Tag: Fatherhood

On Teaching and Hard Goodbyes

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

Editor’s note: All student names have been changed.

You take a deep breath and stare at the 20 pairs of eyes in front of you.

“I’ve had a lot of tough conversations recently,” you say. “But this is the one I’ve been dreading the most.”

Your students, quiet now, shift uneasily in their seats.

“There’s no easy way to say this, guys, so I’m just—”

“Oh no,” Ryan groans. 

“I’m just going to jump right to it: I got a new job as a writer for a running website and will be leaving Koontz at the end of February—”

Brittany gasps. George sighs. April wears an expression of intense worry.

“—which means you’ll have a new teacher for the last little bit of the year.”

Your words hang as heavy as the Florida air around your first classroom eight years ago. Most of your students sit in shocked silence.

Finally Sarah breaks it.

“Congratulations!” she yells, on her way to tears. “I’m so happy for you but so sad for us!”

Ryan yells, “How could you do this to us?”

You stare at the ground. You knew the question was coming but it still stings.

“Let me explain everything first, and then I promise — I promise — I’ll answer any more questions you have.”

Your students accept that answer. 

“The first and most important thing for you to know — if you take nothing else away from this — is that it has absolutely nothing, zero percent, to do with you guys. In fact, you guys, and the students I had before you, are the only reason I’ve been a teacher for this long. Talking with Eric about UF football and UNC basketball. Calling Brooke ‘tater diggers.’”

You get the class laughing at that one.

“Those are the things that I’ll remember, those are the things that matter. I love Math and Science, you guys know that, but the things I’ll remember from being a teacher, the things I’ll take with me forever, are those.”

Some of them begin to cry. 

For the rest of your speech, which you had rehearsed on runs for weeks, you explain to them how the job is draining you, how you are barely home with your family, most days leaving the house before your daughters awake and getting back after they’ve gone to bed. “I feel like I’m missing them grow up,” you tell them, and your students nod through their red eyes. “They, more than anything, are the reason I’m leaving.”

You are equal parts grateful and inspired by their response.

“Do you know if the new teacher will be nice?” Lucy asks. 

“I’m sure they will be,” you try to assure her.

Some had broken out into full sobs now. You’re surprised you’re not crying; maybe the relief of getting it off your chest is stronger than the sadness. 

“I’m going to miss you all like crazy. And I guess I’ll finish off by saying the most important thing: I love you guys and am excited for this final month together.”

You give instructions for them to pack up as you pass out the letter explaining everything to their parents. Among the chaos of kids packing up, of April sobbing and her friends rushing over with red-eyed hugs, of kids running around the room and yelling frantically, of chairs clattering and the walls seeming to shake, of the blur of one of those defining moments in your life, you catch Jayden’s eye as you hand him the letter. 

“Family first, Mr. Harms,” he says simply. 

You smile at this 11-year-old’s wisdom as you fight back your own tears. “That’s right,” you tell him, walking to another table. “That’s right.”

It’s been more than three months since the day I told my students I was leaving, probably the toughest thing I’d ever had to do as a teacher, and it still seems like some surreal combination of a dream and nightmare, like it never happened and that on Monday I’ll see them all again and they’ll tell me about their weekends and we’ll do the Question of the Day for our Math warm-up. 

I’ve experienced the entire spectrum of human emotion since that day, from intense sadness and guilt about leaving to anger and resentment toward a system that puts thousands of teachers in similar situations. I’ve thought, and think, about it too much, too deeply, too often. Even three months later, removed from school and all of the emotion it brings, I’m still not sure if it was the right decision. 

On a Tuesday night in January, I broke down. My wife, Carly, was at book club, her well-deserved once-a-month escape from the rush of evening parenting, and my mother-in-law stayed late, making dinner and watching our two young daughters so I could finish a tutoring session. I got home just before 8, scarfed down some tacos, and began the bedtime routine. 

Mayla, our 4-year-old, went to sleep fine, but Rory, who’s now 2, was having trouble sleeping then. I held her, rocking her in the big gray chair, for a half-hour or so, hoping she would fall asleep in my arms and I could put her in bed. She was restless, though, and seemed no closer to sleep than she had before I turned the lights off. It was close to 9 now. Knowing it wasn’t going to go well, I put her in her crib, sang a couple of songs to her, and left the room. She started screaming before I shut the door.

