Do you miss out on your true 20s if you become a parent before they’re over?
Mayla, and younger her brother or sister.
It is, I think, your first realization that you are no longer young: One of your friends—or simply someone you graduated with—becomes a parent. It happened for me soon after college, when I was 22 or 23 and a few relative acquaintances got married and had children within a year of throwing our caps and gowns into the spring air. I remember thinking, I didn’t even know people my age were allowed to have kids. It seemed like just the other day that I was walking past them on the way to ECON 410, or pretending to study at the table next to them in the library. We were so young.
Part of the reason for this way of thinking was the fact that I was nowhere close to becoming a father. My longest relationship up to that point in my life had lasted a couple of months, I was confused about what I wanted to pursue as a career, and I was living more than 2,000 miles away from most of my friends and family. I was making frozen meals from Trader Joe’s (which, to be clear, are objectively delicious) in the garage kitchen of a subletted house most nights for dinner. I also looked like I was 17 and was probably immature. No, I was not ready to become a dad.
But perhaps an even bigger reason for my surprise was the fact that it was increasingly and strikingly rare, among my oft-discussed/criticized Millennial generation, for a 22- or 23-year-old to have a baby. We are, of course, a selfish generation that delays parenthood (or doesn’t have kids at all!), which, of course, is leading to the inexorable decline of America. I looked at these new young parents with some mixture of curiosity and pity: Why did they want to sacrifice their 20s to the whims of a child? They couldn’t be that great, could they? This thinking was a product of a pretty significant societal shift: If I were the same age without kids living decades earlier, I would have been the one viewed as the outcast. Not having a child in your early 20s, for much of the 20th century, was uncommon and maybe even frowned upon.
I’m a dad now. My wife, Carly, and I have an 18-month-old daughter named Mayla, with another on the way: Carly is 21 weeks pregnant. I will have two children before I turn 30—something, had you told me seven years ago, about which I would have laughed out loud because it seemed so farfetched. Life, as the saying goes, comes at you fast.
But, despite the joys of fatherhood and my deep love for Mayla and her soon-to-arrive little brother or sister, that same thinking that I had when I was 22 still sometimes creeps in: Are other people my age thinking about me, about us, the same way I did about them? We’re older now, yes, but not by that much. We are still not the norm.
Am I growing up too fast?
Last week, after a particularly long day at work, I went on a run on the trail closest to my school. I’d run this trail, a winding, well-groomed section of the Mountains to Sea, dozens of times since we moved to Asheville four years ago, but on this run my mind wandered back to those early days when it was just me and Carly, living in a two-bedroom apartment close to downtown as we attempted to navigate our mid-20s. Life, I thought as I snaked through the leaves on that recent run, seemed so simple then: working and running and walking the dog before dinner. Our biggest decision—and I recognize that rose-colored glasses are indeed real—was often what new restaurant we should try on Friday night.
The leaves fell around me, painting the trail in browns and yellows and reds as I thought back to those times with an undeniable nostalgia and maybe even a bit of jealousy. Everything now, with a child, especially during the week, seems so frantic, so rushed that those days without the responsibilities of parenthood seem (justifiably or not) like an oasis of freedom.
Part of it, probably, is true. There is no denying that life with a child is vastly different from life without one. Becoming a parent is simply a sudden recognition that you are now responsible to sustain and nurture more than one human. For the first however many years of your life, your primary responsibility was to make sure you ate, slept, put on pants, etc.; as a dad, as a mom, as any type of caregiver, those responsibilities multiply.
That doesn’t take into account the fact that your child, especially a baby or toddler, becomes the center of your family’s solar system. They have to eat and sleep at certain times, and when they’re not doing either of those, they need to be entertained. This is, of course, incredibly rewarding—I still have not discovered any better use of my time than reading to Mayla as she sits, enthralled in a book she’s read dozens of times and smiling because she knows that the dragons are about to burn down the house because they unknowingly ate spicy salsa—but also, it’s fair to admit, incredibly exhausting. Apart from sitting your child in front of a screen, something we try extremely hard to never do (and, honestly, something that Mayla often doesn’t have the patience for anyway), there is little to no downtime when your toddler is awake.
The other part of my nostalgia, of the frequent questions about whether I’m growing up too fast, is perhaps more selfish. Your 20s are, the thinking goes, supposed to be the time you focus on yourself: figuring out your career, finding your new home, having fun with your friends. None of that is impossible with a child, but it’s different, accelerated. Sometimes I look at friends/acquaintances around my age, single and living in major cities, working 60-plus hours a week but meeting coworkers for happy hour and going out every weekend, taking cabs and ordering Uber Eats from the office—and it seems kind of fun, a thrill. (Again, the grass is always greener…) Did I miss that—am I missing that—because I became a dad at 27?
I finished the run and drove home to take Mayla to the park.
Maybe, as ever, there is more than one way of looking at it. Maybe, and not to get too philosophical here (though as a dad you start thinking deeper about most things), every person has a general path set for them, and small and big choices here or there determine its exact curves and undulations. Maybe life—maybe your 20s—is simply a series of mistakes and twists and waves, and it’s up to you to ride, learn from, enjoy them all, and trust that it’s ultimately going to work out the way it should.
I don’t regret becoming a dad at 27, or having two children before I turn 30. I wonder, of course, how my life would have been different had the timing or circumstances of a few small things been different—had I chosen a different major in college, had stuck it out in sports journalism, had I never moved back to Florida—but that’s forever secondary to the intense joy and gravity of being a dad.
When I came home the other day, Mayla’s face lit up as she exclaimed, “Dada!” She ran to me and wrapped my legs in a hug. And right then I knew that I had grown up at exactly the right time.
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Three minutes dancing to “Dos Oruguitas”—and navigating a world that keeps changing and changing…
Illustration by Samantha Harrington
Picture this: It’s a Tuesday evening, 7:00. You’ve had a long day: writing and teaching and coaching and tutoring. You know it’s time to wear your most important hat—Dada—but you lack the energy you know you’ll need to entertain your daughter. She’s almost 19 months old and a bundle of curiosity and movement and big feelings.
You drop your shoes in the garage and walk through the door, into the kitchen, where your wife is simmering a delicious, fragrant combination of sweet potatoes, black beans, and spices. There’s Disney music playing from the robot with a human name sitting on the counter. Your daughter is performing one of her favorite activities: removing every piece of Tupperware from the cabinet and placing it on the floor. You greet her. She smiles and says, “Dada!”
You feel better already.
A few minutes pass and the song “Dos Oruguitas” from the movie Encanto comes on. This is one of your favorites, the type of longing song that makes you just a little bit sad. It’s about two caterpillars in love who become butterflies and have to leave each other, full of symbolism and beauty and sadness.
You scoop up your daughter to dance.
At first, like she is most times, she’s resistant, trying to wiggle free and get back down to her Tupperware. When she was little she would rest her head in the nook between your neck and shoulder, but that rarely happens now. You miss those days.
But then you sway her dramatically, high into the air. A smile immediately grows on her round face. You sway her some more. She starts giggling.
You listen to the hypnotic rhythm of the guitar and Spanish lyrics:
Dos oruguitas enamoradas (Two caterpillars in love) Pasan sus noches y madrugadas (Spend their nights and mornings) Llenas de hambre (Full of hunger) Siguen andando y navegando un mundo (They continue navigating a world) Que cambia y sigue cambiando (That keeps changing and changing) Navegando un mundo (Navigating a world) Que cambia y sigue cambiando (That keeps changing and changing)
Holding your daughter in your arms, swinging her from side to side, you think about the past 18 months. You think about the moment she entered the world and changed yours forever. You think about the sleepless nights and the crying and the utter dependence she had on you and your wife. You think about her struggles feeding and their endless complications. You think about the first year of her life featuring a rotating cast of Greek symbols-turned public-health crises and the constant buzz of worry anytime you left the house with her. You think about the good times and bad and everything in between.
