Charlie was referred to be a guest on the dad bod by our mutual friend Carlton, aka Daddy’s Boy Dad. Before committing to an interview, Charlie had some questions, so we jumped on the phone. After some quick pleasantries, he got down to business. "I have some questions," he said. "How real do you want me to be?" "As real as you want to be," I said. We were on the same page. Charlie was in.

And even though the actual interview didn’t take place until a month later, we didn't skip a beat. I began by reading Carlton's words to Charlie. "Charles is married and a father of three beautiful children. While opening up his own business, his father took sick. Balancing a marriage, a job, a family, and being a caretaker for your dad can be overwhelming for a dad bod." Carlton’s quote packs several weighty topics including marriage, fatherhood, and personal pursuits into a small number of words, but the thread that Charlie picks up is the one about his dad. And so that's where we began: Charlie the Son.

Charlie the Son is a grown man in a happy marriage with three beautiful kids and a successful career, but listening to him at this moment in our conversation, he’s a boy again, retelling his dad’s story, and it goes like this: once upon a time, a young man in Sicily asked his dad for some money as he was about to board a ship to start a new life in America. Instead of money, the dad gave the young man a swift kick so hard that it sent the young man to the other side of the family mule. Thus begins Charlie’s dad’s immigrant story. It continues with the young man, penniless in a new country, working his way up the immigrant corporate ladder from dishwasher to construction worker where, with a 90 pound cement bag on each shoulder through countless overnight overtime shifts and side hustle weekends, he builds a successful life.

Today, that young, strong immigrant from Sicily is neither young nor strong. Caring for him is a team effort that Charlie shares with his mom and especially his sister, whom he gives enormous credit to. It involves doctors visits, phone bills, and difficult, pick-your-poison decisions, such as whether to move forward with the extremely painful procedure necessary to confirm the ALS diagnosis. "I'm hearing it's one of the hardest things." Charlie says, "it's gonna hurt like all hell, he's gonna be in unbearable pain, and they say that even if we diagnose him with ALS, we cannot treat him. His body won't handle it. He's got a history of heart issues." And then he sums it up: "So now what do we do? My sister and I, what do we do?"

"It's hard to see," Charlie says, "because you know your dad as a strong man, you've never seen him break down in any way. And now to have to see this, you know, it's hard both mentally and physically."

Like me, Charlie is an American-born son of immigrant parents. Although the facts of our lives and cultures differ greatly, I recognize a lot of the same truths, and even though I’m not yet at the stage of caring for aging parents, I approach Charlie’s story with a great deal of self interest. What can I learn from his experience about supporting a parent in the decline of old age?

This is one of the main reasons I felt compelled to create The Dad Bod: to help us dads learn from other dads and to understand ourselves as connected to one another through the experience of fatherhood. And by learning, I don't mean tips, tricks, and how-tos. Instead, I hope each of the Dad Bod episodes feels like being led through a small stack of photographs chosen by a dad from a partially sorted shoebox. Such an experience offers something deeper than a tutorial, more complicated than a parable. Even though I technically conversed with Charlie through the screen of my laptop, it felt like I was sitting in his living room, his stack of photographs on the coffee table next to an ashtray. We've moved chronologically through his dad's life, starting with old photos of his dad's youth and concluding with new photos from his dad's old age. Charlie talks about how, even though his dad has always been very unfiltered in his communication style, there's an aggressiveness to him these days that they hope is not him but rather a symptom of his sickness, because as Charlie explains, "I just want to shut down and walk away. He's pushing, not just me, but my mother, my sister - he's pushing us away."

And then Charlie continues with this: "It's at those moments when I want to walk away that I've been tapping into and leaning on those good memories." The memory of going to work with his dad as a young kid and gaining the strength over time to lift two 90 pound sandbags on his shoulders, just like his dad. The memory of his dad destroying him in a footrace. And the legacy of strength to achieve a successful life as an immigrant: "If I can accomplish half of what he accomplished," Charlie said, "and he started with nothing, by the way, zero, I don't even think but if I could, if I'm lucky to do that, I'll be in a good place."

The stack of photos is shifting now from his dad to his kids. "Right now, I have a great relationship with the two girls," Charlie says, referring to his eldest, 22 years old, and his youngest, 13 years old. Charlie shares with me the approach he's taken with his girls, his eldest, Gabriela, in particular. Beginning when she was young, Charlie emphasized open, honest communication. All topics - boys, drinking, drugs - were open for discussion. That policy of openness created a bedrock of love and trust in his relationship with his daughter. I'm super impressed and, yet again with self interest, trying to figure out what I can learn from Charlie and his all-in, good, bad, and ugly approach, but I confess to him that I'm not sure I can do the same with my daughter. "First kiss, Shawn," he taunts me, "you gotta be ready for that!"

His relationship with his son is in a different place. They bang heads a lot in part because of how similarly stubborn they are. "Do you ever feel like you're arguing with yourself?" I ask Charlie, and he laughs before saying, "It's like looking in a mirror."

Charlie is the good, bad, ugly dad because, as he reminds me a couple times during our conversation, that's what you're gonna get from him, and true to his word, he goes there. "Have I raised my hands with my son in the past? Yes. Absolutely." I share with Charlie that even though I wasn't hit as a kid, it wasn't a foreign concept. My dad kept a sort of home version of a rattan cane that his native country of Singapore became known for in the 90s when even the intercession of President Clinton could not save an American expat from receiving 4 rattan cane lashes for his crimes. When he would use it on the kitchen countertop, it wasn't hard to imagine it being applied directly to me.

The more we talk about his relationship with his son, the more I hear echoes of his relationship with his dad. Charlie isn’t surprised when I ask him if he sees any parallels, but the topic is short lived because ultimately Charlie’s relationship with his son should be seen on its own rather than through the lense of Charlie’s relationship with his dad.

For one thing, the moment that Charlie’s in with his son feels harder to grasp and more complicated to me than with his dad. You can feel how badly Charlie wants the relationship to work. “Doesn’t he see what I have with her?” referring to his relationship with his daughter. “Doesn’t he want that?” At the same time, you can also feel how proud he is of his son. “I tell him, ‘Benny, I don’t know how you do it,’” referring to his son rising at 4 AM everyday to go to work. “He’s a machine.” Charlie says with awe and admiration.

The photos are now all scattered across the coffee table. Charlie was true to his word. He was 100% real. And the thing I saw and that will stick with me is that for Charlie, to truly love the way that he loves his dad, his mom, his sister, his wife, his daughters, and his son is to hold nothing back. It's gotta be everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And even though his relationship with his son has been rough lately, one thing for sure is that this love is very much alive and it will always be there.

“I actually have to go,” Charlie says as he arranges the photos back into a neat stack. “You won’t believe it but my son - my son - invited me to go watch Godzilla and King Kong with him and my nephews.” Charlie's face beamed with excitement.

Nothing ugly about that.