Daddy Cool by Maulik

Daddy Cool by Maulik - March 2017 Scholarship Essay

I am a father, but not necessarily in the biological sense of the word. Picture Frank Abagnale Sr. (Christopher Walken) from Catch Me if You Can, or James Donovan (Tom Hanks) from Bridge of Spies. I have the Donald Draper hair - a classic side-part that is equal parts professional, sexy, and good ol’ American. I wear sensible button-down shirts, plaid like butterscotch and crisp like potato chips. I’d like to say I dress the way I do in order to emulate the successful men around me, but really it’s because loafers are so comfortable. Point is, though I have boomed no babies, my friends call me "the dad," and I certainly look the part.

My dadness began in the seventh grade, when I sprouted my first facial hair, and by facial hair, I mean birds could have nested in it. After a while though, being frisked at the airport got old. So I shaved my face clean, but even though two pounds of hair were gone, the nickname, "dad" still had weight.
By junior year, the individual voices calling me Mister Rogers had swelled to a strident chorus. I became determined to escape the label, not because being "the dad" was necessarily an insult, but because I did not want to be confined to a given mold. So I did what I always do: I experimented.

I tested each variable individually. First clothing. I traded in the dockers for chubbies and the button-downs for T’s. No luck. My ‘gear’ may have been more ‘hip,’ but friends still jokingly asked for my help on their taxes. So next I remixed my music. All the young’uns listened to rap, but I didn’t know which rapper was the ‘sickest.’ So I familiarized myself with an artist whose name is antithetical to my old-man persona: Future. But I still got cards on Father’s day. Haha, real funny guys. Having found no solution, I moved on to the hardest variable: mannerisms. I had been told I sneeze like an old man. How does one sneeze like an old man? I analyzed the pitch, angle, and decibel levels of my sneeze and fine tuned these from a 1978 V8 Mustang rumble to the young and polite surge of a Prius. But to no avail.

After months of effort, junior year ended, but I still had not escaped the weighty yoke of dadness. One summer evening, I went to have dinner with my friends, and they announced on cue, "the dad has arrived." “Cling, cling, cling,” went my dad shackles, a familiar sound by now. But my response, this time, was different. I did not feel any irritation. And on the way home, instead of turning on some new-fangled band, I opted for something more “archaic,” - Neil Young I think it was - and pondered my new indifference.

By the time I had arrived home, I understood that it was not indifference, but a resonant acceptance. My “dadness” is not a shackle holding me back but a part of who I am. With my experimentation, I assumed that, in order to be my own person, I had to escape the label others had given me. But the label was actually a recognition of my distinctiveness. All I had really been doing was trying to become a member of the control group, when really I should have been content being the independent variable. I do not have to radically rebel against the label to be my own person.

Dadness, I see now, is an attitude, and accepting it is my own form of rebellion. It means that I am comfortable in a slightly wrinkled skin, that I am grounded and reliable, that I am a stabilizing force. It means I accept my own self-image. And it means, as an added cherry on top, that I can dress comfortably and still be totally ‘rad.’