidly captured by this book that was just sitting out there the whole time.

Keith Gessen: It's like they've collected stories over the years from people about their addiction?

Chris: It's the book that started AA because the guys who wrote it were the kind of founders of the program. So they kind of tell their story and then they say, like, here's how we recover, right? Here's the program. Basically, here are the steps and here's everything we went through. But the part of it that was striking is like the first 20 or 30 pages. You get their story, but you also get their mindset like, this is what it feels like to be an alcoholic. And the first time I read that, I had never heard anyone speak about that. And I thought that all of those thoughts and feelings and problems and tensions and conflicts were, like, just completely sui generis. Like, I had just made them all up in my own head. And here it was in this book. And reading you were kind of chronicle of parenting a kid that in so many ways resembles my own was a similar kind of uncanny experience of just like, okay, all right. I'm not the only one out there who has a kid like this and who has these particular kinds of joys and challenges.

Keith Gessen: Julian, he's a handful?

Chris: Yeah. I wrote down so many ways that you described him, but you've got him. "He is adorable, infuriating, mercurial. He still treats us like servants. He is unlike anyone we have ever met." I read that to Chanelle this morning. I was like, you got to hear this. And she's like, that's it. That's it. That's it. That's our boy. But, yeah, I mean, the key part that I kept coming back to was the sort of you call it civil excuse me, uncivil disobedience that comes in cycles, right. This behavioral pattern. So reading it was just wonderful to coexist in this space with someone who's been through that and who gets it and can explain it so lucidly. And you're also like, I mean, I'll take help from wherever I can get it to just get a little bit better at this, to get a little more patient at this, to get a little more tolerant, a little more understanding.

Keith Gessen: Yeah.

Chris: So thank you. Man you write in the book that you're talking about someone else's book, but you say, I read this book slowly and with immense gratitude, and that is how I felt as a reader of your book.

Keith Gessen: Thank you. Yeah. And the book I was talking about, there was that Ames and Elk book, which is really just kind of a series of observations about they had, like, a lab for observing little children, and it's just a series of observations about what little children do. And it's mostly from the but it was uncanny how much of the stuff that those little kids did was stuff that Raffi did. And I read it at a moment when Raffi was one of the most difficult moments where he had turned three. And then we'd had his little brother, so we had all the stress of a newborn. And then Raffi kind of on his worst behavior, partly because he had been sort of removed from the center of the universe, but mostly because he was three, and three is just a tough age. And I was reading these books, as I kind of described in that essay, and I was losing my temper with him a lot. And reading books that told you what to do basically, there were these kind of instruction manuals, right? And I read the instruction manual, which is from the kind of behaviorist perspective, which was like, just ignore everything that he does.

Chris: Just Ignore It.

Keith Gessen: And give him a sticker when he does something nice. Ignore all the bad stuff. Give him a sticker when he does something good. And that didn't work for us. And then I read the opposite of that, which is like, really talk it out with him and listen to his feelings. And that didn't work either, or I was really bad at it because none of the stuff was working. And then I finally read this book that was just it wasn't like, here's what you should do. It was more like, here's what three year olds are like.

Chris: Descriptive rather than prescriptive. Right?

Keith Gessen: Exactly. Yeah. I found that incredibly helpful, just being like, okay, Raffi is his own person, but this is kind of what three year olds are like.

Chris: Yeah. All that really matters is the energy between you and your kid. Because it's three. They're going to be three. Three year olds are going to be three year old. We do the exact same stuff. Except I have less patience or less kind of discipline than you. I'm not a not a professional literary critic. So I try to read those books and be like, get through ten pages and be like, this **** ain't going to work. Like, we read this the Danish Way of Parenting, the Swedish Way. Bringing Up Bebe. Bringing Up Bebe is science fiction. It's a really fun book, but come on. What are you talking about? But we read all of we got a whole shelf of those books. And Chanelle would read them and say, like, here's your assignment tonight. You need to read these three chapters. So you quit yelling like a lunatic at our kid. And I'm reading it. And then I hear us trying out those techniques the next day, and we sound absurd to each other and to Julian, who would be like, we'd do that thing where you repeat back. Like, I hear that you're very angry about this. And he'd be like, why the **** are you talking like that? Like, stop it. He would just immediately reject that tactic. He would call it out. He'd be like, would you read that in a book? **** that ****. He was always a step ahead of us.

Keith Gessen: That's right. Yeah. I read those books less as, like, a professional literary critic and more as just, like, a very desperate person who was trying to figure out how to deal with the situation. I have found those books here and there. Like, you pick up a tip, right? So what I used to do is be like, you lose TV. Right? And then, of course, that was dumb because TV is awesome, and you take a little break when they watch TV. So now what I do to rookie mistake is I say you lose ten minutes of TV and.

Chris: Ten minutes out of how much, dad? Right?

Keith Gessen: Exactly. Nobody knows.

Chris: Show me the ledger.

Keith Gessen: Well, but he doesn't know. He's like, Shoot, I lost ten minutes. Right? I don't want to lose another ten minutes. I better do this thing.

Chris: The principle of having had and lost, yeah.

Keith Gessen: And yeah.

Chris: Some infinite thing.

Keith: So losing ten minutes, that was a pretty good innovation to try.

Chris: That's good. I might I might steal that. I like that. Thank you. Lose ten minutes. Lose ten minutes of skateboarding. I think that'll be from now on that's the thing, is that they're so ******* clever and Julian is so naturally manipulative that he will always ask the kind of question that it dismantles the whole technique. But there's still a way to kind of be creative and almost silly enough to kind of outflank, but it requires a certain disposition of like, all right, this isn't combat. This is a sort of contest of creativity here, right? Who's going to be creative enough to kind of get the upper hand? It doesn't have to turn into this brute force showdown of life because I'm your father, right?

Keith Gessen: No, that's very wise. And also like, yes, they're very smart, but they still don't know what time is. They don't know what half an hour is. Even Raffi now at seven, he doesn't really know what half an hour is. So we do still have some advantages that we can leverage.

