Granderson: How to be a father in the present, not battling the past

19 Jun 2026, 10:38 · The Fresno Bee

Comedian Roy Wood Jr. once shared an observation about being a dad that lives rent free in my head: "It's a weird thing when you get to be more of a father to your child than your father was to you. The hardest thing you have to let go of when you make a choice to be present in your child's life and be there is that you're fighting this battle of being happy to be a father while also being sad for yourself in that you didn't get this. I remember when I played catch with my son for the first time, I almost cried in front of him because I just never did that with my pops. He was gone. So, you're being present as a father while also trying not to be jealous of your kid but you're the reason you're jealous, so it's your fault."

I half-jokingly asked if that was a form of self-hate.

Wood, the host of CNN's "Have I Got News for You," replied: "Yeah." Full-jokingly. I think.

Like Wood, I didn't grow up with my father in my life and didn't fully understand how that absence shapes parenting until I had a son of my own.

Wood and I are Gen Xers, making us middle-aged men who grew up when the divorce rate in America was at its peak: 1980. That year, stagflation became a thing; "Kramer vs. Kramer," an emotionally draining film about a messy custody battle, won the Oscar for best picture; and millions of elementary school students returned home to be greeted by no one. The "latchkey kid" framing normalized the absence and even made it sound cool, but in retrospect, the rebranding obscured the fatherlessness undermining communities.

For men like Wood and myself, the absence of a father didn't dissipate into the ether once we reached adulthood; it mutated into a ghost to fight. To paraphrase something former President Obama wrote about in "The Audacity of Hope": Every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes. When you don't grow up with your father, there are no expectations to reach, only mistakes to correct - with the biggest being his absence in your life.

Of course, most of us don't notice right away if we're using our children as a proxy battlefield against the father who wasn't there.

You are not conscious that you're litigating the past - as opposed to parenting for the future - until someone holds a mirror up. Usually that someone is your kid. The insidious part is that whatever overcorrection you're making feels like good fathering because you're present. But shadowing the desire to be there is the emotional cloud of resentment for the father who wasn't. Gen X men reached adulthood without language for this dynamic, but silence does not mean that pain was not baked into our individual life or the culture at large.

It wasn't until my father died 10 years ago - and I found myself mourning what we weren't more than what we were - that I realized his absence was informing my current relationship with my son. Not in a negative way per se, but in a way that inadvertently prevented us from truly getting to know each other. Because as long as the ghost of my absentee father was clouding the time I spent with my son, I was never going to be able to see him clearly. There was always going to be space in my psyche to compare my actions with my son to my father's with me, in some desperate attempt to prove that I'm the better parent, that I'm the better man.

It took some time for me to realize our children do not need us to be better than the past. They just need us to be fully present.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.