You think, And we continue navigating a world that keeps changing and changing…
Dos oruguitas paran el viento (Two caterpillars stop the wind) Mientras se abrazan con sentimiento (While they embrace with feeling) Siguen creciendo, no saben cuándo (They keep growing, they don’t know when) Buscar algún rincón (To look for some shelter) El tiempo sigue cambiando (Times keep changing) Inseparables son (They are inseparable) El tiempo sigue cambiando (Times keep changing)
She’s loving the dancing now: swaying up to the left, up to the right, softer now, and less dramatic, following the cadence of the song. She’s smiling. You’re smiling. The sun is going down outside, it’s getting cold out there, and the kitchen is thick with the smells of a warm dinner. You think, We are inseparable…
Her smile widens as the chorus begins.
Ay, oruguitas, no se aguanten más (Ay, little caterpillars, don’t hold on too tight) Hay que crecer aparte y volver (You must grow apart and come back) Hacia adelante seguirás (You will carry on, forward) Vienen milagros, vienen crisálidas (Miracles are coming, chrysalises are coming) Hay que partir y construir su propio futuro (You must leave and build your own future)
You don’t listen to the song’s mandates: You hold your daughter even tighter. You don’t want to think about the simple, inevitable truth that all parents must confront: Your child grows up and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You don’t want to think about the next stages of her life, when she’ll no longer be the only child and then go to daycare and then preschool and then regular school and then…?
No, you think, let’s stay here in this kitchen, dancing forever.
You continue to bounce your daughter in your arms as the next verse of the song—about breaking down walls, about new dreams, about miracles—comes and goes. And then, as the final chorus begins, you begin to float, like a butterfly, right there in the kitchen, and all of your worries, all of your fears, all of your strivings and goals and responsibilities, all of it melts away and it’s just you and your daughter, flying together through the kitchen…
Ay, mariposas, no se aguanten más (Ay, butterflies, don’t hold on too tight) Hay que crecer aparte y volver (You must grow apart and return) Hacia adelante seguirás (You will carry on, forward) Ya son milagros, rompiendo crisálidas (There are already miracles, chrysalises breaking open) Hay que volar, hay que encontrar (You must fly, you must find) Su propio futuro (Your own future)
Picture this: It’s a Tuesday evening, 7:05, and as these words drift throughout your kitchen, your daughter rests her head in the nook between your neck and shoulder. Just like she used to.
You must fly, you must find Your own future
You hold her tight.
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Recently Mayla, our 18-month-old daughter, has rediscovered a book she enjoys, which means that she insists that we read it to her, multiple times a day. It’s called Dream Big and it’s about powerful women throughout history: There’s Katherine Johnson writing complex math equations on a chalkboard, Jane Goodall playing with chimpanzees, Zaha Hadid designing a sleek building.
Mayla enjoys the illustrations—caricatures of each person surrounded by scenes of their professional interests—and short sentences, but she gets the most animated on the page featuring Florence Griffith Joyner, the decorated Olympian sprinter with multiple world records. As soon as she sees the illustrated Flo-Jo running on a track and hears me read “Dream fast,” she points to the page and exclaims, “Dada!”
My daughter knows her dad is a runner.
It is, of course, hilarious and adorable that Mayla compares me to one of the most famous track athletes in history. To her growing and forever connecting mind, a runner is a runner, regardless of talent or accomplishments. To her, Flo-Jo and I are kindred spirits.
But what struck me the most was that she recognized that I am a runner, that she knew to make the connection. We run together sometimes, and she has watched me run around the neighborhood or park or famous streets of Massachusetts, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising. But it still made me smile that she associated running with me.
Raising a child has of course altered my life in countless ways, but one of the few things that has remained constant, one of the few similarities between pre-Mayla life and post-Mayla life, is running: a five to seven to 10-mile run, six days a week, on the trails or around the park or through the greenways.
I’ve been a runner for more than 10 years, and it, like fatherhood, has changed my life for the better. Its physical benefits are clear, it’s brought me several of my closest friends, and it indeed does often make your mind clearer and attitude better. I have reached the point where I need running: I need its rhythm and clarity and consistency, its daily exploration of yourself and the world. I am not the same person when I do not run.
This necessity has only been exacerbated by the challenges and questions of fatherhood. Running has helped me navigate being a father, has helped me contextualize those challenges and answer some of those questions (you have a lot of alone time on runs), and I think it’s fair to say it’s even made me a better husband and dad.
But these last 18 months of fatherhood have also been the only time that, on certain days, I feel bad about running, something I’ve felt good about for most of my life. On those days there lingers a question that, I think, most parents who spend hours away running or biking or any other endurance sport have wrestled with: Is it OK to be doing this?
Time, of course, is the most valuable currency to a toddler. They don’t know or care whether you are away at work or on a run or at the store buying groceries; you are simply not there and that is all that matters to them. Their view on time, then, is binary: You are there with them, or you are not.
When I was training for Boston, I was not there a lot. Marathon training necessitates hours that turn into days that turn into weeks that turn into months spent performing, as the author John L. Parker Jr. puts it, “that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of [your] training shoes.” Running is a sport that demands sacrifices, and as a dad I’ve realized the most significant one is your time: It does not care if you are a father or a husband or an employee; it does not care how you spend your time outside of its relatively simple, often cruel mandates. It, like a toddler, possesses a black-and-white view of time.
The dilemma, then, is plain: Your child wants—needs—you to be there with them, guiding them through their new world, but running commands that every day you spend an hour, sometimes more, devoting your time and energy to something else. So, as a parent to a baby or toddler, you begin to justify your absences, why you aren’t there as often as you or they want you to be: Running is a metaphor for life: What you put in is directly proportional to what you get out. It teaches perseverance and instills physical and mental strength. Chasing something big and exploring the edges of your being are important.
But to a toddler, these justifications ring hollow. They don’t care about or even recognize any of these grand lessons about life; they just want you to read a book or build a tower with them. You just spent most of their waking hours away from them at work, and after that you spend more running. There are, you remember walking through the door on those late afternoons, only 24 hours in a day.
Your spouse, too, notices and perhaps sometimes resents the time you aren’t there to help them raise your child. They deserve a present, supportive husband, and often you’re off chasing some dream they might not fully understand but ultimately support because they know it’s part of you. You are reminded, time and again, that one of their truest expressions of their love is recognizing and allowing that.
So what do you do? You could, theoretically, just stop running, choose another, less time-intensive sport, leave it behind for good. You could find something else to replace it. You could attempt to quiet the voices, assuage the guilt, telling you that you aren’t around enough. Or you could attempt to find some type of balance that makes it all work.
Perhaps the biggest irony is that to think about these questions and their solutions all you want to do is go for a run.
There are, of course, countless other parents navigating the challenge of raising a child and pursuing an endurance sport, and countless who do it well, with clarity and grace. There are also professional runners and cyclists and swimmers who devote their entire lives to the sport and still make time for their kids. Being a runner and being a good parent aren’t and shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
I’ve only been a dad for 18 months, and I probably haven’t mastered the balance yet. But perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve pulled from this relatively short time as a father is the power of our time: it is forever limited, and how we spend it defines who we are and what we value.
So when I get home after work and running, I leave my phone upstairs so I’m not distracted. I refuse to work on the weekends and run only once, early on Sunday morning before Mayla wakes up or during her nap in the afternoon. I’ve become as efficient as possible at work and on runs so I don’t waste any precious time that could be spent with Mayla. All of this has led me to have a different, clearer view on running: I realize now it’s a privilege, something I get to do, that it’s not and never has been guaranteed. I appreciate the sport more now than I ever have.
Perhaps the clearest manifestation of that realization is running before work to maximize my time with Mayla in the afternoons. On those days I’ll wake up early, drive to work under the stars, and begin clipping off miles in the morning dark, thinking of my daughter as she dreams.
