I do not know Lucky’s Dad’s name—I only know him as Lucky’s Dad. I’m sure he must have a name, but in the land of Bluey, the popular Australian cartoon about a cattle dog family, we have no use for his name. We know him through the eyes of the children, Bluey, Bingo, and the friends that populate their world, their birthday parties.
One episode, called “Pass the Parcel,” centers around a children’s birthday game. There are two ways to play: the kid-friendly, everyone-gets-a-present way, and Lucky’s Dad’s way, which is a gamble, most kids go homeempty-handed.
All episode, it’s “Lucky’s Dad!” this and “Lucky’s Dad!” that. The children tease him, they reprimand him, they celebrate him—they come back for more of Lucky’s Dad.
“Does Lucky’s Dad have a name?” I ask my wife, Ash. We are splayed on the couch watching Bluey before bed, as is our nightly routine. At least for now, until our toddler, Wilder, finds a new obsession.
“I think so, yeah. Someone says it at some point.”
I don’t want him to have a name. I want to always know him as Lucky’s Dad. I don’t even know who Lucky is, there are too many characters to keep track of and I only ever half pay attention, sinking into the velvet cocoon of evening, of our pack reunited once again.
When we are apart, something feels off. The world is topsy-turvy. There’s a film between me and everyone else. Ash refers to our desire for all of us to be in one place as “sheep dogging.” When one of us is away, even for a weekend, we feel restless, our bodies jitter and dance, struggle against themselves. We feel a pull toward the missing person, want to find them, give a little bark or nip at their heels, then direct them home. Wilder is like a sheepdog pup himself. When we go on a hike with friends, he takes roll call every few minutes, and if someone falls behind or strays too far ahead, he keeps them in line with a shout, “Come here now.”
This herding instinct provokes a sudden softness in me for my parents. Thinking of all those evenings in high school when I never wanted to come home for dinner because I was out with my friends, doing ecstasy at bowling alleys or coke at a boys’ soccer game. My parents occasionally let me miss dinner, but I know it was important to them that we sit down together as a family—or as our smaller, nearly empty-nested family, since my brother and sister were well into adulthood. Back then, I thought it was a way to control me, but now I wonder if they felt that same pull, that same bodily need.
“One more Bluey,” I tell Wilder when the episode ends. Ash picks a new episode, one she wants to watch, having seen them all hundreds of times.
And there’s Lucky’s Dad again. He’s come over to help Bandit, Bluey, and Bingo’s father cut down a stump. It is a whole thing. An event, an extravaganza. The mom and aunt drink spiked lemonade and cheer. The kids whine at Lucky’s Dad about something or other. It feels like Lucky’s Dad is always being thrown under the bus but in a loving, teasing way. I recognize their tone of voice in Wilder. My parent name is Mozzy, but more and more lately, when he thinks I’m being funny, or weird, or embarrassing, my child gets a little coy and says, “Mozzayyyy,” like the end of the word rosé, giving my name this flourish.
Though he is only two-and-a-half, I can’t help but time travel to the future, when he’s in school and has friends who will only know me as Wilder’s Mozzy, because what other name could I possibly have when that is what’s important to them: who I belong to?
No matter who you are, becoming a parent or guardian fundamentally changes you, takes things from you while simultaneously giving you so much. Your life becomes about your child, their happiness and struggles, their triumphs and failures, their passions and interests. It’s about doing whatever you can to help your child become. It’s a passion project, a love letter. But if you aren’t careful, you can get lost in your child, can forget who you were before them.
I always felt that way about my mother, that her entire identity was contingent upon having kids. It’s why she was thrilled when I accidentally came along seven-and-a-half years after my sister. It’s why she clung and clung to her baby for as long as she could. It’s why, when I graduated college and retired from basketball, she suddenly had nothing to do, nothing to cheer for or celebrate.
Who can blame her, really, when for so long, women only had their children, their husbands? My mother always said she had no chance of discovering if she was athletic because her school didn’t offer girls’ sports.