Chris: I mean, you can think of it that way, or that they have the advantage because they can just ask every minute, has it been 30 minutes yet?

Keith Gessen: That's right.

Chris: So who really has the upper hand? That's my question. I don't know.

Keith Gessen: Then it's pretty powerful.

Chris: You write about it so clearly and frankly, sort of pathos of parenting. A wildly sensitive and unruly little boy. At one point, you call him a little maniac, which I love that phrase, because there's a warmth in it, too. You say that you want more than anything to be this warm presence in his life, and yet not being able to stop the sort of constant conflict around his behavior, which only gets worse when baby bro arrives and sort of scrambles the whole family calculus. I remember that so well. And it was right around three, right, where all of a sudden he went from this sort of angelic all suite all the time, little heavenly little creature who was just so miraculous, and all we did was laugh in a door. And then it was like one day, man, I looked back and said, when did I start yelling at this guy so much? When did he start being able to just make me lose my temper? It was somewhere around three. It was when we had a move from Houston to Memphis and suddenly I realized I yell at him so much now. And it broke my heart. Like, I felt so bad about it and it's taken me years of just work and suffering to sort of see my way through, like, what kind of data am I going to be? And there's been so much fear in that of, like, God, what if it's always going to be this way? Or what if he's always going to see me as this kind of stern, ogre figure when all I really want to be is this, like, warm, fun, accepting, loving person to him, right?

Keith Gessen: Yeah. Do you still yell?

Chris: Oh, yeah. I yelled today, too, this morning.

Keith Gessen: But that's one of the things about not being prepared, right? It's like you're like oh, I'm idiot. Dad. I don't know what a uterus is out of the birth process. You're like, okay, you can kind of learn that stuff, but you feel like or I felt like I was really playing catch up in terms of my knowledge. And then all this stuff like, how do you what does it maybe wear? What are you supposed to do with the baby? He just seems to sleep all the time. But then there's this kind of other lack of preparation, of just, like, psychological preparation for whenever the very small amounts of time that I'd spent thinking about fatherhood, I kind of pictured myself as this warm, ironical father figure, right, and kind of cool. And instead I find myself yeah, it turned out to be a yellow and stressed out about stuff, always kind of chiving everyone in the household and yeah, not what I imagined at all. And then part of the book is this journey toward a certain level of self acceptance, which sounds kind of pat to me, but in the last essay, I talk about being Russian, right? And just thinking about how I was raised by a very loving but pretty stern father and who did raise his voice, right? And just thinking about, like, okay, that's inside of me. And it comes out in, like, we used to have more battles over, like, screen time. There's always the parent who is like, less screen time, and the parents like, who cares? And I was definitely the less screen time parent, right? Because it was just inside of me. And now we have these I wouldn't say the fight so much, but this kind of conflict over homework, where Raffi goes to a very traditional, kind of hard driving New York public school and has homework and has had homework since kindergarten. And it was and Emily is kind of like, he's a little too young for homework. I'm not going to make him do it. And I'm like, we got to do the homework. And it's kind of, you know and, like, again, I think if I had thought of myself, you know, imagined myself, whatever, ten years ago, if I had thought for the future, I would be like, I'm not going to be the sort of parent who enforces homework. I know in some intellectual way that kids should follow their interests, right? And the way to make them hate school is to force them to do stuff, right? But now that I'm in the situation, I'm just like, we got to do our homework. We just have to do it. Just like, as I always did my homework, and I always did my homework because we came from the Soviet Union, and the way that you kind of entered American society and kind of progressed in it if you were an immigrant, was through school. And I just can't help it. Toward the end of the book, I'm like, all right, this isn't the most appealing aspect of me, but it's in me. I can't really get it out of me, and I'm just going to have to work with that, and that's okay. And I do still yell, and I'm trying to yell less.

Chris: Progress, not perfection. That's what we say in the Program.

Keith Gessen: I don't know if the yelling has changed necessarily, but I'm like, I'm the yelling one, and Raffi knows that when I try to switch it up, like you said, they just kind of don't buy it.

Chris: I feel like there are two things that you're describing that come in and sort of override the ideal that we sort of set for ourselves pre parenthood, right? When we're imagining, like, what kind of dad I think she's pregnant. And I'm thinking, like, here's the kind of dad I'm going to be. Here's my fantasy of fatherhood. And then two things happen. One is that your kid is their own personality, and it's unpredictable and surprising, and you're now reacting and responding to the kind of kid they are. This did not become fully clear to me until the second until I have little Nico, who is just totally wired differently and requires a little bit different style, right? If I yell at Julian, he yells back. If I yell at Nico, he wilts and crumbles, and I go, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. You poor baby. Come here. Right? But Julian will step to me. He will stick his chest out, right? And that's the dynamic. So I'm a different dad in some ways to them, but the other thing so, like, I'm adjusting to who they are, which I don't have very much control over, it turns out. But the other thing is, like, I could not and I think you were talking about this with your father and being a Russian immigrant and just your background. I couldn't in no way appreciate the ways that my sort of template of parenthood has been inscribed by my own childhood, by my own upbringing, by the sort of authoritarian model of parenting that I grew up under. And then one day, I'm in the kitchen, and Julian has pushed the red button in me, and what comes out of my mouth is my dad, just 100%. And I'm like, well, there goes that ideal, right? Like, that stuff's in there, whether I like it or not, i. Can analyze that. I can work on it, but on some level, I also have to accept it or I'm in denial about it. Right.

Keith Gessen: Yeah. And it's like a pretty happy childhood for me. It's like.

Chris: Your dad sound pretty great the way you described him.

Keith Gessen: Yeah, but I'm a very different person. But yeah, I like my dad. I do wonder about with people who had unhappy childhoods right. And really kind of really don't want to be like their parents. Right. That one's trickier. Is that what you're describing?