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On bedtime, stuffed elephants, and watching your child grow up
Illustration by Samantha Harrington
One Friday night over a year ago, my wife, Carly, and I picked up dinner from our favorite barbecue restaurant. She ordered pulled pork; I got chicken wings.
We were, as first-time parents to a 4-month-old named Mayla during scary stages of a pandemic, exhausted and probably too excited about our once-a-week takeout meal: a chance to sit on the floor of our living room, eating food we didn’t have to prepare from our coffee table and watching a familiar, comfortable TV show—just the two of us, like old times in old places. These meals were refreshing and necessary, some of my favorite times of the week.
All we had to do was get Mayla to bed.
Perhaps more than anything else, bedtime—that nightly journey to help your child find sleep—has demonstrated how much Mayla has grown up, and how much she has changed.
Before I became a father, bedtime was simply a couple-of-steps routine that I did almost automatically: brush the teeth, read or mindlessly scroll through the phone, turn off the lights. Once we had Mayla, though, I learned that it was something far greater: Bedtime is a significant part of the day, like mealtime and naptime and playtime. It is scheduled and, because I’m married to an extremely organized woman, scripted, written out in steps on the white board that hangs in our hallway. Bedtime is an event.
And for the first five months of Mayla’s life, it was an event that she hated with a burning passion. We would, our little family, be having a pleasant evening and Carly and I would be thinking that, hey, maybe parenthood isn’t that hard, maybe we’re doing OK—and then 7:30 or 8:00—bedtime—would come around and everything would fall apart. Mayla would scream as we carried her up the stairs to the nursery, scream as we put her pajamas on, scream (louder now) when we dimmed the lights and turned on the sound machine, scream as we sang a soft lullaby (the contrast was striking and borderline comical), and scream, especially, as we lay her down in her crib (or bassinet during the earlier months) to sleep. And this wasn’t one of those halfhearted, I’m-going-to-see-if-I-can-get-what-I-want screams; this was a full-throated, visceral shriek of intense displeasure. She’d do this for upwards of an hour some nights. Bedtime was awful.
Hypotheses about why she so despised it abounded: We thought, for a while, that maybe because she had cried the first few times we implemented a structured bedtime routine she had, like Pavlov’s dogs, become conditioned to dislike it thereafter. We thought that maybe she was experiencing a very early and strong feeling of FOMO, that she didn’t want to go to bed because she wanted to hang out with her parents and keep exploring this grand new world. We thought that maybe she just didn’t like the dark.
(The likely truth was actually much sadder than any of these guesses: We had an extremely challenging time feeding Mayla, centered mostly on her inability to take a bottle, and we realized later, once she could finally drink from one, that she was probably just hungry. Carly had fed her as much as Mayla would take given her tongue and lip tie—would feed her for hours every day and exhaust herself physically and mentally—but Mayla still couldn’t get enough.)
Pretty soon we stopped thinking at all. We were drained. Bedtime soon became a trigger not only for Mayla but for Carly and me as well. As soon as the evening started winding down, as soon as the summer sky would turn a soft blue-gray, I’d get that sinking feeling in my chest: Bedtime was coming, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
There were very few times I was incorrect with that assessment: We’d go through the routine—PJs, lights, sound machine, lullaby—that had become a drudgery and Mayla would cry the entire time. Carly would rock her in her arms for sometimes a half-hour (or approximately 20 renditions of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”) before being physically incapable to continue and passing her off to me. I’d sing and rock and sway and do everything I could think of to try to calm her down, and Mayla would simply scream into the dark.
It was, of course, intensely frustrating and I think we’d both admit, not proudly but honestly, that some small, ugly part of us began to resent our baby daughter. To us, it seemed so simple: Just go to bed! We both, at that point, would have given away a vital organ for precious sleep, and here she was refusing what we craved more than anything. We knew that thinking was wrong and bad, that she was simply a baby and was trying to communicate in the only way she knew how, but we were, like most first-time parents, confused and tired.
When someone, usually Carly, was finally able to get her to calm down, to stop crying and close her eyes in her mom’s warm arms, the real challenge began: to lay her down without waking her up. Carly would lean over the edge of the crib and slowly, so slowly, lower her arms. If Mayla made even the slightest movement Carly would pick her back up and start the process anew. When she got her down on the mattress, perhaps after two or three tries of this first step, she then had to extract her hands from underneath Mayla. Removing her hand from behind Mayla’s back was typically straightforward, but moving it from under her head was entirely more complex: Carly had to use her other hand to delicately lift Mayla’s head to give her head-holding hand the space to move out, and then lay her head back on the mattress without letting it roll to the side or land too hard, because either would wake her and render the entire process worthless. Watching her do this—as I usually did, sitting in the dark corner of the nursery—was like watching a doctor perform open-heart surgery, so precise was her every move. Mayla woke up during this process more often than not, and it was those nights that we felt truly defeated.
That Friday night when we ordered takeout was one of those times. Mayla screamed for what seemed like hours, before finally calming down but then waking up screaming when Carly tried to lay her in the crib. This happened at least three times. We were in the room for close to two hours before our daughter, miraculously, went to bed.
The barbecue was cold when we ate it later.
Mayla loves bedtime now. When, after dinner and post-dinner reading or swinging or block playing, we say, “OK, it’s time to go get ready for bed!” our daughter’s face will light up as she points toward the ceiling to indicate that she is ready to go upstairs. Often she will climb up by herself and other times she asks to be carried, and thus begin bedtime.
First, we brush her teeth—with a squeeze of toothpaste the size of grain of rice—ourselves before allowing her to try by herself (which she does with a smile but very little teeth cleaning). She then loves to exclaim “Wawa!” to identify the clear liquid falling from the sink, and giggles as it gets her feet wet in the sink. Next we try to wrangle her into some pajamas as she laughs and squirms and talks and holds both of her stuffed babies in either arm. The only passing sign of displeasure is when we have to apply cream or moisturizer for rashes or dry skin.
Then she waddles over to her basket of stuffed animals to get them in place for reading time, taking each one out and handing them to whichever one of us is sitting in the rocking chair, where we are now surrounded by at least three stuffed bears, two elephants, a llama, and a flamingo. Only when everyone is in place does she choose two or three books for us to read, specifying which one is for Mama and which is for Dada, before (sometimes) sitting and (less often) listening attentively as we read about mice and bears and little girls named Madeline getting appendectomies. When the books are finished, she invariably tries to ask us to read more, which she would do until midnight if we let her.
When reading time is over, we tell her to put her animals away—most go back in the basket, but she sleeps with one of the elephants, so he goes over the crib railing—and we once asked if she was going to put her babies in bed, too, but she shook her head no, and now she does that every night whether we ask or not. So she holds on to them tight.
Finally, we lay out her sleep sack on the floor and say, “OK, it’s time for sleep sack!” And our daughter, who used to cry as soon as we carried her up the stairs to her room for bedtime, lays down on the floor on her own accord because she wants to go to bed.
Bedtime is genuinely enjoyable now, a pleasant conclusion to Mayla’s day and the beginning of our precious hours of relaxation before we go to bed ourselves.
Once Mayla is in her sleep sack, Carly rocks her in the chair as we say our prayers and she rubs her eyes, yawns, and leans over to both of us for kisses (and often holds up her babies so we kiss them, too). Once we say “Amen,” I tell her she is beautiful and I love her to the moon and back, and before I close the door on the way out, I look back into her deep blue-green eyes, sleepy and serious. I relish the fact that the last thing my daughter sees before the lights dim is me blowing her kisses.
Carly comes out of the room a few minutes later, and together sometimes we watch, from the baby monitor, Mayla hug her elephants and dolls and shift her body dramatically to get comfortable, and we marvel at how far she has come, how far we have come, how our daughter is growing up, and that fills us with a strange mixture of pride and nostalgia, nostalgia for those long loud nights and cold barbecue, when she needed us to hold her, and pride that she made it, we made it, our little family is making it, and we both just stand there with silent smiles.