I was slow to the idea of having a child because I didn’t want that to happen to me. I didn’t want to lose myself in my child, in anyone, for that matter. So much so that, up until recently, despite having a child, despite adoring him in that disgusting “look at him, he’s doing absolutely nothing and yet I find him so cute and fascinating” way, I rejected the label of parent as part of my identity. Always, basketball player. Now, writer. Now, queer and nonbinary. But not parent, not partner, though being a good parent and partner, treating my family with compassion and kindness, are extremely important to me. I want to do right by the people I love. But they aren’t my identity, I insisted.
The very idea reminded me of people’s social media bios: Mother, Father, Grandfather, Granddaughter, Sister, Twin, Aunt, Uncle, Wife, Husband, Dog mom, Cat dad. Or, Mom to [baby emoji], Wife to [social tag].
For years, whenever I read bios like this, I would roll my eyes, judging these people who identified by those around them. It felt trite, common. What else? I wanted to say. I told myself I was something entirely my own, distinguished from others, something that would persist even in the absence of a particular person or people. I hated the idea of my identity depending on those around me. I wanted it to come from within, as if anything can ever truly happen in isolation. As if I hadn’t gambled twenty-some-odd years of happiness on the idea that I could and always would be a basketball player. As if there is a certain nobility in identifying by what you do instead of by who you love and how much. Now, I cannot think of a better way to consider who I am in the world than by love, its insistent music and call.
But under that judgment was fear—I was scared, and I was too close to that fear to really see it for what it was: a preemptive grief. I was all too aware that these relationships could end at any time, that it was possible to lose these people, and with it, the very fabric of who I am. Foolishly, I thought basketball would last forever. I really thought that way, it was a willful delusion. Even as the score ran away from us in my last college basketball game ever—at home vs. Syracuse in the second round of the WNIT—I still thought it would never end, that I’d never have to deal with it ending, that I’d never have to grapple with that part of my identity.
But my fear, I see it now, I get it. I see its monster shape, I see the way the news feeds it, I see it in the eyes of grieving parents, in the space between pleas and screams, in the howling place where soul leaves body and doesn’t return the same. In death sentences masquerading as legislation, in the locked-and-loaded negligence. In government-funded genocide.
Can I still be a basketball player if I no longer play basketball? A question I can easily sit with and explore. Can I still be a parent if I no longer have a child? An unimaginable, disturbing, throat-thickening question. Something that startles me awake often, forces me to sedate myself back to sleep.
Claiming parent as my identity means accepting that it may displace all other parts of me. At writing conferences, people I only know from the internet ask, “How is your kid?” and for some reason, it aggravates me and puts me on edge—even though, of course, I’m thinking of him, asking Ash to text me updates from home every few hours: What did he eat for dinner? Did he have fun in the tub? Am I angry that these internet people are correct? That I am, some days, more parent than person?
Still, there is a tenderness to Lucky’s Dad being known as Lucky’s Dad. This possessiveness, this belonging to. Someone on Twitter gripes that he is in too many episodes to be known solely as “Lucky’s Dad,” but I disagree—I think it’s beautiful and sweet, possibly the most honest thing I’ve ever seen.
I can see my own future so clearly: I’m waiting in the school pick-up line, windows rolled down, radio turned down because I can’t focus on watching for him when there’s music or talking. Wilder running out from school, backpack bouncing up and down on his back, strap slipping off his shoulder, blond waves caught in his mouth, in his lashes. Behind him, a river of friends, wild-eyed and gorgeous, jack-o’-lantern-toothed and big-eared.
A chorus of small voices: “Hi, Wilder’s Mozzy!”
And I will be so glad to hear it, it’ll make my body sing, my joy come out in sweet, easy laughter. I don’t care about my name, not even Mac, the new name I’ve chosen for myself. They all feel stupid these days, approximations of me but not exactly me. I decide to go by another name, in addition to Mac: Moz, a constant reminder of who I am. Of my responsibility to love this child, to help him become whatever and whoever he wants to become, outside of my own expectations or desires. To show him that identity is expansive and creative, is, if you’re doing it right, a queering of expectations.