Chris: Not quite. Mine is somewhere in the middle, but definitely the style of just the relationship between father and son. I have a very, very different, if not opposite, ideal in mind that I continue to pursue, but I can't get there because what blocks it is, number one, that stuff that's hardwired in me, the expectations I have for the way a father and a son are going to manage their disagreements and their conflicts, but also Julian's personality and his nature, right? Which is to not only, like, buck authority and sort of civil disobedience, he rejects the very notion of authority over him. Right from the beginning, he's like, this is the three of us. We we're like a triumvirate. But you guys aren't in charge of me. Come on. I'm Julian. I'm the sun. I am the Sun King.

Keith Gessen: Yes, that's right. And you were saying earlier about how different they are, and that's something that, if I could go back, I would change about my reactions to Raffi is like, when he was little, I just took everything so personal. Right. And when he started hitting us and just rejecting us in all these ways, and I was like, oh, like I did something wrong, or Why is this happening? And then when he would say, I hate you, or it's in the book, he says, you're not nice. Right.

Chris: You're not a nice dada. I love that.

Keith Gessen: Yeah. And I was just like, oh, my God. That's true. I'm not nice.

Chris: I love how you own it. You're like, he's right. I'm not a nice dada.

Keith Gessen: Yeah, he wasn't wrong. I thought I was pretty nice, and I'm sure I could be nice.

Chris: Well, you try to be nice, but you failed at being nice. Right. Like, that's what it is.

Keith Gessen: But but some of the stuff is just like, you know, there's this moment, you know, he's like, dad, I I love you even when you do bad things to me. And it sounds really dark, but actually he just means, like, turning off literally just turning off the TV. That's what he meant.

Chris: Yeah.

Keith Gessen: And so some of those not nice things are like, yeah, I don't think you should watch TV for 6 hours. Right. If that makes me not nice, then yeah, so be it. But I did take it very personally. And then Ilya comes along, this little angel so sweet, never gives us any problems. Then he turns three, right, and starts hitting us, right? Turns four and starts saying all that, I hate you. You're not a nice dada. You're a bad dada. Same exact stuff. And I'm like, that's just what happened? No, but the second time around, I was like, oh, that's just what they say.

Chris: I don't know that I'm still ready for that. Nico just turned three last week, and he's still the sweetling, and I just can't.

Keith Gessen: I don't know if I can go.

Chris: Through it again, man. I don't know if I could do.

Keith Gessen: It second time around.

Chris: A little Sith apprentice.

Keith Gessen: Nobody hit us. I'd be like, oh, that's so cute.

Chris: Well, that's the way it is. Every now and then when he go, yeah, you turn off Paw Patrol and he gives you a little whack, and it's hilarious. Whereas with Julian, it was like, oh, my God, is he going to be a murderer?

Keith Gessen: Exactly.

Chris: I have to teach him right now that this behavior will never be acceptable.

Keith Gessen: Yeah, that was with Raffi. I was, like, teaching him lessons. I'm like, I got to teach him again. It sounds very dark, but just be like, I must make it clear once and for all, right? Via whatever, like a time out or my stern reaction to this thing that he's doing. Must teach him a lesson, right? And that is something that with Ilia, like, possibly to a fault, where, like, now he's really kind of really doesn't listen to us even more than Raffi. At some things, you're like, oh, it is us, actually. We're the problem here. I've kind of discarded that notion of teaching him a lesson, right? Because actually, it doesn't work. Like, they're too little. You're not teaching them a lesson. You're just making everybody miserable.

Chris: See, I just felt like I had to correct the behaviors so that we could end them and then go back to the warm, fun stuff that I was all ready for, right? It's like, no, you can't hit your mother because she won't let you have a candy bar for breakfast. And I'm going to come down really hard on that, partly intentionally and partly instinctively, right? Because of my own hardwiring, my own ****** up head, I'm going to come down way too hard on that behavior. Freak you both out, right? But my hope is that it'll clear it away, and then we'll just be this beautiful, happy trio and then a quartet. And it never happened. Just the conflicts just got bigger and bigger and bigger and louder. And you described that point where one time you really kind of lose it with them, and he's lost it, and he starts laughing in that kind of defense mechanism that happened to us, too. And that was the scariest thing, because it's primal when you really scare your son, they laugh like a lunatic, and you're like, oh, no, I broke his brain. This is not the expected reaction to losing my temper. Right. You would expect tears or something else, but the laughter, really?

Keith Gessen: Yeah. So much of the stuff do I have a right about this? Given I do my best, but I'm still like the number two parent. I am not the MVP around here. And Emily is.

Chris: You'll always be Pippen. You're never going to be Jordan.

Keith Gessen: Yeah, that's right. And she's the MVP. But like but then there's these things, and like, the first essay, it was about teaching Russian, and that was my thing. Obviously, Emily doesn't know Russian. Right. I was the one who was speaking Russian to him because we had to go through the schools selection process, like just finding like, a pre K in Brooklyn right after Ilia was born. So kind of like, Emily was too busy, so I got sent to all the deputies to go to all the school tours. Right. So that was this thing that I was doing. But then the third thing I wrote was the thing about anger. And obviously we both get angry, but it's different. Right? It's like the mother's anger is this in a way, it's worse. Like when Emily, much less frequently than I do, gets angry. But when she gets angry, partly because it's less frequent, but partly because it's mama Raffi finds that really upsetting. Right.

Chris: Scary. Whereas for the most part, we're just a lot of noise and racket.

Keith Gessen: Yeah, that's right. Well, I think it's truly emotionally scary. Whereas there is something the dad is, like, bigger.

Chris: There's a difference between an action film and a horror film. Right. Like, a father's anger is just like Tom Cruise and a mother's anger is like, holy ****, like, what is happening?

Keith Gessen: The whole world is spinning. Yeah. I guess my thought was just like, there is something distinctive about the father's anger and I don't know, like, we have testosterone and we do lose our temper more. Right.