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Ten things I’ve learned, or relearned, from my 18-month-old daughter
Illustration by Samantha Harrington
We, as parents, are supposed to teach our kids about the world: what’s good and bad and everything in between. We’re supposed to provide them a structure and framework by which they can begin to understand its complexities and ask questions when they don’t. We’re supposed to help them shape and sharpen their perspective and challenge it when necessary. We’re supposed to be their guides.
But through 18 months of being a dad to Mayla, our strong, hilarious, stubborn little girl, I’ve learned that the opposite is true, too: Our kids can teach us. I’ve learned—or perhaps relearned—things from Mayla that are as or more valuable than anything I’ve taught her.
So here’s to those timeless lessons of toddlerhood. May we all remember them when life gets crazy.
Take your work seriously.
Recently Mayla has become a chore connoisseur. If you ask her to open the door to let the dogs in, she immediately stops what she’s doing and marches over to it, stretching her arm and standing on her tippy toes to pull the handle. If you hand her a piece of trash and ask her to throw it away, she opens her hand and takes it to the trash can in the kitchen. If you open the dishwasher, she’s suddenly at your side, taking spoons out of the silverware hatch and handing them to you to put in the drawer (which she’d do herself if she were tall enough). If you say it’s time to feed the dogs, she scoops up the dog bowl and heads over to the bin of food in the pantry, waiting expectantly for someone to scoop a cup in. Then she carries over the now-filled bowl to the dogs’ designated eating spots, invariably dropping some (or a lot) of food along the way. When this happens, she immediately sits down and silently picks up every piece of dropped food, one by one, and places it into the dog bowl. It is attention to detail at its finest.
By far my favorite, though, is laundry. First, she loves to help put the dirty clothes into the machine, taking care not to miss even the smallest sock, helps scoop and pour the detergent, and presses the power button to begin the cycle. Then she goes about her day—until she hears the washer chime to signal the cycle is complete. She immediately drops whatever she’s doing, points over to the laundry room, and exclaims, “Uuahh!” as a giant smile forms on her face. This is our signal that she wants to move the clothes to the dryer, which we then do together. Finally, once all of the clothes are clean and dry (another chime that elicits a joyful scream), she helps us sort and organize all of them as we put them away in our bedroom.
My favorite part about all of this is the look on Mayla’s face when we ask her to do one of these tasks: She looks us directly in the eye, unsmiling, as if to say, Thank you for trusting me. I won’t let you down. To us, they’re relatively menial, quotidian chores; to her, they’re the most important thing she’ll ever do, and she treats them as such. I love that.
Play. Every day.
Work, as Mayla has established, is important. But so too is play.
Most of Mayla’s non-eating waking hours are spent playing: at the park, on the swing Papa built her in our backyard, in the playroom upstairs. She loves to play with blocks and cars and ramps and balls and bubbles. She loves to play hide-and-seek and chase and (an extremely basic form of) soccer. She loves to play with her Mama and Dada and grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles, with anyone who will pick up some blocks and help her make a tower. She loves to play.
Life, as we all know, is busy, and fulfilling your responsibilities as a parent or spouse or employee is of course paramount. But perhaps we should not forget to make time for, every day, something that brings us that simple, pure joy we found every day as kids.
Food is life. Treat it as such.
Since we had such a challenging time feeding Mayla as an infant, we were worried that we might also have trouble when she graduated to solids. We did not.
Mayla loves to eat. Breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, post-nap afternoon snack, pre-dinner stroller snack—these are, probably, her favorite times of the day. It starts in the morning, soon after she wakes up, when she’s strapped into her high chair, wrapped with her bib, and gets to work. She eats eggs or waffles or oatmeal or yogurt (or sometimes several of these at once) and always, always fruit: blueberries and bananas, mostly, but often also strawberries and blackberries and oranges. It is her biggest and best meal of the day.
The rest of her day is dictated by her eating schedule, and she will, by rapidly moving her bunched fingers toward her mouth, sign language for “eat,” let you know when it is time for her next meal. She’s the queen of snacks—Cheerios and cucumbers and cottage cheese—and loves to feed herself independently. If she likes the food you offer her, which is most of the time, she will sign for more and say, “Muuahh!” so adorably that you will have no choice but to agree to her demands. At some meals she will eat more than her mother. If she doesn’t recognize what’s on her plate, she lets us know, usually by pointing at the unidentified food and saying, “Uuahh?” Only when we have identified it all—“black beans,” “rice,” “avocado”—will she begin eating.
Mayla does not understand all of the hype about fad diets. She does not skip breakfast. She does not believe in intermittent fasting. She is not picky or demanding; if it’s in front of her, she’ll try it, and probably like it. She loves going to the farmers’ market and the local ice cream shop. When she’s there, she often treats herself to bites of her parents’ ice cream and doesn’t feel guilty about it. She does not think eating healthy is as difficult as adults sometimes make it seem. She abides by an eating philosophy radical in its simplicity: Eat good food and enjoy it.
Sometimes all you need is a nap.
Mayla does not pretend to be perfect. There are times when no amount of work, play, or food will fulfill her. During these times she simply needs what most of us crave every afternoon: a nap. A good, dark-room, fan-on, A/C-down, uninterrupted nap. When she wakes up she is refreshed and happy and ready to explore again.
Pet your dogs.
Read, often.
If Mayla is not eating, sleeping, playing, or working, she’s likely reading a book. She has her favorites—Blue Hat, Green Hat; Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?; Will You Be My Sunshine?—but is willing to try new ones, too. She loves the rhythm of the words and simple beauty of the illustrations. She loves pointing at pictures of things she recognizes, like “buhh”s (birds), “duahh”s (dogs), and “wawa” (water). She reads probably a dozen books a day, at all times of the day. Books, Mayla has reminded me, are sometimes the only entertainment we need.
Go outside when it’s sunny.
Go outside when it’s raining.
Mayla is not brought down by the presence of rain; she is energized by it. As soon as she sees water falling from the sky, she excitedly points outside and exclaims, “Wawa!” She then relentlessly asks to go outside, and we eventually must let her, such is her desire to go play in the rain. When she gets her wish, she toddles around through the wet grass and splashes in puddles and raises her arms up to catch the miraculous wet drops falling from above. Her joy in these moments is pure.
Expressing your feelings and communicating are important.
Mayla has big feelings, and she does not shy away from sharing them. When she is happy, we know. When she is sad or angry, we know. When she is confused, we know. There is something refreshing in knowing exactly what she’s feeling at any given moment, because even if we can’t do something to immediately make her feel better, at least we understand and sometimes that’s all that matters. Carly, my wife, is especially adept at helping Mayla navigate her feelings. “I see that you’re sad,” she’ll tell our daughter. “But we are about to eat dinner, so I don’t want you to fill up on more Cheerios.” Sometimes simply the soothing sound of her mom’s voice will help her become calm; other times it won’t, but Mayla will know that her feeling was identified and understood.
At some point as we grow up we are conditioned to hide weakness, to hide those big feelings, and sometimes that makes it difficult for others to understand. Mayla has reminded me that emotions are real and it’s OK to share them. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to be honest.
The world is a vast, beautiful place.
My 18-month-old daughter thinks it’s an absolute joy to be alive. Sometimes she can’t believe that she gets to, every day, explore the world. She thinks it’s a privilege to watch birds fly and rabbits run and water rush through the creek. She thinks every rock on the ground and every airplane flying above is a joy, a miracle. She doesn’t take for granted that she gets to splash in puddles and read books and play with toys. She appreciates the simplicity of walking the dogs around the neighborhood and pointing up to the mountains along the way. She is endlessly curious and endlessly happy.
I love her.
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The second time around, everything feels so much different. Is that OK?
Early one morning a few months ago, Mayla, our then-15-month-old daughter, walked into our room carrying a thin plastic tube that looked like a thermometer. She was wearing a pink hat with writing on the front I couldn’t yet read; I was still in bed, sleeping in as part of an early Father’s Day celebration.