I went back in and tried it all over again: rocking her, singing to her, holding her. She kept wriggling around in my arms, fighting sleep like a champ. It was 9:30 now. My frustration mounted: I still needed to shower and make lunch and pack clothes for the next day and I wanted to be asleep by 10. By then, though, I knew it’d be a small miracle if Rory was asleep by 10, let alone me. 

I sat there, in the dark of my not-yet-2-year-old daughter’s room, and stewed. Doesn’t she know that I have to be up at 5 to run before school because I have to tutor after school till 5:30 and Carly is going to yoga at 6 and I need to meet her there to pick up the girls and drive them home and make dinner and eat and go to bed so we can do this all again the next day? Doesn’t she know how busy I am? I don’t have time for this. 

That last thought — I don’t have time for this — is the one that, days and weeks and months later, ate at me, and maybe the one that pushed me to find a different job. How could I not have time to help my daughter fall asleep? How could I have spent hours away from her that day and then be wishing for nothing more than to leave her? A toddler not sleeping is frustrating, yes, but what she needed that night was a patient dad who could soothe her, hold her, be there for her. 

It struck me then with startling, unsettling clarity that I was not that dad. 

I don’t remember how Rory eventually got to sleep that night. She always does, and now she falls asleep on her own in her crib with very minimal help, which only makes my frustration more embarrassing. 

What I remember was going to bed angry that night, mostly with myself but also misdirected at Carly and Rory, and waking up feeling the same way. I was probably short with my students that morning, too, and likely went through the motions of teaching with little joy or energy. I was disillusioned, exhausted, and mad at the world. For the first time in my life as a husband and dad, the two roles I consider most important, I started to see meaningful gaps between what I strove to be and what I was becoming.

That was one night, yes, but many others were like it: I’d get home after dinner, maybe joylessly read a book or two to Mayla and Rory, help them get to bed, and then get ready for the next day. My friends affectionately called it “monk life.” I remember thinking that there was a reason monks didn’t have kids. 

I knew something had to change, that my current pace of work was unsustainable and maybe even unhealthy. I was running 50-plus miles a week, mostly in the cold dark in an upscale shopping plaza in the mornings before school, teaching every day from 7:30 to 3, and tutoring most nights from 3:30 to 7:30. On Monday nights I had another session from 8 to 10. My fifth graders could do the math: Most days I was spending 10-plus hours with other people’s kids and less than one with my own.

Every 15-minute increment of my day was planned, scripted, inalterable. On some nights I remember feeling that eating dinner was a chore. If something small changed my schedule in the slightest way — maybe a 2-year-old having trouble sleeping — I felt like everything collapsed. I was an inflexible zombie with no time or energy for anything other than what the day had prescribed.

I write none of this to portray myself as some kind of hero dad who grinds for his family. In fact, I think it’s the opposite: I was kind of an idiot for believing I could do everything and still prioritize what mattered to me. The past eight months have humbled me significantly. 

So I was left with a few options: The first was to continue my current pace until I officially exhausted everything I had; I’d call that the stupid choice. The next was to cut back on tutoring and try to be home more often, which was financially challenging.

And the last option was the one I didn’t want to face: find a new job that allows me to be around more — and leave teaching. 

All three options kind of sucked. I didn’t want to fully burn out; I didn’t want to turn away tutoring clients because that business is the reason I was able to remain a teacher in the first place; and I didn’t want to leave teaching before the school year was over.  

It forced me to examine my priorities more closely than I ever had. What mattered to me more than anything else? 

The answer to that question starts and ends with the three girls/women in our house, and maybe it was as simple as that. If I could find something that allowed me to be a better, more present dad and husband and still help support them financially, then perhaps it was a no-brainer and this essay is 2,000 words too long and all of this analysis is melodramatic and unnecessary. (It’s probably still too long and melodramatic and unnecessary.)

But teaching is one of those select few careers that muddles that calculus, that makes those seemingly simple decisions agonizingly difficult. If I were pondering leaving a career in insurance sales or advertising, I’d have had no second thoughts. But teaching. But teaching.

I knew that my decision would affect far more than me, of course, and my family. I knew that it’d affect, probably in a negative way, the 40-plus young people whom I saw every day, that they’d be disappointed and sad and not have the years of being jaded by the world to shape their understanding. All they’d know is that someone they relied on was leaving them. That hurt, and still does. 