Chris: Do you think it'd be different if we had girls counterfactual go, oh, yeah. Do you imagine yelling at a daughter the way you yell at a son?

Keith Gessen: Yeah.

Chris: There'S something a little Oedipal about the whole thing. Not with the weird actual Freudian stuff, but just the struggle between father and son, father and eldest son. I mean, it's biblical, right? And it starts at three. Not at 20, at three. It starts right where you're like, no, look, I'm as modern as the next I'm as feminist as the next guy, but God **** it, you can't take over in my own kitchen. You didn't pay for this kitchen. And that's where I start talking like my dad, right? Like this sort of patriarchal authority figure, because that's what's being attacked. And in some ways, I have set up all the conditions for him to attack that with every other choice I've made as a parent and as a person, to be this different kind of man than, of course, like my Baby Boomer, conservative Christian Texan father. We have totally different value system and personality traits. And now I have this little boy who's coming up in that soil and he's like, you can't ******* pull this authority figure card now. We're not doing that. That's not who we are. So he'll say to me, like, he doesn't say you're not a nice dad. He tells me, you are severe. Why are you so severe? You're so much more severe than mommy. Was your dad severe? Was Grandpa Dewey severe? I'm like, **** yeah, he was, man. You have no idea. You don't know from severe.

Keith Gessen: The word that Raffi used was serious. He said, Why are you so serious? I think it's in the book. He's like, why are you so serious? Why are you so serious all the time? And again, what he meant was, why do I turn off the TV? But he was making this distinction between me and mama. One of the things that I explained to him, I'm like, my dad yelled at me. His dad got half his face shut off by the Germans right. Not the most guy in the world.

Chris: Yeah, I think that's part of it too. Which is that at some point along the line, I began to have these, like, minor little resentments over, like, how good this kid has it and how he has no idea. So when he's having a meltdown because I won't give him a band aid for a non existent wound, I'm like.

Keith Gessen: Dude, I need a bandaid.

Chris: And he says to me, like, I hate you. You're the worst dad ever. And I want to die, and I want everyone to die. He just goes full apocalyptic. I'm like, ************, can we get some context here? So that becomes part of it. But that's my problem, right? Because from his perspective, the non existent wound is worthy of an apocalyptic event.

Keith Gessen: Yeah. The other day I had them in the car just by myself for a very long time, driving to Massachusetts.

Chris: And.

Keith Gessen: It was like an eight hour drive. And I was very patient for like 1st 5 hours. And then I lost it. And they had got these little flags somewhere, and they were just like whacking each other with them. And they wouldn't stop and they would start crying, and then they'd start again. So finally I just screamed at them. And Raffi was like, ilia, we don't have a papa anymore. That's right. Raffi is like, right. And he's like, yeah, we don't have one. And they were just like, we have no dad.

Chris: We're orphans.

Keith Gessen: No dad. Yeah, but we were still stuck in the car. So I get to hear all this and then Raffi is like, I miss having it. They kind of talked themselves back into having me. And the whole time I was like I was like, you know, like it or not, I was done talking to them. I was just like, I'm your dad stuck with me. I don't know. And I felt terrible about screaming at them. And yet they got over it. I got over it. They didn't hit each other with their flags anymore. Next 3 hours. And I kind of did get to make it up to them. That's the amazing thing. You screw up, you get mad, but then there they are in half an hour. And sometimes you're like, you want to be like, I'm so sorry. Which isn't like I try to avoid.

Chris: Being like, going begging for forgiveness.

Keith Gessen: Yeah. If I scare him or something, I will give him a hug, right? But I try not to burst into tears.

Chris: Freak him out more.

Keith Gessen: Unstable person. Yeah. But yeah, I'm like, okay, I'm still here, and I'm not yelling at there's.

Chris: An opportunity for grace always in a child's day.

Keith Gessen: And they're going to be here for a while, and I'm going to be here for a while. So it's like the factory where you're like, they're like, two days without an accident. Three days without an accident, you go back to zero.

Chris: It does feel like ****, man. That's exactly the way it feels. And you get to like, seven days and you're like, well, this is the new era, baby. We're good.

Keith Gessen: Yes.

Chris: And then it happens again. You're like ****.

Keith Gessen: The amazing thing is that I wrote that whole essay about bear dads, yelling and being mad, the love and anger, right? Just about being mad. And then as I was finishing it, Raffi did go through this phase where he was much chill. Like, he'd kind of approaching four, and it's kind of an age of seeing the world and starting to explain it in these funny ways and kind of stopped being quite such a jerk. And I was like, we made it through.

Chris: I did it.

Keith Gessen: Yeah, well, I survived. He survived. And I finished the essay and then two months late before it even comes out. It takes a while for these things to come out. Sometime before it even comes out, he enters this new phase of thinking of stuff to do to really upset me. And I'm back to yelling at him again. And I'm like, I'm kind of like, Raffi, we already did this. I already wrote the essay. Like, let's move on. But you don't move on. And they kind of invent these new ways, right? Because they've changed. They've matured, they become smarter, they become more articulate. They do find new ways of pushing.

Chris: The exact same button. Whether it's the button of like, I can't believe how brilliant and adorable this person is, or I don't have a temper anymore. It's gone. It's in another county. They're always themselves as they develop through these stages.

Keith Gessen: Exactly.

Chris: I think I consistently fail to appreciate the way that he actually sees me because we have so much, like, conflict and argument and because he can step to me with such ferocity. I always think that he must see me as this sort of deeply flawed man, right, which I am. But he's also a six year old boy, and he sees me, like, make a jump shot, and he's like, well, you're the greatest basketball player in the world. Right. And I don't register that. Right. And I don't appreciate what that means to him, which is that he is now putting that pressure on himself to be perfect right now because he actually thinks, for the most part, everything I pick up, everything I do, I do perfectly. I can read books. I can even write them. I can work a computer. I can drive a car. I do all these things from his perspective without making mistakes. And as talented and special of a little guy he is, he's obsessed with being perfect. He's so hard on himself. When he can't do something instantly, it's really hard to remember. I have to actually show him my frustrations, my failures, my struggles, and my own frustration with myself in a healthy way and model that to him. Or I'm just compounding his own perfectionism.