Carly, my wife, followed her with a camera as Mayla approached the edge of our bed. “Give it to him!” she told her. She was quivering as Mayla handed me the tube that changed my life forever, again.
My initial reaction—jaw dropping, eyes widening, giant smile forming—was predictable: that classic combination of pure shock and unbridled glee, the what-am-I-supposed-to-say feeling that accompanies any revelation of big news. I was ecstatic.
But then…then the news sunk in. Holy crap! We were having another kid! How were we going to provide for it? Where was it going to sleep? Will we have to go months without a paycheck like we did with Mayla since the new baby will also be born during the school year? What will Mayla think? What will our families think? What will our dogs think? I am going to be a father of two before I turn 30!
I went outside to the edge of our driveway to retrieve something from my car; I didn’t come back in the house until a half-hour later. I sat there, alone, for a long time, thinking, thinking, thinking. It was a beautiful day, I remember: mid-June, sunshine, no clouds. The car sat motionless in front of our house and felt small. I should go back in the house, I thought. I stayed in the car.
Finally I went back inside. I needed something to do so I started washing dishes; there, scrubbing plates and bowls, looking out into our backyard, I thought about our new future with some combination of excitement, trepidation, and something I couldn’t identify: a feeling of stupidity, maybe, for not preparing more emotionally and logistically. Carly and I had discussed having a second child, of course, but we weren’t planning on trying to have one until a few months later, so they would be born during the summer months when we were both off from work. As two educators working in the public-school system, we had no maternity or paternity leave, so any days we took to care for our newborn child would be unpaid or taken from our (relatively paltry) banks of leave. Compounding my stress was the fact that a few days before, I had found out that I hadn’t advanced to the final round of interviews for a new job that would have paid at least double my teaching salary; one of the reasons I wanted the new position was to avoid this exact scenario of having to worry about finances when we decided to grow our family. Now, within the span of a few summer days, I didn’t get the job and we were having another baby.
I experienced the entire spectrum of human emotion the day we found out we were having a second child. But the biggest question ate at me that day and for weeks after: Why wasn’t I more excited?
When we found out we were having Mayla, it was also a relative surprise, but everything—from picking the color of her nursery walls to choosing her name—felt so big, so important, so new that I didn’t have time or the mental capacity to worry about the things I was now worrying about with the second (I spent most of that extra brain space worrying about having a pregnant wife in the throes of a pandemic).
The night we found out about Mayla, we watched What to Expect When You’re Expecting and treated ourselves to takeout; this time I spent most of the day in our home office researching Roth IRAs and made frozen pizza for dinner. With Mayla, we spent hours and hundreds of dollars designing her nursery; this time we debated even making one. With Mayla, we spent every spare moment preparing for her arrival, buying clothes, updating the baby registry, researching baby products; this time, life just kind of continued as normal.
I felt awful, of course, for feeling this way; this was not how I wanted to welcome a new life into the world, worrying about logistics and finances. I didn’t want our second kid to think that I wasn’t, we weren’t, excited about them joining our family. I didn’t want them to think they were simply a financial burden. I didn’t want them to think we didn’t want them.
Then there was Carly, who was about to undergo a physically and emotionally demanding nine-plus months and who was as shocked as me that she was pregnant so soon. She was, naturally, processing a lot of emotions as well, and I was too caught up in my own to be there for her. For the first couple of days after we found out, I was not the husband I strive to be.
Finally, there was Mayla. I started looking at her differently: She had been the center of our universe for so long and now she would have to share attention and space and food and clothes with her little brother or sister. Sometimes, when I looked her in the eyes, I felt a pang of guilt: She didn’t know what was happening and how it would affect her. She had become my—our—everything and now that was going to drastically change and she had no control or say over it. How do you explain all of that to an 18-month-old?
I finished washing the dishes and took a deep breath.
Eventually, after a few weeks or maybe even months, I realized that two things can be true: I can be both truly excited about having another kid and worried about the logistics of bringing them into the world. It’s OK to be worried, I learned. It’s OK to give yourself some grace.
I realized, too, that my concern was all rooted in love: I was worried because I didn’t want our second kid to not have the best life we could offer them. It is part of my responsibility as their parent to make sure that their needs will be met, that we will be able to support them in every way we need to. Being a father encompasses more than emotion. We have to demonstrate our love in a multitude of ways: working hard to support our families, making meals and cleaning the kitchen after, taking care of those small, quotidian, often unsexy tasks that can easily fall through the cracks of a busy life. Why wasn’t I more excited when we found out we were having a second kid? I think that’s the wrong question. I think a better one would be: How can we make sure we show our love for this baby in every possible way?
This website was borne of that goal, as was my new perspective on teaching and working and time itself. I used to think that a dad is failing if he doesn’t spend every spare moment with his child. Being present in their life is still the most important thing we can do, but fatherhood has other duties, too, and we’re not fulfilling our mission if we don’t perform those as well. We can show our love with our heart and our head. It is difficult, sometimes, to perfect that balance, but it’s worth attempting because it’s the most important role we’ll ever occupy.
And Mayla, well, we realized Mayla’s going to be fine. Most nights before we put her to bed, as she’s laying in Carly’s arms, her blinks getting progressively heavier as she clutches her doll, we ask her to say goodnight to baby. And my daughter leans over to my wife’s growing belly and kisses it softly.
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Thousands of teachers in North Carolina left their jobs last year. I was almost one of them—until the heart won its battle with the head.
Illustration by Samantha Harrington
*Editor’s note: All student names have been changed.
They cried. As the principal came on the intercom for his last announcement of the year, as they finished the final lines of their impromptu karaoke of “See You Again,” their arms linked with their classmates-turned-friends, as final minutes, then seconds, of their fifth-grade year trickled by, as the bell rang to release them for summer, a typically joyous occasion, half of my fifth-grade students were in tears. Brittany’s eyes were red and puffy. Eva’s tears were streaming down her face, under her blue surgical mask. Camila turned to her friend and said, “This is the first time I’m sad to leave school for the summer.”
The past school year, more than most, meant something to them, and to me. We created, my fifth graders and I, something special, memorable. Our class, at the risk of sounding cliché, felt like something close to a family. They bickered like siblings, knew one another’s strengths and flaws and idiosyncrasies, laughed and fought and cried together. They knew that Jeremiah liked at least two sleeves of grape jelly on his biscuit every morning. They enjoyed the fact that Erica owned over 50 birds, and listened and asked questions as she led a presentation about them every Friday during “Bird Talk with Erica.” They appreciated Ada’s love of Star Wars, and Evan’s obsession with Pokémon. They, whether or not they realized it, filled a classroom with love.
As I watched them say goodbyes to friends new and old on that final day of school, I fought back tears of my own. I thought about the journey that led me to that specific moment, one that took me from coast to coast and dropped me in the mountains of North Carolina. I thought about how much the young people in front of me had grown since August. I thought about how becoming a teacher had changed my life.
I thought about a lot during those final minutes of our school year, but hanging over every thought, like a cloud promising rain, was a brutally simple question: Was this my last day of school, too?
Last school year, of the five I’ve taught, was the most challenging. There were days I left the building defeated, or worse, disillusioned. Sometimes I’d spot a teacher friend in the hallway, and we’d simply share a knowing look and sigh. Teaching during a pandemic, devoting our not limitless energy and time to countless things unrelated to academics, worrying if we’ll make enough money to support (or start) a family—all of of the problems that have for years plagued public-school teachers, especially in North Carolina—they all began to, finally and inevitably, bear consequences. A teacher around my age found a new job and started it after winter break. Others took weeks off to recalibrate. Several teachers I know joined the almost 8,000 (!!) in the state who planned to leave the profession altogether.
