The NJ DAD Podcast
The NJ Dad Podcast is where fatherhood meets humor. Join Andrew Parise for honest conversations about parenting, marriage, work, friendships, and the everyday chaos of suburban family life. Some episodes are solo, some feature guests, but they’re all built around one idea: being a better dad doesn’t mean taking yourself too seriously. Whether you’re changing diapers, coaching Little League, navigating date night, or just trying to survive another trip to Costco, you’ll find relatable stories, practical perspective, and plenty of laughs along the way. New episodes every Thursday.
The NJ DAD Podcast
Learning Experiences Growing Up Fatherless
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SPEAKER_01You know, my my kids would go to school and and I'd you know put a floor in the kitchen or something like that. Come on, my daddy, what did you do? I don't know. I blacked out. But six hours later, there's a floor in there. And that that that makes me very happy. Hey, welcome to the fatherless cheat sheet. I'm Andrew, your host, your fatherless friend, your quasi-big brother. And we're going to talk about things that I learned along the way, not from anybody, but from the best teacher experience and life being fatherless growing up very, very, very early. And I would extend that to other kids, other children, other young adults who are going through some sort of trauma, even an existential tumult within the household. Both parents are working or s somebody's sick. You name it. This stuff happens all the time. And unfortunately, it happens. Kids, they're really they shouldn't have to go through things like this. Yeah, they have they should go through things that make them stronger human beings. We'll talk about that as well. How you game that out and how you achieve creating strong humans when you don't want anything to happen negatively to them. But while thinking about and writing this episode, researching the episode, just getting ready before I came out here, just getting my getting my face on, I was looking at myself thinking, Jesus, how the hell when you're you live it feels like you live 50 lifetimes. You think back 15, 20, 30 years ago, five years ago, and you just can't believe that you drag this meat suit around and you you accomplish what you do and you have the relationships and friendships that you do. And all of these things change us. All these all these things help to evolve us as humans. You hope in a better way, sometimes worse, met a few of those. But it's a tricky thing. And the the thing is, is that there's a line in a song and a wallflower song, one headlight, everybody knows that song. And in this in the song, he says, I ain't changed, but I ain't the same. And I think that rings true for all of us. I think that in our in our hearts, ultimately, even though we could be shaken and changed to the core, I think there's probably some fundamental piece of you know who we were even when we were kids. And from the onset of the show in all the episodes and all the preparation, I always keep my eight and ten-year-old sweet husky self in mind because I've been sticking up for that kid for the rest of my life. And this episode maybe we'll shed a little light on that stuff and and it'll be interesting. And we'll just chat about it a little bit. So here we are, the fatherless cheat cheat. Check it out. Okay, guys, we're back. We're gonna talk about a couple different things. And I think the first thing I want to mention about what can happen, because I don't speak super specifically. I always leave this caveat in there of different things happen, different circumstances. But I'm gonna talk about what I learned. I don't want to talk about my life because it's my show. What can happen, and what did happen for me, was that immediately the curtain was pulled back on the world's fallibility. You no longer believe that everything is guaranteed, safety's not guaranteed, systems fail, adults will disappoint you. And when shit hits the fan, it tends to reveal a lot of that stuff. And you kind of start to go, oh wow, I didn't even know that was possible. I didn't even know that person could be that much of a shithead. But they tell you pretty quickly, and these situations reveal themselves. And one of my favorite topics and think abouts is who who shows up for you in that time. And we were lucky enough to have certain people do that and certain people scooted and and it was what it was. But when you feel that disappointment, when you feel that sort of abandonment after a death, it just kind of compounds. And it's also interesting because what happens inevitably is that when you go through something, when you go through something pretty serious, your empathy meter goes up. It just does. That's just what happens. I I know there are Hollywood stars that I won't name that I can't stand, and then I find out that they have a special needs sibling, and I go, oh, okay, that person, they must not be that bad because they're taking such good care of this sibling and they're doing these things. They can't be they can't lack all humanity. So when you go through things, your empathy goes up and your humanity tends to rise a bit. If if you disagree with me, that's fine. But that's just what I've found. But the empathy can be taken advantage of then. And so you start to have this thing when I've said this before, but you start to become like this this feral animal