The Sweet Father's Day Tradition Ben Napier Shares With His Family

Yahoo

14-06-2025

Ben Napier is a person you want to listen to. Not because he's a burly, bear-hugging Southerner with a deep voice and an all-knowing drawl—but definitely for those reasons too. Mostly it's because he speaks with his heart. He does it on Home Town, the long-running HGTV renovation show he hosts with his wife, Erin, that's about celebrating the human spirit as much as it is about renovation. He does it on the Home Town spinoffs that show off Ben's expert wood craftsmanship and the couple's peerless gift for transforming entire towns. And he's doing it right here, for Country Living, as he talks about becoming a parent, being a dad, and the one quality he hopes his daughters inherit from him.
The girls usually do French toast. Helen, the older one, could probably do it herself, but Erin likes to make it for me, so they all make it together. I love it with just white sandwich bread, but she'll probably use some fancy bread for a special occasion, which I'm not gonna say no to. I've never met French toast I didn't like.
We don't do gifts or anything, but I like to do take a drive. We have a small collection of classic cars—none of them are crazy valuable. We have a '95 Range Rover Classic, we have a '99 Suburban. We have my old truck that I drive on the show. None of them are some hundred-thousand-dollar collector car that we only drive three days a year. We rotate them in and out and drive them daily. So yeah, then I like to go for a Sunday cruise in one of our old cars and go swimming and either get a summertime drink from Sonic or have ice cream. It's a relaxed day.
When Erin was pregnant with Helen, my dad said, Go out to dinner, go on dates. Go see movies as much as you can right now.
I have two warnings and one piece of advice for first-time parents, things that were never told to me. My first warning is—and I may sound like an idiot for saying it—the first night home from the hospital is the absolute scariest thing you will go through. We had been in the hospital for two or three days, the baby had spent both nights in the nursery at the hospital—and it was great. Then we came home that first night, and she cried all night. I was trying to let Erin sleep, sitting on the couch holding Helen, and as long as I kept moving, she wouldn't cry.
My other warning: I grew up with three brothers and a mother who is irreverent. She's hilarious and she's amazing. She was always just like, I don't care what you do, just don't be in my kitchen. My point is, I didn't learn a lot about the female body. Later in life, your wife has nine months of the craziest hormonal swings ever while she's pregnant—but then in my mind, it was like, 'Alright, baby's here, hormone changes are over!' And that's not how it works. I was unprepared for the next three to six months of hormonal changes that were going on. So if you're a boy who grew up in a house full of boys, just know: That's coming.
Then the advice is to just be gentle with each other. Everyone—including the baby—is going to be out of whack. Be gentle with everyone. Yourself too. You're tired, and they're tired, and maybe you're hungry, and you're scared. But it's going to be okay. Everything is going to be all right.
More advice: Don't read too much into what everyone is saying that you should be doing, especially on the Internet. We struggled—Erin couldn't produce milk and felt very ashamed of that. Which was unfair. That first night home, that was what was wrong: Helen was starving and she was trying to tell us. Erin had not tried pumping or anything like that, and everyone's telling you, 'Oh, that's what you need to do, you don't need formula.' But if we had not had formula, Helen could have starved.
Don't read into what the world is telling you about, Oh, this is how you should raise your baby. Every baby is different and every family is different, and what works for yours may not work for theirs.
When I turned 30, it was just another birthday. I did not care. But now—and I'm gonna try not to tear up saying this—time has become the scariest thing. When you have a baby, you see every day when they wake up, they're different—they look different, they act different. Suddenly you realize, Oh, man, that's happening to me also! So it's not that I'm worried about my time. I've always been unfazed by fear of the unknown. It's the time that I lost because for Erin and me, at first, having kids wasn't a priority. We were instantly so obsessed with each other that we just wanted to spend as much time together as we could. And then later, when we had our children, it was immediately: 'Oh, my gosh, I'm going to miss so much of your life that will happen after I'm gone.'
Then there's another kind of fear. Fear of the world around them. Our daughters' grandparents are terrified of everything that the girls go out to do. Don't let them get on that trampoline, they're gonna break their legs. Don't let them do this, they're gonna fall and skin their knee! Maybe they've forgotten, because I used to leave my house at 8 or 9 AM after the cartoons went off and would not be home until suppertime at 7. My parents had no idea what I was doing. Well, they had an idea, because I lived in a small town in Mississippi and everybody knew everybody and everybody and kind of looked out for everybody.