For most of the year, I thought I’d be one of them. The realities of working full-time for not enough pay and being a dad became immediately and strikingly clear: When I got home from school, I’d usually tutor or complete my work as a teaching assistant for a college course to supplement our income. All I could think about during those hours was that I was missing spending time with Mayla, our now 17-month-old daughter, that I was missing her grow up.
And that was at home. At school, chaos reigned. For the first half of the year, I usually spent the first 30 minutes of every day trying to figure out who was allowed to be there: Was that scratchy throat and runny nose dripping into their mask COVID or just allergies? Wait, was she technically exposed since they were outside but weren’t wearing masks? Does that kid need to show me a negative test so he can learn about fractions today? How many days was he in quarantine? I had to send more than one kid home, pulling them out in the hallway to tell them that according to the ever-changing policies they were not supposed to be at school. They handled the news, as ever, like champions: This was their new world.
When a student in my class tested positive, an administrator would walk down to my room, carrying a pool noodle (they’re exactly six feet, apparently) to determine who else was potentially exposed and therefore had to go home and quarantine for 14 (and later, 10, and later, seven, and later, five) days. I didn’t keep track, but I’d estimate that in my class alone the total number of days missed by students was over 100. They fell behind, of course, because if virtual learning taught us anything, it’s that it doesn’t teach students anything.
(None of this is to complain about pandemic policies or downplay the severity of a new and scary and often deadly virus; it is simply to say that how to be an effective micro-scale public health coordinator was not something they taught us in grad school [not that North Carolina values grad school, because they don’t pay a master’s degree supplement].)
COVID, of course, also exacerbated other issues that had already plagued the public-school system: behavior problems, achievement gaps, transportation. Our school, like so many others across our county and country, had a severe shortage of bus drivers, which meant that the ones we did have ran two, sometimes three, loads of students to and from school, which meant that teachers and other staff members were arriving hours early and staying hours late to supervise the early arrivers and late departers (who were often the same kids). During one particularly rough stretch, a group of students who lived in the same apartment complex had to leave school 20 minutes before the bell rang, missing out on instruction and time with teachers and friends, because it was the only way we could get them home before 6 p.m. If one of the drivers, God bless them, got sick or had to miss school—COVID or otherwise—the entire system came crumbling down. They couldn’t drive (and if you think hiring a bus driver is difficult, try to find a substitute), which meant many of their students couldn’t get to or from school because their parents worked early or late and they were relying on the bus. I remember missing a couple of my students one day because their bus wasn’t running and thinking that being unable to transport a child to and from school has to be one of the biggest failures of the public-school system ever.
Teachers got sick and had to miss school too, of course, and if that happened finding a substitute to replace him for a day was often close to impossible. When a class didn’t have a sub, usually a support staff member (media specialist, intervention teacher) would step in to cover it, which of course affected their own schedule and their students’ learning. Worse still, if there were several teachers out without substitutes, there wasn’t enough support staff at the school to cover their classes, so the students would be split into other teachers’ classrooms: More than once I had students from other classes arrive at my classroom door asking where they should sit for the day. (During all of this, we were called to a meeting in which a higher up in the system told us our students’ test scores were troubling.)
Not that there were easy solutions: Teachers and administrators and staff at our school worked long days and often long nights simply to keep the school running; this wasn’t an issue of not caring or working hard enough. No, this was an issue of finding answers to often unanswerable questions. This was, as had become the trite saying, unprecedented.
We were exhausted and sometimes broken. As every restaurant and grocery store around town started posting “We’re Hiring” on their road signs, we began to do the uncomplicated math: at almost $20 an hour for some of those jobs, accounting for working summers, we could make nearly the same salary we did teaching. One day after school my friend from down the hall came to me and said, “Today was one of those days that made me want to go pack boxes at Amazon.” At that moment I couldn’t come up with an argument against it. (And that’s not to take anything away from people who work those jobs, which are not trivial, or to say that they don’t deserve the salary they earn; it’s to say that teachers are underpaid relative to their training.)
It all began to feel unsustainable. For the first time in my career, I began to feel what everyone warned me about when I became a teacher: burned out.
So I began looking for a way out.
On the second-to-last day of school, less than 24 hours before my students cried during their final moments of fifth grade, I had a third-round interview for a writing job at a science education technology company. If I progressed, I’d have a final interview before the company decided whether to offer me the position.
The application and subsequent interview process were intense—multiple essay questions, an initial interview with a manager, a writing challenge that took close to 10 hours of planning and research, an interview in which two senior team members critiqued and peppered me with questions about that writing challenge, an interview with other team members that required me to come up with several ideas for a potential science video—but I was relatively prepared, because six months earlier I had gone through the nearly the exact same thing for a similar job with a similar company.
I was prepared to leave teaching halfway through the year.
The jobs, which were fully remote, came with tantalizing benefits—401K matching! Weeks of (or unlimited) PTO! Free health and dental! Three months of paid paternity leave!—and a salary that doubled what I earned teaching. The complete package was more than six figures, easy.
The contrast with teaching was striking. When Mayla was born toward the end of the previous school year, I took three weeks—15 days—and had to use sick leave for all of them. My wife, Carly, who also works in the public-school system, took 12 weeks and was paid for exactly zero of them.
It baffled me: I could earn double my salary with benefits dwarfed those provided by teaching without gaining any extra training, education, or experience. I was still the same exact person! There was a job out there—multiple jobs—that valued my skill set (which, to be fair, is not that impressive) at least 100 percent more than the public education system did. I didn’t realize that this market existed for me. I thought a career change would involve, like it does for most other jobs, going back to school and earning another degree.
I was taken: I imagined spending mornings writing and researching in our home office before heading downstairs to eat lunch with Mayla, and then maybe taking the dogs for a walk during a mid-afternoon break. I imagined taking a day off without feeling guilty. I imagined, overall, feeling less stressed. One of my greatest sources of worry as a dad was (and is) earning enough to support Mayla and our family, and this would have all but eliminated it. All of this, naturally, only increased my resentment for the current education landscape. These jobs wouldn’t be perfect, of course, I knew that, but it was difficult to think that getting either of them wouldn’t be a positive career and family move.
But there lingered, during every hour spent applying to jobs and preparing for interviews, during runs spent pondering my future and the drives home after, a question I tried hard to ignore: Was I selling out?
Turns out I never had to answer it, because I didn’t get either job. After each final interview, I was emailed a stock rejection from the company’s HR rep. But the fact that at least some part of me questioned my willingness to leave teaching for a higher-paying, less stressful job surprised me. And the reason, as always, was what the entire crumbling, confusing, contradictory education system is built upon, and will be forever: the kids.
Because every time I thought about my new life working remotely, I also thought about Patrick, who went from never turning in assignments to becoming one of the strongest math students in the class and crushing the end-of-year test. Every time I imagined a day without the unnecessary bureaucracy of education, I also thought about Joy, who showed up in tears on the first day of school and by the end of the year was confidently running my classroom. Every time I wondered what life would be like working in the real world, I also thought about Abby, who organized the entire class writing inspirational notes before I left to run the Boston Marathon, leaving me with no words and red eyes. I knew, no matter the companies’ claims of Improving the education of every child! and Implementing innovative, thoughtful solutions to personalize learning!, that they weren’t the same as being in the classroom, never would be. They couldn’t and wouldn’t match the feeling of flipping the lights on every morning and preparing for the rush of questions and stories and life that came from teaching a group of 10-year-olds. They would never come close to the love you felt as you gazed, from the front of your classroom, at those wide-eyed young people you were responsible for. They couldn’t replicate the pride you felt when one of them told you about finishing Harry Potter or the laughter that echoed around the classroom when one of them tried to teach you ballet. There would be no more inside jokes and personalized handshakes and sticky notes on my desk with fun facts. There would be no more Patricks or Joys or Abbys. They would be out there somewhere, sure, but I wouldn’t get to know them. And that ate at me.