And these children, his friends, will know virtually nothing about me besides what Wilder tells them, that I am here to pick him up, that I return, day in and day out, to retrieve my child, my pup. They don’t know that I spent my entire life devoted to a sport, that I now spend hours typing silly little words on a silly little laptop, trying my best to create something from nothing. Or rather, not nothing, but from the kaleidoscope of messy feelings inside me. Like: one day Wilder will be too cool to hang out with me, will assert his independence in new and terrifying ways. And one day after that, he will move out and I will be devastated, my-little-baby-all-grown-up about it.
But for now, I consider the words I write and my legacy. Of course, I want to be proud of my body of work, though, ultimately, nothing I write will ever be as important as the things I don’t write because I’m busy loving my child and, crucially, letting him know just how easy he is to love. It’s taken me a long time to get here, to a place in which my identity is richer and more beautifully intricate than I ever could have realized. That it’s not defined by something I do, a passion.
For years, I thought basketball was the only thing worth getting out of bed for. And I thought that would never change, that there would never be anything as beautiful and poetic, as hypnotic and enchanting, as stimulating. How delicious it is to be proven wrong.
The Oscar-winning documentary, The Queen of Basketball, tells the story of Lusia Harris, a virtually unknown women’s basketball pioneer who led her college to three national titles and scored the first basket of the first women’s Olympic basketball game, bringing home the silver medal. She was also the first and only woman to be drafted into the NBA, by the New Orleans Jazz. But she didn’t go—she turned the NBA down because she and her partner were going to start a family and because she didn’t think she was good enough to compete against the men. In the documentary, when talking about saying no to the NBA, she says, “I don’t regret not going, not even a little bit.” She laughs, then poses the question to herself, “Why not?” Onscreen, we see her son in a graduation gown, holding a football and smiling. She says, “Christopher is a lawyer,” then goes on to list off all of the achievements of her children. She says, “They’re athletes, all of them,” chuckling, clearly proud, if not a bit self-satisfied. Years ago, I might have found her reasoning cheesy, or even viewed it as a cop-out. I might have said, “Really? Like parenting can compare to being the first woman to play in the NBA?” But now, I can’t even tell Ash about that part of the documentary without breaking down, without then laughing through misty eyes at my own sentimentality.
What is identity? My earliest definition was obsession. Identity felt, in many ways, merely a way for me to justify my obsession: first with basketball, then with writing. Then, I began to view identity as a blend between what you do, what you value, and how you behave—and maybe that still holds true, but more and more lately, I’ve been thinking of identity as the intersection between desire and vulnerability. The wanting, the intense yearning for something, my behaviors and decisions reflecting that desire, and my willingness to be vulnerable, to pain and loss, making that desire sing, making it more than a static wanting. Identity is in giving myself permission to hope. To be devastated by that hope.
Right now, we are trying for another baby. I am allowing myself to identify in the future tense as a parent of two, the hope at once lifting and ravaging me.
The shift, for me, from being a person who parents to being a parent took digging through all the defenses, the borders and walls I put up in the name of fear. It took becoming an exposed nerve, wires frayed, jumpy at every touch, but relishing every zap, every heartache.
For the past few years, my writer bio has read: “Basketball player, writer, and sweatpants enthusiast.” But last week, while I was lying on my side on a table getting a massive thigh piece tattooed, I submitted a new one to the local paper for a Pride write-up that lists “parent” and “partner.”
The tattoo? Two large Joshua Trees and one small one, its two branches wrapped around the bigger ones. Mommy, Mozzy, and Wilder.
Back on the couch, the last episode of Bluey turns into “One more, please,” and we oblige—we want the cuddles just as badly as Wilder wants to stay up late. I raise my arm so he can duck under it, tucking himself into the nook of my chest. I lean my cheek on the top of his wild, wavy hair and close my eyes, breathing in the scent of his chamomile shampoo—tonight, I had to hug him the entire time I washed his hair, his face buried in my shoulder to protect his eyes. Tonight, I didn’t have to, but I did, let him dump cups and cups of water on my head to return the favor.
I’m not listening to the show when Ash says, “There it is! Bandit just said Lucky’s dad’s name. It’s—”
“No, no, no, don’t tell me,” I say. I’d rather not know. Let him stay vulnerable. So that I can, so that we all can.
***
Artwork by Beatriz Camaleão