We're trying to let our girls experience some freedoms. Especially when we're at our farm. I might stay out of the road and if you see a snake don't touch it, but other than that, you do whatever you want.
I honestly think that being on TV has affected it more! I like the idea of living long enough to see my grandchildren become adults. And being on TV, I hate to say it, but, gosh, when I see an episode where I had maybe put on some weight, I'm like, man, that is embarrassing. It's a good motivator.
I think we all are in a current weird state. We're all saying, wait a second, what am I putting in my body? Why is it so hard for me to stay healthy? Growing up, my parents did not think about what we ate, and I didn't care what I ate. And my grandparents didn't think about what they ate. My dad talks about how, growing up, the beef you ate came from a farm nearby. You didn't have to worry about organic this or that, who raised it, what those cows ate. Because it was the same thing that the neighbor's cows ate. Same with chicken and same with eggs and milk. But that at some point, things changed.
I'll tell you, I had shoulder surgery two years ago, and in some ways I regret it and in some ways it was the best thing I ever did. The doctor said, It's going to hurt, but I kept telling him, It hurts already. So post-surgery, I didn't really take my pain medicine because it was a relief after it was hurting so bad pre-surgery.
The problem was, I couldn't do anything for two or three months. Then physical therapy lasted six months, then it was a year and a half before the doctor felt comfortable with me doing things like lifting weight overhead. So I missed out on a lot of play with my girls, and now Mae is afraid of it. She won't jump into the pool to me because I never did that with her for a year and a half when she was of that age. I couldn't. So I regret the surgery in that way. But then the fact that my shoulder doesn't hurt anymore and I can pick up her, or anything else, is great.
Just yesterday morning, I had just woke up and Mae had just woke up, she came downstairs and she came and sat in my lap and I said, ' Did you sleep okay?' And she said, 'Yes, sir, but can you not breathe your breath into my nose holes?' And ten minutes later she said, 'I need you to go wash your teeth.' She didn't want to say, 'Your breath stinks.' That was her idea of being polite, because she's been told taught that you don't say something that might hurt somebody's feelings.
Erin's dad and I are great friends, and Erin loves my parents. I have friends and family members who don't feel the same way towards their in-laws. So I want that for my daughters' someday spouses. I don't know that I necessarily want boys to be afraid of me, but a healthy amount of fear would be good. And I'm not kidding, I have a short list of boys who my daughters know now that I'm like, 'Hmmm, that one would be okay, and that one maybe.' These are boys between the age of 6 and 9!
Who knows what they're gonna become? But I'm looking at their parents.
I'm going to talk about Erin first and say: imagination. Just the way that she sees the work world is absolutely incredible and at the same time can be paralyzing for her because she's extremely creative and her imagination runs rampant. While she is capable of imagining and creating the most beautiful things ever, she's also capable of imagining and creating the scariest and most devastating things ever and the most beautiful outcome, the most beautiful version of what is capable, both in themselves and in other people and in the world.
From me, I think that the thing that I am best at—and other people have pointed this out—I am very good at living in the moment. I tell people all the time that it's because I witnessed my father lose everything on multiple occasions. On one occasion he lost everything except they let him keep a vehicle that the bank deemed worthless. And that was all we had. This little Datsun. One of my earliest memories was going down the road and the hood flew up and busted the windshield. And my dad's solution was he just ripped the hood off the car and threw it in the ditch, and we kept going.
The second time he lost everything was when he became a preacher. Or rather he gave everything up. He was a truck driver and was very successful in a time when you could make a lot of money as a truck driver. He owned an 18-wheeler, a semi. It was probably the only time since being a father that he was financially stable. But he felt this higher calling on his life and gave it all up and sold everything. It was impactful for me because, there he was, giving everything up. We sold our farm. We had a house and 10 acres and a barn. Sold his truck, sold his trailers, went back to school and got a degree and then got his master's from Duke University. I've been down in my life at times where if I didn't make it to the free lunch that I was going to get at the cafeteria, then I was not going to eat that day in college. There were a lot of Saturdays that I missed out on a meal because I slept in.
But I survived it and I'm here.
And so I hope that from me our daughters inherit that ability to be present in what is happening, because, you know, what happened yesterday, it's over. Learn from it. And who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. You can't control it. But in my experience, everything's going to be okay.
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