I look back at pictures of me with my month-old baby boy and cringe a bit. He looks great, of course—but I see a 35-year-old man standing there looking a little broken.  And wearing strange glasses.  Of all the changes that fatherhood had wrought, I was obsessed with my new glasses.  My previous pair that I’d really liked had been smashed in a mosh pit.  Seriously.  And so I’d gotten these just a month or so before he was born.  They were intended to be different, stylish, edgy.  But in the wrong light, or on a strange hair day, or if I was totally cleanly shaven, I found the silvery frames reminding me of a little old woman I’d met in Oklahoma with rhinestone-framed glasses.  They were Church Lady, but I tried to pull them off.

Then he was born.  And I was tired.  And everything else in life changed.  And yeah, if you haven’t had a kid yet you think that is hyperbole: that won’t be me.  I’ll still go out and have fun, we’ll take turns.  I can work while she naps. It’ll be fun to read while he crawls around.  But everything changes, and ironically that is when I learned a lot about who I was.  I learned more about what keeps me balanced, maybe.  It isn’t that I’ve ever been a super tough guy.  I don’t drive a truck, or use a nail gun.  I’m sort of a man tourist, working an egghead job but mountain biking when I can and taking welding classes.  But just as postpartum physiological changes fundamentally alter a mother, I think some chunk of my Y chromosome started to express itself anew.

Suddenly tiptoeing around the house during naptime, or dealing with the emotions of NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) treatment, or rearranging the abundant pastel blankets/toys/binkies around our house, not sleeping—all of these things I knew would be different, even frustrating.  I knew there would be some impermanent but significant changes between my wife and me, but I couldn’t have predicted just what those changes would be.  What my status in the new family would feel like, and so on.  Of course, as a father you don’t complain.  You didn’t physically go through childbirth.  Your body hasn’t just been transformed into a milk factory. 

But what this all translated into was a strange feeling of being neutered.  Of nobody paying attention to the struggle I was having with change, because it all comes second to the much greater change of your wife, your child.  There are a few books, sure, that try to be funny and deal with how you stay cool and still play daddy—but most of those, like Neal Pollack’s “Alternadad,” are more about how you remain juvenile, frankly, not how to feel like…. a guy.  A man.  So I would complain in brief huddled conversations with another friend who was a new dad, and we realized how much we shared this feeling. I started to notice all the white spots on my cool black T-shirts (yeah, it is spit-up).  I couldn’t believe the amount of waste coming out of the little guy, and my promises as an environmentalist were going into the trashcan, literally.  I had no idea what he wanted about 90% of the time—a typical frustrating relationship.  But I knew that all of this sensitivity and softness that I was expressing was squashing on the part of me that likes to burp a lot.  Watch football.  Light campfires and act like I know what I’m doing when it works, or talk about how wet the wood is when it doesn’t.

So to rediscover my manhood—again, something I didn’t know I cherished the way I do now—I found myself finding times to push the stroller with Metallica on my iPod as loud as I could play it.  I spent more time, though less time than ever was available, playing with old bike parts in my workshop, looking at tools, getting my hands greasy, fixing a lawnmower that had been properly neglected for years.  If I hadn’t thought I’d burn the house down I would have started welding on our back deck—melting metal definitely stimulates the testosterone, even if you don’t really know what you’re doing. And when I couldn’t mountain bike, I’d “mountain stroll,” finding bumpy paths to push the stroller down.  I realized that for all the times I’d seen a guy my age before, pushing a stroller, I assumed that guy was one of them.  It never crossed my mind that that guy might also be listening to The Pixies, have a can of beer in the cupholder of the stroller, and be looking for bumpy sidewalks to jostle along.

I figured I would love the little guy, but I didn’t at first.  It was all an academic exercise, and one I found psychologically defeating.  I couldn’t imagine why people choose to have more than one—I would find myself in debates with other people about whether the additional burden was additive (twice as much work) or geometric (the amount of work, squared), which probably indicates more about what a nerd I really am than anything.  The laundry piled up, and I’m sure all new parents—daddy or mommy—start to feel pretty unattractive with the whole reduced sleep/intimacy/quiet/personal thing going on.

So when a couple of my friends let me know that—despite all my bitching and complaining for those months—they were expecting babies later that year, I smiled.  I congratulated them.  I said they’d be great daddies.  And a part of me thought oh hell—they don’t know what’s coming.  So I stopped complaining as much.  I also knew some friends who were having a hard time conceiving, and from our own personal experience with that, I knew they really didn’t want to hear bitching about how hard it is to be a parent.  So I shut up.  But as the months progressed, I wanted to somehow mark the occasion for my buddies.

I put some spare time—when I wasn’t learning to enjoy the cadence and sheer poetry of “Good Night Moon” or “A Snowy Day”—into making “Man Kits.” 

What is a Man Kit?  Well, although I kept mine Safe For Work (I didn’t want to get anybody in trouble after all). It was a box filled with the sort of in-case-of-emergency-break-glass items that I thought could help a guy remember his quote-unquote-manhood (at least, what it was once imagined to be).  A cigar.  A small bottle of scotch.  Bolt and pieces of metal.  A fake mustache (you might want to skip that if your friend is already hairy).  A mix CD of, uh, man music.  Okay, so I knew my buddies well enough to pick out some things I knew they’d dig.  Music Hates You might not work for everyone.  But things like that. And it was all in a wooden box.  In case of emergency—come to the box.  Find something to make you laugh, or bang your head, or get a little buzzed if it helps.

I don’t know if it helped them or not—one of them has the fake mustache attached to the handlebar of his bike, and at least I still dig the music mix I made.  But letting other dads know that it’s OK to whine a little bit, even if we haven’t earned it as much as heroic mommy or the little one (for having her head smooshed in the birth canal, or having to sit for 30 minutes in a stinky diaper because daddy is trying to perfect his sweet potato baby food purée in the blender), at least makes me feel like I stepped up, reached out my hand to my friends…. and talking in a gruff voice, shook their hand, real hard, with a firm grasp. Man-style.