Because that’s all it’s ever been about, right? I realized early in my career, with startling clarity, that our students, those 20-plus (sometimes 30-plus!) vessels of humanity seeking our guidance, our wisdom, our presence—they are the reason teachers endure what they endure. They are the reason we bear the early mornings and late afternoons spent in the quiet aloneness of our classrooms, the after-school duties and meetings during planning, the ever-changing guidelines and protocols, the endless parade of important-sounding acronyms—in short, the challenges that public-school teachers deal with every time we walk in our classrooms. Our students need us. They need our knowledge, our discipline, our strength. They need us to listen to their weird stories and questions, to assuage their worries and fears, to inspire and lead and tell them it’s going to be OK. We are there, first and always, for them.
I try to remember that simple truth every day: It’s about the kids. That’s all it’s ever been about.
Therein lies the teaching dilemma: the conflict between rationality and emotion, the endless war between your brain and your heart. Or, as Gary Smith, one of my favorite writers, put it: “An old nettle digs at most every human heart: the urge to give oneself to the world rather than only to a few close people.” If teachers were all Adam Smith-created (different Smith) rational beings, governed by pure self-interest, the entire system would crumble in days. Because teaching, at its core, is irrational, at least in the economic sense: Most teachers’ skills and experiences would earn them more money, sometimes far more, and perhaps a higher standard of living in another field. There is nothing tying them to their jobs other than a deep, abiding commitment to the young people in front of them (and summers off).
It’s cruel, really: It’s difficult to leave because you know you’ll lose that strong sense of purpose but difficult to stay because of everything else. The question, then, is which part of you do you choose: the pragmatist or the dreamer? That’s the question every teacher, those that left the classroom and those that are starting another year of teaching this week or month or year, wrestled with at some point before they made their decision. There is no right or easy answer.
I made my choice: Yesterday I started my sixth year of teaching. The question for me, then, and all fathers, is how do I teach Mayla which voice to listen to, which itch to scratch? How do I teach her how to balance reason with emotion, logic with passion? Can she—can anyone—have both? For a good portion of last year I thought that I couldn’t be both a good teacher and a good father because I wasn’t around enough, but what I’ve learned is that maybe being a good teacher is part of being a good father, that maybe one of the most important lessons you can teach your child is that the world is complicated and sometimes you have to listen to the nettle that digs at your heart.
All of that’s for the future, though. For now, I’ll simply smile when, on the final pages of her favorite book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, she points to the teacher and proudly says, “Dada!”
“Yes,” Carly tells her. “Dada is a teacher.”
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We blazed, my daughter and I, down the mountain, the trees around us a blur and our hair jetted back like we were on a rollercoaster. I looked down at the watch on my left wrist; it indicated that we were running sub-6-minute-mile pace. Perhaps concerned about the speed, Mayla, my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, looked back at me through the crack in the stroller awning, as if to ask, You got me, dad? We closed the 6-mile run on one of my favorite trails in 5 minutes and 57 seconds; it was our fastest mile together, and we’ve run many.
We’ve covered miles in our neighborhood, on trails, on the beach, on the dirt road I used to run from my parents’ house as a high schooler in Florida. We’ve run in the heat and cold and rain. We’ve run to blow off steam after a long day and to feel the wind rush past our faces and the oxygen snake through our veins. We’ve run because it is sometimes the best way to give thanks for another day of sun and cloudless skies. We’ve run because sometimes the best thing to do when life gets overwhelming or complicated is to throw on the trainers (HOKAs for me, white low-top Converse for her) and sweat. We’ve run to feel free, alive. We’ve run every mile together.
I had been looking forward to running with Mayla before she was born, and was slightly disappointed when I found out that she wasn’t old enough to go for a run until she was six months old (count this as one of the many logical things I didn’t know entering fatherhood). But when Carly, my wife, bought me a used running stroller as an early Christmas gift, it was, in the most literal sense of the phrase, as if Christmas had come early.
I took her out in it for her first run later that week; she seemed to love it. Since then, our runs have become something exclusively ours: Dada and Mayla, pounding pavement or crushed gravel, with the squirrels and rabbits and birds often our only companions. They are some of my favorite times as a dad.
I always wonder what she thinks when we’re running. Often she smiles and points at dogs or other animals passing by, identifying them by name if she knows. Other times she’ll, after minutes of silence, sit up suddenly and yell “Dada!” as if she just remembered who was making her move. “Hi, Mayla!” I’ll respond, and she’ll look back at me, wave her hand dramatically, and say, “Haaii!” with an irrepressible smile. Recently, when she’s bored I guess, she’s started rotating her fists in front of her face, which means she wants to hear “Wheels on the Bus.” And that is why, if you’re around the park near our house at the right time, you’ll hear a dad singing “The people on the bus go up and down/up and down…” through clipped breaths as his daughter throws her hands up, dancing to the song in the stroller that he’s pushing in front of him.
Most of the time, though, she sits there essentially expressionless, taking in the sights and sounds and life around her. It’s in those moments, when I look down at my daughter, the person who changed my life for the better, forever, that we experience something pure, a type of wordless communication of love, the embodiment of stillness and contentment: Just a dad and his daughter covering ground as we were designed to do. I like to think she loves these runs as much as I do. (As if to prove that point, she fell asleep on one run: As we climbed up a steep hill on our first trail run, as the stroller bumped and swung over the uneven ground and Arcade Fire blasted from my phone’s speaker, as I sweat and huffed vigorously, Mayla closed her eyes, put to sleep by the rhythms of running. She awoke shortly after to eat a snack once we reached the top of the hill.)
I don’t know if Mayla will become a runner when she’s older; I won’t attempt to sway her one way or another. I mostly want her to appreciate its simplicity and groundedness with the natural world, to understand that there’s value in making your heart work hard and letting your mind escape the everyday, to see that the world is vast and gain important perspective. Maybe she’ll find that through running, or maybe it will be something else.
Right now, though, we’re going to keep running. A few weeks ago we went out for a 2-miler, and about a mile-and-a-half in it began to rain, gradually picking up in intensity. We were still a good half-mile from our house, so I tried to cover her the best I could with the awning as we turned home. A few seconds later, we hit a significant bump, and my phone flew from the top of the stroller into her lap. I walked around to the front of the stroller to retrieve it.
“You ready?” I asked, extending my hand. She looked me in the eye and returned my fist bump.
So the father and daughter ran home in a growing rain.
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Here’s to those days with endless light, to those days we spent together…
Illustration by Samantha Harrington
Long live those long, unhurried days of summer, when the sun sank behind the mountains as we finished up a late dinner and let Mayla search for fireflies in the backyard before a late bedtime. Long live its sounds and smells, the hiss of the grill and the new plastic of inflatable pools. Long live the heat and the storms and the cool gray nights. Long live summer.
Summer, for teachers, is special, perhaps even sacred, but this one carried more meaning for me: It was the first real one I spent with Mayla, our vibrant, curious, exhausting 17-month-old daughter. Last year, both because of her age and her dependence on Carly for feeding, father-daughter time was relatively and understandably limited. And this summer, with Carly, my wife, working part-time, we tried to make up for it.
So, with the summer officially ending in less than a week (teachers in our county go back to work on Monday), here is what I’ll remember from those two precious months with my daughter.
I’ll remember taking her on hikes, strapping her to my chest as she pointed to the trees and leaves all around us and keeping her content with a ready supply of her favorite snacks. I’ll remember the trips to the library, where every book was her favorite book and she waddled around the kids section as if it were her home. I’ll remember our family trip to the science museum, where she played with rocks and trains and colored pictures of weasels as her father read a Carl Sagan quote about the vastness of the universe and the smallness of Earth on the wall. I’ll remember discovering that her name means “one who loves water” and thinking how fitting that was as we watched her play in endless pools and creeks and puddles and hoses. I’ll remember her learning how to say water, her demands for “wawa”—either to drink or play in—echoing around our house daily.