where you're reactive and defensive, and then much later in life, as I am now, you start to flip the script on that, and you're outwardly affable and outwardly kind and mean it as I do. But the fact of the matter is, is that you know, stay on the resort. You don't want to visit off of the resort. You don't want to get in there and test the affability and test the kindness, never mistake the kindness for weakness. Because what you do over the years is it you create this space internally where you do have this protective thing. And it used to be the opposite, where you weren't able to protect that thing and you were you were insecure, too insecure to be nice. You were afraid to be nice. Now I'm not afraid to be nice. So don't don't go off the resort. Stay on the resort if you're vacationing. Okay. You don't wanna you don't want to get in there and and poke the bear. And we don't want to I I I never understand unsolicited meanness. Does it make sense? I'm sure it stems only from insecurity, from the giver. But I get a little tired of that excuse as well. It's like, clean your bullshit up, clean house. I don't want to hear it anymore. So what happens is you learn how to deal with all that more, diffuse these- you diffuse these situations because what happens is that there's always a patina of nuclear threat. There's always that thing of, all right, what do we have to do? My sister Emily, who is so great, fan favorite, shout out M, she was on a couple times and she said it so beautifully. She just said she's always she's always prepared with a go bag. She's always prepared to go, and she's always prepared to take care of herself rapidly. And and she's done that, and she's done that her whole life, and she continues to do that. I'm proud of her for it. But sometimes it does get a little tiring. It gets a little bit of exhausting, just taking care of shit and never letting your guard down. So that's one of the things you learn along the way. And we're gonna get into a few others, but I want to open it up with a couple of stories to illustrate what I learned and what I mean by all this. And the first one, and may he rest in peace, it's about my grandpa, and my grandpa was one of the best humans I've ever known. He died when I was he died when I was 20. He died at 100 years old. So because he had those that back in at 20 years, thank God, I got to know him and we were really, really truly kindred. We were very similar. In fact, fun fact, the venue that my wife and I married in, he actually put the roof on the building and totally separate. He was in Long Island and Brooklyn, and this was in New Jersey, and it just so happened he was a roofer and a truck driver. It just so happened he put this this building on this old post office that's now turned into this venue up in northern New Jersey. And so I didn't know that until a couple weeks before the wedding, and it wound up being such a special thing. My grandpa loved me, boy. He loved me, and I could talk about him for hours. The one thing he got annoyed at me about, the one thing ever, was that he heard, he didn't even see it, because I didn't cook at his house. He heard that I was a messy cooker. I would splash the gravies, the gravy around the stove or whatever it was. That was it was messy. And I always thought to myself, like, grandpa, I'm I'm eight years old, I'm 10, give me a break. I'm like, this is the saddest after school special ever. I'm putting, I'm throwing dinner together, and he's coming at me for getting a little red sauce on the stove. I always thought that was funny, but the illustration is that, you know, my mom worked her ass off. And sometimes I had to take care of dinner. If Emily wasn't, my sister was doing her own thing. She was in that point, you know, in her twenties and living her life and stuff like that. So maybe I was a little bit older in eight, you know, 10, 11. But either way, you get my drift. So when you have to be responsible, when you when you have no when you have no backup, you have to just do it. You have to get the thing done. And I'm again, none of this is I'm not lauding myself. This was that I wasn't I wasn't thrilled to be doing this. I'm not like, look at me. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it was a fact. And I just I always laughed about that. That's the one thank goodness. It was because I respected him so much. I loved him so much. And that was the one thing that he ever sort of he would like, give me a face, ah, you're messy, you're a messy cook, like a messy cook of 10. I hadn't even anyway. It was just funny. It was one of those funny things. And another one, another story, take a sip. I remember this like it was yesterday. I was probably about 11, 10, 11 years old. And we were on, mom and I were on 7th Avenue, and we had a Plymouth Voyager. I don't even think they make those anymore. And we needed to jump. The thing's dead. We needed to jump. And she pulled a 10 out of her pocket and she stayed with the car, which was interesting, because if the car wasn't going anywhere, I don't know, maybe we're in front of, I'm not knocking you, Linda. I'm just saying, I'm just trying to think of the the uh logistics on this, but maybe we had to you had to stay with the car. But anyway, she goes, here's a 10. Go into the deli here on 7th Avenue in in Brooklyn and see if someone will jump the car. So little me, 10, 11 years old, was walking into the place, ask