My great-grandfather was not a man you wanted to be on the wrong side of.
My grandfather only spoke of stories of how harsh he could be because I am sure that’s what my great grandfather needed to be. There was no room for much of anything else. Life was severe. You only had what you fought and worked for.
They lived in rural Oklahoma before phones or electricity. One-room schoolhouse. They'd managed to get a genuinely good young teacher — well-spoken, kind, clearly dedicated. She stood out the way people who came from somewhere else with some education tended to stand out in those communities.
There was another local — someone my grandfather described as having a bubble that wasn't quite level. He followed the schoolteacher on her way home one evening and dragged her under a bridge.
In a rural area before telephones, news traveled neighbor to neighbor faster than it could travel into town to find a sheriff. My great-grandfather took his shotgun and went to find the man. A few others joined him. They found him in his shack in the woods.
As my grandfather put it: when you have a hog you don't want breeding anymore, you cut him.
That's exactly what they did.
I know that makes some people uncomfortable. I have no sympathy for anyone who sympathizes with a rapist. What I know is that the schoolteacher was protected, the community made its position clear, and the men involved went home and went back to work and never spoke of it as anything other than something that needed doing.
— — —
The Blood in Your Veins
These were the stories I grew up with. The homesteaders. The survivors of the Dust Bowl and the Depression and a war. Men and women who carved farms out of river bottom and worked night shifts for thirty years and never once described any of it as hardship because hardship was just Tuesday.
I was surrounded by truck drivers, waitresses, factory workers, bikers, veterans, farmers — you name it. What I got from all of them was an amazingly honest view of the world. Not a pretty one, necessarily. But the people who told me their stories often didn't have the luxury of embellishment. What they had was the real thing — unvarnished, unsentimental, and worth more than anything I ever learned in a classroom.
And like I'm sure our species has done since the first words were spoken around the first fire — we feel the need to pass on what we've lived to the people around us. Not because we have all the answers. Because we made it this far and something in us knows that's worth saying out loud.
My story has no comparison to theirs. No wars, no dust storms, no genuine survival in the old sense of the word. Just my own triumphs and struggles in a world that, compared to theirs, is extraordinarily comfortable and soft.
But here's what I've come to understand: I am the culmination of their stories. My story is their story, continued. I exist because of what they endured. And that means I carry something forward whether I intend to or not — their grit, their standards, their particular understanding of right and wrong.
The question this asks is simple and uncomfortable:
What are you carrying forward?
What have you inherited — from your family, your culture, your own history of hurt and survival — that you are now, consciously or not, passing on to the people around you? Where do you seek validation? What are you trying to prove? And who, exactly, are you trying to prove it to?
— — —
Thanks a Lot, Assholes
Maybe this is the right place to thank all the people who went out of their way to make my life difficult.
To every bully who found me in every state I ever lived in — and there were several, because being the perpetual new kid is a full-time job in social navigation that occasionally gets interrupted by actual school. To every person who called me a name or made me the punchline or decided that whatever made me different was fair game.
I don't dwell on it. But I remember all of it.
That little reservoir of fear and self-doubt in the back of my mind — I let you put it there, and that's on me. You found the weak spots and poked at them, the way people do when they need somewhere to put their own hurt and can't find a more honest outlet.
You needed somewhere to put your pain. I gave you a place. So in a sense: you're welcome.
But here's where it turns.
Every single one of you was teaching me something. Not what you thought you were teaching me — not that I was lesser or weaker or didn't belong. You were showing me what a weak mind and a fragile spirit looks like from the outside. You were showing me exactly what I never wanted to become. Your shortcomings were the clearest possible map of what I needed to fix in myself so I'd never end up operating from that same place of fear and inadequacy dressed up as dominance.
You tried to break me. A few times you came close. I learned how to repair what was left either way.
I remember the words. I remember the specific moments. They don't hold me back. They push me forward.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, assholes.
— — —
The Part That's Actually About You
Here's the thing: the bully in that story isn't always the obvious one.
Sometimes it's you, years later, doing a quieter and more sophisticated version of the same thing — taking your unprocessed pain out on the people closest to you, making them pay for things that happened before they knew you, protecting your ego at the expense of someone who deserved better.
Nobody decides to damage the people they love. Nobody wakes up and thinks: today I'm going to pass my unexamined wounds down to my kids.
It happens anyway. Out of autopilot. Out of the completely understandable human tendency to treat others the way we were treated, to recreate the emotional dynamics we grew up in, to default under stress to the behaviors that were modeled for us before we were old enough to evaluate whether those behaviors were any good.
This is the cycle. Not a moral failing. A pattern. Patterns can be interrupted — but only if you can see them.
The men who carry their history forward as fuel rather than as damage are not special or uniquely gifted or unburdened. They're just the ones who were willing to ask the question honestly:
What did I absorb from the people who raised me? And am I passing it forward, or does it stop here?
On a weekend when the culture wants uncomplicated gratitude, that's the harder and more honest question. The one actually worth sitting with.
Your kids don't have to run the same software. The people in your life don't have to absorb the output of wounds you never looked at. The chain breaks when you decide it does.
Happy Father's Day, motherfucker. Make it mean something.
Happy Motherfucker is a book in progress — a survival guide for men navigating the wreckage of the life they thought they were building. More excerpts here regularly. Share this with the guy who needs it — especially today.