Keith Gessen: Yeah. Another argument for being, again, within reason, but, like, being authentic as a person. And this is something that Emily said to me once that I thought was very wise, where these parenting books, they really want you to become, like, a bit of a robot parent, and one.

Chris: No longer have emotions of your own, your own totally dialed into their emotional experience. Which can I mean, the one I.

Keith Gessen: Was thinking of is that there's this one where I forget which one it is, but which parenting guru is the one who says this? But I think she says something like, you need to be the calm CEO of your family. Right. And that's appealing in certain ways.

Chris: Right.

Keith Gessen: Like, your kid needs calm environment and clear boundaries. Right. And then I think at one point where I was very down on myself for yelling at Raffi, and he's like, it's okay for him to see us, that we're like human beings. So that's, again, you don't want to be a ****** human being, but, like, somebody who fails and is frustrated and is imperfect. Yeah. It's okay for them to see that.

Chris: I don't know. So many of the themes of the essays connect, and they're all about very different subjects, like teaching him Russian, playing sports with him, your own upbringing, and how that connects to issues of cultural identity and ancestry and all of that. But it always kind of, for me, circles around that line. Right. "There is no tragedy like the tragedy of parenthood," this kind of beautiful contradiction or paradox, almost, of loving your kids so much. And there's an amazing line. I read it to Chanelle this morning, and she agrees with me that it's just unspeakably beautiful. I'm going to read it right now. It's from the Russian essay, the Russian language essay. "A few days after that, he said his first Russian sentence. I am a hippopotamus. I was deeply, stupidly, indescribably, moved. What had I done? How could I not have done it? What a brilliant, stubborn, adorable child, my son. I hope he never goes to Russia. I know that eventually he will." It's so good because that's the paradox right there, right? That's the paradox. The brilliant, stubbornness and wanting to give him this inheritance and then being like, oh, ****, what have I done? And then knowing that that's still his to figure out one day.

Keith Gessen: To me, that's like, of all these things, it's the one that's kind of the most interesting, because you're like, everybody's like, oh, it's so wonderful that you're teaching him Russian. And I'm like, are you sure the endpoint of him learning Russia or one of the stages is for him to go to Russia? Right. Even when I wrote that, it was like, three years ago, Russia wasn't doing great, and now it reads even more. So it's like, you really don't want your kid to go to Russia right now. And when will you like, when is this going to end? It'll end someday, but I don't know when. It's like all these things, all these things in our very imperfect society, right, where you're like, it's almost like there's nothing you can think of that you're going to pass on to your kid that isn't connected to some form of, you know, violence or exploitation of sports, right? Oh, I love sports, but if you look at hockey is probably the nastiest kind of locker room environments I've ever been in. We're around hockey, like the whitest, the most homophobic. Right. I played football and soccer. Football wasn't like that. It's like everything that you're trying to teach your kid. We exist in this very nasty world, and it's hard to think of anything you're going to pass on that isn't tainted by that stuff. Yeah. Makes it harder.

Chris: Yes, it does. But more poignant when you can express it that way. Keith and, you know, I guess that's where I would I would wrap things up. You know, you write this amazing epilogue about Raffi at six, six and a half. You know, as as the book is, you've essentially finished all the essays and you're kind of telling us, like, this is what he's like now. And I read that line to you earlier. "He is adorable infuriating mercurial. He still treats us like servants. He is unlike anyone we have ever met." So in the spirit of that epilogue, I made a list of all the notable things that my six and a half year old has done just in the last 24 hours. He wrote me a beautiful song on his ukulele called Smile on Your Face. He played a pretty competitive game of chess with me. He ranked our whole family in order of physical beauty with him first and me last. Not necessarily wrong. It's an interpretation. He conquered a new ramp at the skate park and had an epic meltdown leaving the skate park because I didn't capture that feat on video. I mean, this was like throwing **** down the stairs kind of meltdown big time. He counted all of his money twice, and he congratulated me on getting much better with my patience lately, which is both, like, really touching and also, like, have you been paying attention, like what is your sense of time here? What do you mean by lately? You mean in the last hour?

Keith Gessen: In the last hour, you've been better?

Chris: But it was like a long speech. He really presented, like, an award to me of, like, you've gotten so much better on your patience, even though I'm still "so much harsher than Mommy." And it just leaves me, and it kind of takes me back to that tension, that kind of irresolvable tension that we're talking about. And then it's at the heart of your book and at the heart of these sort of philosophical dilemmas about parenting. But as I've been thinking about these things, I've also been able to do it while kind of living with your book. We were on a two week road trip. We just got back from two weeks, 15 states, eight cities, one prius, four people, right? We did it. We really spent that time together. And I took your book with me, and I read it. And just having it with me and reading your experience and the way that you've kind of worked your way through these tensions makes it more manageable to me because it's like I have the right company. And again, it's not that I'm like getting the answers to how to do this, but just knowing it's sort of a gift to have your book and to commune with it and know that you're down there in Brooklyn going through the same thing. I feel fortified and comforted by that. And that's the whole idea of this podcast, too, right? That we can sort of tell these stories and describe the problems, even if we can't necessarily prescribe a universal solution to them.

Keith Gessen: I thank you so much. Somebody asked me, from writing this book, did you become a better parent? And answer is no. And also, it has caused problems in our home. It's just tough. Everybody's very supportive, but it's tough to become a character in someone else's book, right? And so, Emily, it's been tough. Raffi has very mixed feelings about it. Half the time, he's very happy that he's famous or he wants to be famous. And then he looks at and then he kind of reads something in the book, and he says, this is not true, or he's not sure anymore.

Chris: We're going to open the libel laws up, Pop. We're going to take care of this right here.