a few people, didn't even look at me. I went up to this guy, this sort of very regular-looking guy, as I can remember, and I said, Hey, I'll give you 10 bucks if you give us a jump. And he just he just started laughing. Not in not in a a bad way or a really negative way. He's like, oh my God, look at this kid. So he came out, he jumped the car, didn't take the money. He was uh just a mensch about it, and it was just one of those funny things. And and stuff like that kind of raises the humanity meter and trust in it back up just a little bit. So that's another funny one. Going, sort of pushing forward to high school, when I when I sort of moved up to where I went to high school when I moved out of Brooklyn. I left Brooklyn when I was uh uh after my freshman year of high school. I think it was a junior in high school, and uh we were out, and a friend of ours with Dino, and a friend of ours, he was doing something stupid. There you go. Shockingly enough, a 16-year-old guy doing something stupid. He sl he went to dunk on a hoop and he wound up breaking his wrist. It was I could actually pass out thinking about it. It was pretty gross. So we got him in a car and we drove him down to the hospital, and Dino was driving, and I was just trying to keep the kid awake because he was gonna pass out, and that's dangerous in that situation. So we get down there, we go, and and uh Dino's got a you know, took him in there or whatever, and then I had a call. The kid gave me his house number, there's no cell phones at the time. I had a beeper senior year. We'll talk about that another time. But I called his mother and I said, Hey, listen, this happened, he's fine, it's gonna be okay, but you just gotta get here. But when she got here, and she was a very affluent, very kind, but like no nonsense person. And when she got there, she was uh effusively thanked me the way I communicated with her. And that always stuck with me as well, because I just that's just how I was and what I did. Again, not lauding myself. Dina was handling business as well. We were very responsible kids, but the way I talked to her, I talked to her like I was like an adult. And I didn't panic, I didn't this and that. I and I assured her that, you know, it wasn't this horrible thing. He wound up breaking his wrist. He was out for like two, three months for baseball, whatever. Well, it worked out fine. It was fine. But that always stuck with me as well. The last story I'll tell as sort of a reflection on growing up sort of early or the way I grew up, and a lot of this stuff I think you could also attribute some of this stuff to some degree to growing up in New York City. Uh Brooklyn, but certainly New York City, and my uncle was in Queens, just all that, all that stuff. Well, when you're in New York City, you just grow up quickly. You see everything, you hear everything, and you're just a part of the whole thing. So you're exposed to different things, some things you shouldn't be exposed to. But the first time I ever really, really tied one on, you'd think it was what, with your with my buddies and this and that, stealing a couple bottles of Southern Comfort. No. I was at Han Raddies on the Upper East Side with my mom and her close, close friends, drinking, drinking a drink that was named after her close friend. And I got so I got so drunk. I had two martinis and two glasses of wine that probably I still wouldn't, they were probably so expensive, these glasses of wine, because this guy was, you know, who he was. And I I wouldn't order them now, but it was such a fun time. And the f the first time I really tied one on, I was with, you know, adults. And it just that just kind of sums it up for me. And obviously I had my fun elsewhere, but it was really the the first time I could think about something like that. And it was a fond memory, to be honest with you, because there was a an element of of safety involved. I know your mom was there, she was gonna get me home safe. I had this this crazy man I was I was boozing with, and he was a real character as well. And um, but anyway, just one of those funny, funny stories I reflect on. And you just I tell I say this much. The way I am raising or the way we are raising our our children, we don't want any of that stuff for them. I don't want to I don't want to shield them from all this, of course. But you you don't it's not it's a necessity. Now that brings up a different topic of conversation, which is how do you make strong people and strong kids without major trauma, stress, struggle? I don't know. I don't have an answer for you. I have a couple of ideas, but getting back to what I was talking about with just simply speaking to adults, back then it was a little bit different because you kind of had to sharpen that knife anyway with calling a friend. You had to pick up the phone, you had to go through the gatekeepers, which are parents, pain in the ass, siblings, whomever. For me, I had a good friend of mine, and I'm not I'm not gonna give her name or anything. It was a million years ago, it doesn't matter. But I would call, I would have to go through her. She had a uh a lovely Jamaican grandmother with the most wonderful accent, and we would do this tango almost every day after school. I would call, hello, this is Andrew May, please speak to Jade. I said her name. There you go, it doesn't matter. But it was the same thing every day, and she held me to a standard. And I