A Warm (Re)Introduction

Editor’s note: This is the introduction to our first newsletter, which will feature background on essays, parenting stories, book recommendations, and more, in your inbox every Thursday. You can subscribe to the newsletter at the bottom of this page!

Almost a year ago, I launched a website called Essays of Dad, a place where I hope(d) to explore fatherhood—its joys and triumphs and challenges and everything in between—through writing. I designed the site and wrote an introduction! I created a Facebook page and Instagram account! I outlined a schedule of essays to publish! I enlisted the help of my incredibly talented friends Samantha and Daniel to, respectively, draw illustrations and create logos! Essays of Dad was ready to become something! 

And then…and then life, as it often does, intervened. I attended weddings. I watched our daughter, Mayla, crawl, then walk, then talk. I lost sleep. I endured the most challenging year of teaching of my career. I missed spending time with Mayla after school to work two part-time jobs. I, relatedly, questioned my career choice and interviewed for others. I trained for and ran the Boston Marathon. I, like everyone else, attempted to navigate the endless changes of life during a pandemic. Essays of Dad, sadly and perhaps necessarily, fell down the list of priorities.    

My plan to publish an essay every week lasted for…two weeks. I wrote a piece in September and the next didn’t come until January; then I took another writing hiatus until April. The site never became—or came close to becoming—what I hoped and thought it could. Essays of Dad never got its chance.

Now, I’m hoping to give it that chance with consistent writing: weekly essays and newsletters and #content. Things, personally and professionally, have become infinitely more clear in recent months: I realized, through no small amount of trials and disappointments and searchings of soul, that teaching, like fatherhood, is a calling, something I’m supposed to do (there will soon be an essay on that and how it relates to raising a child). 

And with that realization came another: I need to write. I will not be satisfied—and worse, will always regret—if I simply fantasize about my grand plans of writing (essays! articles! books!) but never act on them. I need to write, especially, about being a father, the most important role I will ever occupy, about the questions and experiences and challenges I and all dads attempt to tackle daily. Last year I thought that Essays of Dad needed me; what I’ve learned since is that I need Essays of Dad.  

So. Here we are. The first newsletter of what I hope is many. Thank you for subscribing, for reading, for believing. I hope you enjoy.

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