Keith Gessen: Well, in the epilogue, I say that he climbs, he stacks a chair on top of another chair to get to the high shelf to get some candy in the mornings. And he read that and he's like, I don't do that anymore. And I'm like, well, as of two weeks ago, you were doing it. I agree with you. You stopped doing that, but you used to do that very recently. But for him, he's like, this is just false. It's a fake. But he actually said he was going to write a book, a rebuttal. Yeah, it's called Raising Raffi Is Fake by Raffi. Anyway, but hearing you say, as I was saying earlier, I wrote "Love and Anger" about being angry, and it didn't change our relationship at all. Like, I still get angry. It didn't do anything for me, so it's only caused problems. So hearing you say that you have found it, I don't know, helpful or comforting is very meaningful to me. Thank you.

Chris: Thank you.

Chris: Can you ride a bike?

Nico: Yeah. Really fast.

Chris: Really fast?

Nico: Like my brutter.

Chris: Like your brother?

Nico: Yeah, my brutter can go really fast on his bike.

Chris: So can you. You can go really fast on your bike.

Nico: No, my brother can go this fast. That's how my brother can't go. And I could go this far.

Chris: Yeah, but you're going faster and faster. Every time you go on your bike, you go faster and faster.

Chris: There are more ways to **** this up than there are units of patience, empathy, and self control in my spiritual well some days. So one thing we can do here on PODRE is first, acknowledge that acknowledge the difficulty and challenges of being a parent and being a dad that everyone goes through. But we can go further than that. So right now, it's my honor to present the very first, the very prestigious, Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award. Look, I feel a certain way about awards in general, okay? But the Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award, this prize speaks entirely to an individual's merit, to their performance and excellence on the field of dadhood, at least according to me and me alone, this is as pure as a prize gets. And the first ever the first ever Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award goes to Dr. Ricardo Nuila, MD. Of Houston, Texas, father of Valentina and Teo. We're going to give Ricardo a call here in a minute and present him with the award. But let me just tell you a few things about him first. Ricardo is a doctor and a writer. He saves people's lives at the hospital. He teaches medicine and medical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine. And somehow he finds time to write some of the best nonfiction being published today. You can find his work in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Texas Monthly. His new book, The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril and American Medicine, will be published by Simon and Schuster this spring. It's going to be at the center of the conversation around public policy and the human realities of our healthcare system for a long time. But, you know, as impressive as all that is, I don't know if any of it's going to compare to being the very first recipient of the Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award. So let's call him up.

Ricardo Nuila: Hello?

Chris: Ricardo, dude, what's up, man? Hey, buddy. How are you doing?

Ricardo Nuila: Okay.

Chris: How are you? You are on the line right now. You're on the air live on PODRE.

Ricardo Nuila: Live? ****.

Chris: Welcome to PODRE.

Ricardo Nuila: I'm honored to be on this. Thank you. I'm glad that it's up and running and that I am your selected guest.

Chris: Well, you're actually more than that, and I'll explain in a minute what I mean by that, but I wondered if you could tell our listeners. You and I were talking the other day, and you told me a story that involved travel.

Ricardo Nuila: The passport story. Yeah. Every summer we go to Mexico. I grew up going to El Salvador during the summers. My wife went to Mexico during her summers, and so we want the same for the kids. And I think a couple of weeks before our flight, it becomes obvious that my wife has lost her passport. Now, just an aside, I had seen it lying around the house, and I told her, you need to put this away. She didn't, and she lost it. And of course, this engendered a lot of debate because she thought that maybe I had been the person that might have misplaced the passport and the kids. As the date approached, the kids were totally unaware. They were still extremely excited about going to Mexico. They're visiting their grandparents. They're going to a school down there. They just love going to Mexico.

Chris: They're going to go to school in the summertime. And how old are Valentina and Tayo now?

Ricardo Nuila: Valentina six, and Teo turned four. And they just love being around their grandparents and everything about Mexico, because we get to play around with them a lot.

Chris: They have their heart set on this trip. They're getting excited as it gets.

Ricardo Nuila: They pack their bags, like I mean, they don't pack their bags, but they put all their **** in, like, in, like, a little backpack two weeks before and everything.

Chris: And they had no idea that you lost Val's passport?

Ricardo Nuila: No. And the only appointment they could give her was for the day of travel. She says, okay, my appointment is at 07:00 in the morning. I'll get my passport, and we can hit our 10:30 A.m. Flight. And I was just like, yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. So I wasn't scheduled to go on the flight. The flight is just Val, my wife, and the two kids. I have work that week, and so I was going to join them later. And also they like to have some time with their family down there a little bit.

Chris: You say work. I mean, it. Reminds what kind of line of work you're in. You do something kind of fairly important. What is it you do? You're an influencer of some time. What is it?

Ricardo Nuila: I work at a safety net hospital. I'm a hospitalist at the safety net hospital.

Chris: Oh, you're a doctor. That's right. Okay. Internal medicine. Remember that time I referred to you as what was it? As an ER doctor.

Ricardo Nuila: I would wipe that from my memory. Thanks for reminding. No. And so I was like, all right, that was the plan. They're going to go to Mexico a week early. I was going to join them later. And it was okay, except that the day comes for her passport. She calls me within an hour. She's like, there's no freaking way I'm getting my passport by our 10:30 a.m. Flight. So I'm in the car with the kids, and I'm like, oh, I think that you all may not go to Mexico today. This was, like, around 08:00 a.m. In the morning. We're supposed to be headed to the airport.

Chris: And they take that in stride, of course.

Ricardo Nuila: Oh, yeah, they're very mature about it. It's one of those things where it's like the bad news makes them fight with themselves. They start clogging. Like it's almost like Valentina heard it and when and she got upset, and Tayo heard it, and so Valentine got mad at Tayo for being upset, but they were all like it was like we were driving in the middle, and.

Chris: Then you're yelling at them for you hitting each other, and then it's just pure camp.