had, I said, How are you doing? How was your day? We would do it almost every day because we talked a lot. We were good friends. And it made me, it made me really, it sharpened that thing. I mean, even over and above what I'd already learned through the other channels and things like that. But kids, kids don't have to do that. They're talking through Roblox. Be careful who you're talking to on there. But it's it's all these things where you don't have to to do that. And then, you know, you're throwing a uh a fucking celebration because Jackson is ordering chicken fingers for himself for the first time at his 12th birthday party at Hula Hands. Let's not get too excited. So it's it's tricky. I don't know, but I'm gonna I'll probably punt punt that about how do we raise the kids with without too much struggle. Uh maybe make that its own episode down the road, because that's a really important, interesting topic. Some one that my wife and I are trying to figure out right now. God forbid they have any struggle. I don't want them to. I don't want to be that snowplow parent clearing the path. I don't want to do that. But I think there is some there is some merit to this is not a judgment. Maybe don't carry their backpack. That's just me. I don't I load them up. I load these girls up. Put your backpack on, carry it. I'm not carrying your stuff. Why why would I carry your stuff? So I guess when you get into the the micro things like that, I think those stack up the my the little thing cleaning up after yourself. Very logical things. I'm not believe me, I'm not teaching a uh Ted TED Talk masterclass here about parenting. But I guess my point overall is nobody knows what the fuck they're doing, basically, including me. So even after I learned all this shit.
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SPEAKER_01Okay, so I want to talk about a couple different things. I will say this much. Not all of this is bad. Not all of the things I learned, whoa is me, oh my God, it's so sad. No, no, thank God I learned some of this stuff. Dealing with service providers, learning how to how to talk to these guys, you know, learning how to leverage these guys, learning how to stick up for yourself within that conversation. You got the the guy drops off the wrong uh washer dryer, the wrong dryer. This actually happened. Dropped off the wrong dryer, it was electric and not gas. And I had to have them take it out. They're refusing to take it out. And I'm, you know, 17 years old and I'm digging in at these three guys, um, all with very intimidating Slavic accents. And I'm like, no guys, you've got to get this thing out, you gotta make this right. And, you know, it that's a pretty useful tool as you get older. And to this day, you know, I try to, I take, I take the approach with the with the service providers. I try to I start with very, very nice and then and then we go from there. But because these guys are just they're working guys, and and you know, anyway. Um even down to handling paperwork, uh, you know, I I used to have to do errands all the time. Go to the dealing with the post office or uh different sort of business ventures my mom was taking care of or trying and you know, this is a this is a big one. Money awareness. I think that a lot of the time when it's mom and dad, you know, or dad, whatever the circumstances, when there were two adults in in the home, you're not privy to those conversations. Now, mom wasn't like, oh, come here, look at the checkbook. She wasn't doing that stuff, but stuff just kind of it just kind of slips through the cracks, it kind of comes up. So you start to understand some of that stuff, you start to understand like what The value of certain things are money, rent. Oh, I left one thing out about one of the stories. Where I grew up, we grew up at the in the top floor of a brownstone. And I used to take the rent down until our very last day there in ninety-six. And the Hennessys. The Hennessys were down there. And they were okay. He was a little bit he was a bit a little bit nicer than she was. But I tell you what, you could cut the B-O and uh smell a beef eater gin down there with a knife. So Linda would send me down there with the rent, and I would say, again, the whole thing, how to talk to an adult, passing off the rent, understanding those machinations. May I come down, please? You know, these are important, at the time, scary things that I had to do. As a kid, it's scary. And so it's important to do that because you learn and you learn how to navigate those things. Now I'll do you one better. From Jump Street, I wanted a dog. I wanted a dog. I wanted a dog. They would not let us get a dog. And I would probably ask, I wouldn't say quarterly, but probably, you know, every six months I'd go down and ask to have a dog. They would always say no. So, so sad. So much of this shit is so sad. It really is. I you can laugh at it now, because I'm great. I have two crazy dogs that I love so much, and it pains in the ass. And I I love them. I do anything for them. And and uh I've had dogs since. But it's just so sad. But yeah, the Hennessy's going down there, going down those three three flights to smell the uh the B.O. and the corned beef and cabbage, that was a pleasure. But anyway, all right, where were we? Okay, now even to this, and I and for some of the some of those some of those of you, that doesn't make any sense. Those of you who see some of my