Our 101st Dad in the Limelight is Alan Kercinik of AlwaysJacked.com . I want to thank Alan for being a part of this series. It has been great connected with him and now sharing him with all of you!
1) Tell me about yourself, (as well as how you are in the limelight for my readers knowledge)
My name is Alan Kercinik, a lifelong Chicagoan who has remained a Cubs fan despite decades of disappointment. (That should tell you all you need to know about me. I love lost causes.)
I’m the North American creative director for the public relations agency, Weber Shandwick. I lead a couple of pieces of business, as well as help teams across the country concept campaigns for their clients. I’ve long held aspirations of becoming a writer, and when my son was born a couple of years ago, I took it as an inspiration to start doing a little bit more about it and sharing my personal writing more widely. I started blogging at AlwaysJacked.com a couple months after he was born. I also contribute to thirtymag.com and the soon-to-be-relaunched Fatherfolk.com.
2) Tell me about your family
My wife is the greatest. If there is anything that has confirmed my belief in fate, it’s her. We met about nine years ago, when I had to rent a car to drive to Wisconsin for a client meeting. She worked at Enterprise at the time (they really do pick you up, as it turns out) and rented the car to me. Instant banter and connection. Her name is Lara, which also happens to be the name of Superman’s Kryptonian mother. I’m a huge comic book geek and took that as a sign, on our first date, that I should be paying attention to this woman. We’ve been together ever since.
Our first child’s name is Scout. She is a mini goldendoodle and a great dog. Our son’s name is Jack. He is very independent, a bit of a climber, has a pinch of mischief in him, and is a really friendly, happy little dude.
3) What has been the largest challenge you have had in being a father?
Finding balance. Between my job, being a husband and a dad and my own personal writing, sometimes it’s hard to find time to just sit and do nothing. Or read a book. I know that this is a complaint of many women who work, who feel like they have to somehow ‘do it all.’
I don’t think that most people expect men to actively make the effort to spend time with their kids. But that is something that I knew I was going to work at the second that I met Jack. So if it means that I have to work at night for a while, or work a bit every weekend, I’d rather do that because I want to make sure that I’m an everyday part of his life, not just his dad on the weekends.
4) What advice would you give to other fathers?
Communicate. Lara made the choice to stay home with Jack after he was born and I appreciate how hard it can be, especially in the midst of a Chicago winter, to be inside with the little guy for ten hours a day. So we’ve developed a good routine — which we mapped out pretty early — and know when to say to the other, “Hey, why don’t you go take a break today?” If you don’t do this, to say that you need a couple hours to go hit the gym or do something else, that’s where resentment and tension is going to come from.
5) Seeing that you (or your position) are in the limelight, how have you come to balance parenthood and outside life? If you are currently not in the limelight per se, please still answer this in regards to how you balance parenthood and outside life.
One of my challenges in that regard was about my blog, oddly enough. A lot of parental bloggers highlight different brands or talk about different products. Because of what I do, that can be a challenging place for me. I believe in the clients I work on, but didn’t want to use that platform to promote them due to transparency and other issues like that. Or to have other parents think that the only reason I started a blog was to promote my clients.
So I decided that my blog was going to be a place where I put some writing out into the world and I would try to talk about parenthood and raising Jack through the lens of what he’s teaching me, rather than what brands I use in our house. It’s been a little bit of church and state separation that I feel works pretty well for me.
6) What have you learned from the fathers that you have interacted with?
There are a lot of really good dads out there, who take that job very seriously. Many of them are, in their way, pushing against the stereotype of dad as this kind of do-nothing bumbler who doesn’t know a thing about his kids.
I think this is an interesting time of male self-expression. There weren’t a lot of men out there, a generation or two ago, who really talked about what it meant to be a dad. Hopefully that also translates into more fathers telling their kids what they mean to them.
7) What else would you share regarding your experiences as a father thus far?
I wasn’t ready for it. I mean, I was in the sense that I knew I wanted to be a dad. I knew that for a really long time. But I don’t know that I could have been adequately prepared, no matter how many people I talked to, about the impact it would have on me.
It has, in many ways, pushed me to pursue some things in my own life that I was not doing as much as I could, because I want to be a proper example for my son.
What have been the most memorable experiences that you have had thus far as a parent?
My memorable moments are really the little things. Stupid things we do together that get us both laughing, like when he wants to play LEGOs and we build robots and he starts running around the house yelling, “Robots!”
This past Christmas was pretty special. Jack was at an age where he almost understood the concept. What he did understand was that he was getting a bunch of new toys. Prior to then, he’d not been the most emotionally demonstrative kid in the world. Bit of a squirmer / back-archer if you tried to give him a hug. After all the presents were opened, he came up to me and Lara to give us hugs — more than once — and it kind of blew me away.
If you have any questions for Alan, please leave a comment here and I will make sure that he gets them so that he may be able to respond!
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