Ricardo Nuila: It's just like, what the hell? So an idea dawns on me right there because they're freaking out in the car, and I'm like, I'm going to take you all to Mexico. I say it to them like that. I was like, I'm going to take.

Chris: Buckle up. We're going to Mexico.

Ricardo Nuila: Now, I might have over promised at that moment, but I didn't know what the flight was going to cost. But I was just like, and I do have limits. So I was like, but I think I can do it. So I looked it up, and it was actually pretty reasonable. It's one of those budget Mexican airlines.

Chris: You're teetering on the edge here. This is such a perilous path that you're walking here. You're over promising. Exactly.

Ricardo Nuila: It really was, because I could have easily been like, oh, it's actually $600 a flight. Daddy is not taking it.

Chris: Never mind.

Ricardo Nuila: I don't know what the hell I was thinking saying that. No, I looked it up, and I was like, okay, it's doable. And I told Val, my wife, I was just like, we saved their tickets. I take them. And more than anything, they're not upset. I was like, all right. I went home, threw a bunch of stuff in the bag, purchased a ticket, and we sped off to the airport. Now, my wife, she fears flying with the kids because of what they fight.

Chris: Because she's done it before, because she's sane, because she learns from experience.

Ricardo Nuila: It is a rational fear. And so I think she was also taken aback that I was just, like, going to jump into it, but I was like, all right, you know what?

Chris: My theory but sidebar, I don't understand why they don't have kids sections on airplanes. Imagine if the back of the plane was just for all the kids and all the babies, and you throw some toys and treats back there. There's one flight attendant who goes back there and does, like, a puppet show, and all the parents are up in the front part of the plane, in the parent section of the plane, and.

Ricardo Nuila: They should bring back the smoking section.

Chris: Back there, too, just like smoking. And we're drinking and we're laughing and we're relaxed.

Ricardo Nuila: We go to the airport, and I have my ticket, and we say goodbye to my wife, and it's me and the kids.

Chris: Did you apologize to her for losing her passport and denying it and trying to make her feel like it was all her fault?

Ricardo Nuila: Dude. I was actually excited about it because I actually kind of like the idea of flying with the kids because I.

Chris: Feel like you're playing hooky from work and it's a sudden change and you got the adrenaline of we. Got to get to the airport.

Ricardo Nuila: And right when we get to the gate, it's, like, delayed for an hour, and then it's in 2 hours. And that's when all of my wife's fears start coming to, like, air. The kids are starting to get antsy. They're like, what the hell? Why aren't we going to Mexico and everything?

Chris: Are we in Mexico yet? Are we there yet? Have we already taken the plane? They start asking this wonderful question.

Ricardo Nuila: Tayo's favorite thing to say is taking forever, and everything is taking forever. So sensing that, I tell him I commit a venial sin, a little white lie. I tell him that there's baby cops throughout the hospital, throughout the airport. In fact, there's one of them right there that's like this passerby.

Chris: This is a cop who is also a baby.

Ricardo Nuila: No, this is a guy who's looking for babies who are crying.

Chris: Wow, that's dark, bro. That's dark.

Ricardo Nuila: And that there's a baby jail that he takes. I mean, listen, dude, there's a whole baby carceral state.

Chris: Yes, it's big. Bush International Airport.

Ricardo Nuila: Big baby brother. It's like, anybody who's passing by, I'm like, that guy might be a baby cop. Act like you're not a baby crying because he takes crying babies to jail, and it works. And like, Valentine's at that age, of course it works.

Chris: They're absolutely petrified with fear and panic.

Ricardo Nuila: No, you don't know.

Chris: My kids scare him like that all the time. He's used to it.

Ricardo Nuila: My kids are Latin American. They don't get scared. No, but Valentina's at that age where she recognizes that Daddy is probably full of ****. But I, like, playing the game with.

Chris: She'S an accomplice now.

Ricardo Nuila: Yeah, she's actually kind of, like, trying to figure it out the whole time.

Chris: She sees daddy's angle here.

Ricardo Nuila: I'm pretty sure that she's like, no, there's no baby, too, because she starts telling him. She's like, that's right tail like the baby. But it works. It's like random people going by, and I'm, like, miming them. It's just like, have you seen any baby crying? And I was like, there's one blonde haired going over there. Maybe he was crying before. And the plane right, is fine. I get to even freaking read on a plane. I don't think I had read on a plane with the kids.

Chris: No.

Ricardo Nuila: Ever. Right. Get to read. I was reading Cormac.

Chris: Cormac?

Ricardo Nuila: Yeah.

Chris: You're reading Blood Meridian while your children that's a very dark one.

Ricardo Nuila: That's super dark, man. And it's about a baby that's left out in the woods to die.

Chris: You know what? This just gets better and better. Ricardo they're past the age they're past the age where they're crying because their ears won't pop. They're able to just, like, sit there with the tablet and amuse themselves.

Ricardo Nuila: It does feel like an achievement, actually, to get to that age where they're like, okay, they can put their attention on something. And I had downloaded Sing Two for them, and they were watching it there, so it was pretty awesome.

Chris: Good. And that sounds age appropriate. You weren't, like, letting them listen to the audiobook of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark or anything. That's good. All right, so you make it to Mexico in one piece. Everybody's happy. Everyone's glad, everybody's happy.

Ricardo Nuila: And then we happened to arrive at the same time as four other flights, and there's one attendant for the immigration line. So we have to wait in line for an hour. We get through that with the baby cop story. I mean, now it's a Mexican baby copy.

Chris: Like, hey, dad, I need some cash.

Ricardo Nuila: And the airport has, like, little rooms that look like they could be baby jails.

Chris: That actually might be baby jails for all you know.

Ricardo Nuila: So Tayo's listening more. We're getting through the line. I even have somebody tell me, your kids are so well behaved. And I'm just like, that is dude, can you imagine that this was unimaginable for me before this day?

Chris: Did you get any people saying weird **** to you? Like, Where's Mommy? Or, sir, are these really your children?