social media stuff that I've been sort of doing more recently, DIY, man, do I love my DIY. I really do. I didn't, when I'm you know 16 and I'm fixing outlets and I'm doing this and shocking myself and just doing as well as I can to just kind of bubble bubblegum and and scotch tape the thing together. I actually do really enjoy it now. And it's kind of cool sometimes when you know my my kids would go to school and and I'd you know put a floor in the kitchen or something like that. Now come on, my daddy, what did you do? I don't know. I blacked out, but six hours later, there's a floor in there. And that that that makes me very happy and it makes it feels good. So some of those things over the years, again, just the I've lived such trial and error, trial and error, and going back to other kids in that situation, you have to just you have to just figure that shit out. It's a it's literally a lifestyle of figuring things out. You know, it's not thinking about where we're gonna go for for you know winter break, which which slopes are gonna have the best powder. What? That I don't even know what that means. And that's I'm not knocking them, God bless them. I want people to live the best possible lives they can. I really genuinely do. But that just wasn't my setup. And I would say, the DIY, I'm so glad. I'm so glad. You can't, what is it, the forest for the trees? I I never understood that. You can't see the I don't know. Yeah, you know what I see when I see trees? I see leaves that taunt me that are gonna fall, and I'm gonna have to pick them up in the fall. That's what I see, forest for the trees. But what it is, is all this stuff prepares you, all those little minor things that it just prepares you for the next thing in life. And I'm, boy, was I was I prepared. And thank God because now my kids and my wife have the benefit of that. And, you know, um I I sort of couldn't ask for more in that realm. Let's see. And you you kind of also you kind of turn into a and as much of a smacked ass as I am, and I'm a creative, I'm a little bit of a nut with certain things and artistic and blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, there's a duality to me, and I think this was formed earlier with everything we're talking about, where there's hyper pragmatism. Like literally, how is this thing going to get done? You have to get this thing done. How are we going to figure that out? And let me tell you, most times it wasn't pretty and still's not. But you just have to get there's no choice but to get the thing done. So that that's was a big help as well. And and I'll say this as well. And maybe this is just like a not a great maybe a misconception because I've met a lot of people who who are like I am in this sense, but the you gotta be able to take some take some hits and and just keep moving on. I mean, people lose their minds about the smallest little thing. So and I think sometimes it's about other stuff they have going on. As I say, sometimes different episode. Handling crisis calmly that's a good one. I I think about I think about my approach with with other people's crisis, not not so much my own, because we're always uh harder to to soothe ourselves often, hence hence the the booze sometimes. But anyway, I think about in that sense, because I I always uh saw and felt my mom's pain. It was hard to see that. And I'm not obviously not trying to upset her when she listens to this, but it was very hard to see that because she went through a hell of a lot. And I always think about Barry Katz is a famed comedy manager and he managed uh Jay Moore. And on Jay Moore's podcast, Barry Katz talked about when he was four years old, he lost his dad. And he talked about seeing his mom slumped over washing some dishes, and he just sort of went up behind her and just kind of put his hand on her and said, No, everything's gonna be okay. And he said from then on, he was the everything's gonna be okay guy. You're looking at him. I've always sort of taken up that that role. I've always been that way with with my friends and and um my wife and you know, my family. You know, the Barry Katz of it all, and those type of stories, he obviously is a big success in comedy and entertainment. And it doesn't have to define you what happens. I try to say that a lot as well. Although you do carry the baggage with you, you can to a large degree. But anyway, the capability is born out of necessity, like I said earlier. And some of those stories, again, in many ways I would change a lot. In many ways, I wouldn't change anything because I'm here now, and I have my family and I have my toolkit that I've put together through all these years of trial and error and some toughness. And I certainly have grit. I have grit and I have accountability, and I'm very, very proud of those things, and I'm very reliant on those things as I move through this sometimes fresh hell of a world which is unrelenting. And you stick your chin out there, it will punch you in the face. And you gotta get up and you gotta move forward because we don't really have a choice. But anyway, I try to put this little charcuterie board of information and comedy and all this stuff together for you. And I hope you're enjoying it. Tell your friends, subscribe to the YouTube, come see me on Instagram. I do some other fun stuff on there related to the show. But keep listening, stick with me.
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