I’ll remember pushing her in the stroller for runs around our neighborhood, in the rain, on my favorite trail in the woods. I’ll remember her falling asleep once we reached the top of the climb, the rhythm of running and sounds of summer making her eyes heavy. I’ll remember watching her walk around a fairy garden with my mom, swing on a swing set built by my dad, listen to my sister read about an insatiable caterpillar. I’ll remember her demanding to be read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and Red Hat, Green Hat and Will You Be My Sunshine? at least 50 times each. I’ll remember the joy and wonder on her face when she discovered that like the teacher in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Carly also wore glasses, her little neurons forever firing and connecting as she pointed back and forth from the illustration to Carly’s face. I’ll remember when she learned how to ask us to play “Wheels on the Bus” by attempting to rotate her fists over each other but looking more like she was speed punching a tiny punching bag in front of her face. I’ll remember her insistence on helping us with chores around the house: dumping laundry into the machine, feeding the dogs (and picking up every dropped piece of food one-by-one), handing us clean spoons to put away from the dishwasher.
I’ll remember teaching her how to kick a soccer ball and give a fist bump, that “luna” is Spanish for moon, and that the best flavor of ice cream in the summer is strawberry. I’ll remember her getting a zucchini that was almost as tall as her from our friend’s garden, and watching her eat a tomato, like an apple, straight off the vine from her aunt’s. I’ll remember the smells of grilled salmon, crisp watermelon, fresh basil sitting on the kitchen windowsill—and our long, slow lunches on Sundays.
I’ll remember traveling down to south Florida to see her aunt, and up to rural New York to see her extended family. I’ll remember changing her diaper in the plane bathroom on the flight there, bouncing with the turbulence as she smiled up at me from the too-small changing pad. I’ll remember picking blueberries with her in the garden of the great-grandma she never met but loved her deeply, laughing as she ate four of every five she picked, and watching her swing from the same tree that Carly used to in the summers. Finally, I’ll remember watching the river with her later that day, sitting on a bench outside of our hotel as a soft breeze made the flowers around us dance as she looked out at the water and rested her hand on my leg, reminding me that, sometimes, the best thing you can do as a dad is simply be there.
Mostly, I’ll remember this as the summer I got to know my daughter better: her moods, her intricacies, her thoughts and desires. I knew her, of course, and fatherhood doesn’t stop once the school year begins, but this summer was something beyond the normal break from work, something that felt important.
I will miss it.
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For the first time as a father, I returned to my childhood. Everything was the same.
“You’re not gonna wear a shirt?” my dad asks me from the garage. He’s wearing a thin shirt blotched by giant circles of sweat. “Mosquitoes are bad today.”
I’m standing between my parents’ cars in their driveway, attempting to connect my GPS watch by holding my left wrist above my head, pleading with the heavens. I smile and nod.
“Well, you didn’t listen to me when you were 16,” he tells me, walking inside. “You’re not gonna listen to me when you’re 28.”
He’s right. My shirtlessness was never in question on this run: It’s the second day of August in central Florida, the time of year when, as a friend once told me, “the air is so thick you can chew it.” I start off down the crushed stone driveway, shaking out the stiffness from my legs as I cross the cracked concrete bridge leading into the rest of the neighborhood.
I’m home—or am I?—for a week, working at a camp that helps high school students apply to college. That’s how I described this solo trip to anyone who asked—“I’m going home to Florida”—but now I’m hesitant. Is my parents’ house, where I spent 16-plus years, where I picked blackberries in the spring with my mom and watched “Jeopardy!” on school nights with my dad and battled friends in marathon basketball games—is this home? My wife and our daughter stayed back at our house in North Carolina, where pictures of our growing family dot the walls, a 15-minute drive from friends and work and the apartment we lived in when we moved there three years ago. In the coming days, I will tell my wife, “I can’t wait to come home.” Is it possible—is it allowed—to have two homes, or is home, by its very definition, a singular place?
Maybe I’m just being sentimental; people tell me I’m too sentimental. Maybe I’m calling my parents’ house in rural Daytona, a one-story stucco with a weathered palm tree in the front yard and the stump of a towering sycamore in the back—maybe I’m calling it home because I know this could be the final time I’m here, and assuredly the final time I’m here alone. They’re going to sell this house soon, they tell me, because without my sister or me living here, they don’t need these two-and-a-half acres and 2,000 square feet and the upkeep it all entails. They want something smaller, simpler to begin their retired lives together.
Maybe I’m calling it home because I know, in some fiber deep in my chest, that I am back, for the last time, in my childhood.
My parents’ house stands a few miles south of Daytona Beach, in an area referred to as “unincorporated county land.” That’s a good word, unincorporated, to describe their community, a swath of land teeming with deer and dirt and Ford F-150s. The road leading to their house, a misshapen oval named after the fourth wife of the man who owned all the land, has never been paved, which is why after it rains you will often see Mr. Knox from two houses down riding a tractor to smooth out the sizable divots in the crushed gravel.
That’s where I’m running, mosquitoes be damned, on this gray and humid Monday, beginning the barely four-and-a-half mile route that we used to call five even. Without my wife, without (most of) the responsibilities of fatherhood, staying in my sister’s old bedroom, trying to finish the run before dinner, I feel 10 years younger, like I’m in high school, putting off studying for a bio test the next day and T9 texting friends from my flip phone. I can hear the echoes of my childhood in my dads’ words before the run (“You didn’t listen to me when you were 16…) and see it all around me as I run: There’s Harry’s farm, with a couple dozen chickens running around in the yard, a 500-pound pig lying in the hay, goats munching on grass contentedly. There’s Mr. Kondos, trying to corral his fierce German shepherd and yapping little terrier on another frenetic walk. There’s Lily, the neighborhood deer, who’s so unafraid of humans now that she essentially lives in Harry’s yard, a wild addition to his domesticated animal haven.
But even if the neighborhood had remained comfortingly static, I had changed, of course I had, because that’s what people do in the 10 years since high school: They change and they grow and they try to navigate adulthood and maybe parenthood and, if they’re alive at the right time, a pandemic that won’t go away. They learn that health insurance is a complicated mess, that all you need to watch TV is a baby boomer’s cable login, that every single one of their stored passwords is somehow compromised.
I’m running in, running through, my childhood as an adult, with all of the experience and baggage and contradiction it brings, running past the house I used to think was haunted, down to another one on the corner where Fife, their dog, used to bark and chase me along the edge of his yard until I was far enough away. I’m running across the busy road to the other neighborhood, taking a right onto the paved road, passing the same white mailbox that marks two miles and dozens of No Trespassing signs (“The fastest way to meet the Lord is praying. The second fastest is trespassing”), reaching the turnaround just past my old soccer teammate Garrett’s house.
I’m running the same route I’d run hundreds of times before, and its overwhelming sameness strikes me. It’s me that’s changed: Everything is shaped, or sharpened, by my adult experiences and perspectives and skepticism.
The first way this distinction strikes me is when I read, from my annoyingly precise GPS watch, that the white mailbox is actually only 1.88 miles, not two. I later wonder if it’s ironic or wholly appropriate that one of the most remote areas in the county has the highest number of No Trespassing signs per capita, and if it’s strange or refreshing that my parents, two lifelong Democratic educators, chose to live in a conservative stronghold where their shirtless, skinny son ran for miles while other kids rode four wheelers through the mud. When I pass Garrett’s house, I think about how he is married with a kid, and how that’s almost beyond comprehension, because it was just yesterday that his grandma was driving us to soccer practice, stopping at McDonald’s for double cheeseburgers on the way home—and then I catch myself: Holy crap. I’m married with a kid.
It’s a strange place, your childhood. When you’re in it, all you think about is leaving; when you’re back, all you think about is how you can never live it again, not like you did before. It exists independent of you, unmalleable and unaffected by your new interpretations of it. You can come back, of course, to revisit its memories, appreciate its simplicity, but it remains unchanged, forever. So you’re left running through it alone, in a growing rain, back to the place that you used to call home.
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