06/18/2025
A very personal journal entry on father’s day. I often journal as if I were talking to my daughter. It helps clear my mind and process all kinds of parenting feelings. I’m sharing for those who can relate, and in honor of the dads that are trying to do it differently, the cycle breakers. We see you. We love you❤️
My dear baby,
Join me in congratulating your dad on this father’s day. I would love to be cute and post a short and sweet “happy father’s day,” but I prefer to be candid and give you a realistic and complex view of your dad, in the hopes that someday, you’ll read this journal entry and learn to appreciate the complexity of our human nature, the duality of manhood and fatherhood, and the paradoxes and challenges of our life’s roles.
Your dad is a brand new dad, who is also a good and imperfect man. Someone with flaws and virtues, with awesome days and worse nights. A loving father who is both a provider and a nurturer, both a mental health expert and a stressed out man. Someone who was raised by anger and irritability and is presently calm. I see him trying to break the generational cycle every day he holds you with tenderness, feeds you, puts you in a clean diaper, makes you giggle with silly faces, tickles your toes, and tries to prevent his heart from melting every time you call him “dadda”. He is doing it without role models. He is doing it out of pure instinct and love for you. He is your father and he is a human.
In his words, “you’ve made him soft,” in mine, you’ve made him vulnerable. Vulnerable to the fear of loss, vulnerable to toddler tantrums, vulnerable to worries about health, and to existential angst. But above all, irresistibly vulnerable to the sweetness of your eyes, the fondness of your gaze, and the brightness of your loud laughter that could light up the entirety of Times Square in a blackout.
So say it with me, happy father’s day to your one and only, your loving human, cycle breaker, “dadda.”