Ricardo Nuila: That's a really good question. Actually, no, I don't remember it. But I do remember no, I don't think I did get something like that, but I seem to remember somebody saying something at one time. I don't think it was, like, that pointed, but something.

Chris: Well, I'm glad you didn't, because you don't deserve that. They're your kids. They're my ******* kids.

Ricardo Nuila: That's why I had but they probably saw me, and they were like, this dude, can't be doing anything wrong because he seems kind of elated right now.

Chris: Look at him. Look at him. He's insouciant.

Ricardo Nuila: If he's trafficking kids, like, you would think that a trafficker would have, like, a scowl on it, but this it feel it felt like I was throwing a no hitter, dude. It felt like we're getting through the bottom of the 7th, and it's just.

Chris: Like, okay, Ricky's no-no. Yeah.

Ricardo Nuila: I mean, everything is yeah, sure, one can argue that the baby jail could discard my son for life, but at.

Chris: The same time, one could. But I'm not going to argue that. I think it's fine.

Ricardo Nuila: So we get through customs. We get on a shuttle. That's another hour and a half. The kids are just listen to this. The kids are looking outside of the shuttle through the countryside of Mexico, and they are just simply, like, thinking and looking at the countryside for an hour and a half. They are not doing anything else. Can you imagine that?

Chris: They didn't ask for a snack.

Ricardo Nuila: They didn't ask for a single **** thing. They just looked outside at the countryside.

Chris: And thought and I'm serious about that they contemplated.

Ricardo Nuila: They contemplated. They were like travelers for, like, an hour and a half.

Chris: They had, like, an inner life going.

Ricardo Nuila: On, and they were yeah, if you know my kids, that is, like, a huge shock, man. But we get into my in law's house, and I tell them they were angels. That's the story, man, because of you.

Chris: Because you did it. You were the strong and steady guide.

Ricardo Nuila: I'd like to think so. I have to say. I'd like to think that that was nice. That's cool.

Chris: You put on your cape, and you ******* flew into action, and you took them to Mexico. You did it.

Ricardo Nuila: I just did it. And everything worked out okay. Work was okay.

Chris: Val made it there. Okay. How long did it take her?

Ricardo Nuila: Two days later, completely relaxed and refreshed. She needed that time to unplug from the kids, and it was fine now. The kids were still, like, rough the next day. Dude, it was just like to me.

Chris: The story is about, like and this isn't just a dad thing. This is a parent thing, right? That you have a plan, right? Something like a family vacation. It's a huge ordeal. Everyone's got to kind of get their time off work, and you got to make all the arrangements, and you got to spend all the money, and it's stressful thing, right? It's not a vacation. It's a trip. Right? It's not a vacation. You're not going there to relax when you have young kids. You're going there to have an experience as if and it's stressful, and in the last minute, everything goes haywire, and it requires calling this huge audible, calling up your work and shifting things around and move things around. But a lot of people in that situation, I think, would just shut down or say, like, this is no longer under my control and that there's no way to salvage this. But you didn't do that, man. You got to create.

Ricardo Nuila: It made me think that maybe we should all be more spontaneous, because maybe the reason why it's so stressful, because, trust me, all of our trips are stressful. Like, the way you said it, this was different. And I think in part, it's because it's like there was no time to put all that stress to put those expectations on.

Chris: But you knew that it was important to your children to go to Mexico and be with their family and have this experience in another country. And you made that be more important than whatever pressure and stress and disappointment you may have felt on the day of when the plan went to ****. And they rewarded you by actually soaking up the experience and making the mistake.

Ricardo Nuila: I feel like they did reward me, and I agree.

Chris: So that's the thing, man. Like, you put yourself out there and you give something and you get it back. So here's the thing, Ricardo, I'm asking you to tell the story, not just because it's a good story, but because this experience of yours, we want to recognize and acknowledge to our community of listeners, and we have a particular way of doing that here on PODRE. You, Ricardo Nuela, are the first recipient of the prestigious Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award. So congratulations, my friend.

Ricardo Nuila: Does it come with some sort of cash? At least a little gift card, like to Target or something like that?

Chris: Wow. Does it come with money?

Ricardo Nuila: That's second season, huh?

Chris: This is about maybe I should have won this second.

Ricardo Nuila: Maybe I should have told you this.

Chris: I'm going to let you choose because clearly this kind of thing is very important to you. I'm going to let you choose. Do you want a PODRE hoodie? Do you want a PODRE a very form fitting fashion forward t shirt? Do you want a coffee mug? I know that you're a big coffee drinker. You name your particular item of PODRE merch, and that is what you shall have. But that's not really...

Ricardo Nuila: Does it have your image on it?

Chris: Because that it's actually just my face. Like, my face is synonymous with the show.

Ricardo Nuila: Like, a really good ironic t shirt.

Chris: Because here's the thing, man, this award, you walk down the street, people are going to recognize you. They're going to say, hey, Ricardo, you're the Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award winner.

Ricardo Nuila: I love that. I love the winner of the inaugural not such a Bad father in this One particular instance award.

Chris: Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award, man, it's you. Congratulations, buddy. You deserve it. You're making us proud here at PODRE. I hope I see you soon. We're going to have you back on the show when the book comes out. We're really excited about it.

Ricardo Nuila: Awesome.

Chris: Thanks for being here.

Ricardo Nuila: All right, dude.

Chris: Take care. All right, that's our show. Join us next time when I'll be talking to the decorated poet, best selling memoirist, legendary storyteller, Mary Karr. You don't want to miss that. So, look, go subscribe to the pod. Go leave us five big fat stars on Apple Podcasts. Tell your friends to download and subscribe. Spread The Word. Carry the message. Alert the villagers. Thanks again to my guests Keith Gessen, Ricardo Nuila, and my very powerful cohosts, Julian and Nico. PODRE is created and produced by me, Chris Brunt. Additional production on this episode by John Greenhalgh. Original artwork for the show is by David Wojo. Special thanks again to Brad Franco.

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