And that feeling, more than anything, led to maybe my most important epiphany from this entire thing: All of this is wildly unfair to teachers. Three months ago I stood at the front of my classroom, alone, trying to explain something that I — and the thousands of other teachers leaving North Carolina public schools — shouldn’t have had to. It was me, not the secretary of education, telling my students that I legitimately, deeply cared about that I was leaving them. It was me, not a state representative who took away master’s pay for teachers, attempting to explain how I couldn’t be a teacher and raise a family in the way I’d always hoped. It was me, not anyone who helped create this entirely avoidable reality, facing their disappointment and questions and anger. I was alone. Teachers are alone, fighting a fight they can’t and won’t win because the country’s priorities are somewhere else. Their only recourse is to marry rich or leave, find something more lucrative but less fulfilling while trying to ignore the hole it leaves inside of them. And there is something deeply sad about that. 

Carly, also a public-school employee, and I don’t live beyond our means. We eat out once a week and our idea of a luxurious vacation is staying at my parents’ house in suburban central Florida and taking the girls to the beach. And yet, if we relied solely on our two combined educator salaries, we’d be living paycheck to paycheck. We’d save no money for ourselves or our girls, and God forbid an accident or emergency. It made clear a sobering reality: We could not raise and support a family on two public-school employee salaries.

I realized this basically as soon as Mayla was born four-plus years ago, and that’s why I was spending most afternoons and evenings teaching high schoolers how to take the SAT. For whatever reason, the market said that doing test prep was almost four times more valuable than teaching fifth grade, an economic quirk I’m equally puzzled by and grateful for. There came a time, too, when some of these students wanted me to meet with them during school hours, and I’d invariably respond, I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m a teacher… For the first time, I had to turn away a student because they could only meet during these hours. Teaching, it seemed like, was getting in the way of making actual money. A business that I first started simply so I could keep teaching had become something more, and it seemed stupid to not pursue it. 

The question, then, changed from Should I leave teaching? to When am I going to leave teaching?

This is the question that caused, and causes, me the most pain, and the one that I’m not sure I answered correctly. I could have stuck it out. I could have, and maybe should have, cut down on test prep, maybe even dialed back running. I could have stayed for three more months and spared myself and my students a lot of emotional turbulence. A growing part of me wishes I chose to do that, especially as the end of the school year approaches and the mountains turn green. A growing part of me wishes that I could do over these three months. 

But I was exhausted and bitter and it was the dead of winter. These spring days seemed so far away. Mayla and Rory were only getting older. I knew that I wouldn’t cut back on test prep as much as I needed to because I knew that beyond June it was going to become my primary source of income. I knew I wouldn’t dial back running because that was the only thing holding me together. I knew that delaying the start to a new career would make me anxious. I knew that I would look out the window during long meetings at school and wonder why I wasn’t outside, wonder if I missed my chance to leave again. I knew that I would get home after dark one night and break down again, another day gone without seeing the two kids who matter to me more than anyone else. I knew that in 10 years, when they’re teenagers, I’d regret not spending as much time as I could with them, even if it was only three months. I knew that I had to leave. 

I had long conversations with Carly, my parents, my sister, my friends, my pastor. All of them said some version of the same truth: You have to do what’s best for your girls. Carly, who is much smarter and more well-adjusted than I am, told me that just because something is hard to do doesn’t mean it’s wrong, that sadness does not automatically equal something bad. She reminded me that life is about choices, primarily about how to spend your time and who to spend your time with, and that every decision as a parent comes with some level of guilt. It’s up to us how to apportion that guilt. My pastor told me that there’s no shame in choosing your family over your career. My friend Jordan reminded me that just because what I’d be doing as a career wouldn’t be as personally fulfilling, the extra time with Mayla and Rory would equal or surpass it in importance. My dad, a former fifth grade teacher and lifelong educator who recently retired after 30-plus years in public schools, told me that I’d regret not leaving now. My sister walked into our house one day, saw me down, and put it more succinctly than anyone else: “You owe it to yourself and your family to do this.” 

But teaching. But teaching.

Once I decided, I didn’t have a single second thought. Until I told my students. 

After that day, exactly one month until my final day at school, I questioned everything. Carly had to remind me, daily, of why I was leaving. (I really don’t deserve her.) Some nights I lay awake, wondering if I had just made a giant mistake and if it was too late to get my job back. A couple of my students asked me if it was some elaborate prank, and I remember wishing that it was. 

Everyone else, for their part, was more understanding of the decision than I was. My students handled it like champs. Their parents were kind and supportive. Several people told me they were proud of me. I found that strange: I felt the opposite of proud, like I was doing something wrong. 

Some of those feelings still linger. As I was cleaning out our garage last week, I finally worked up the courage to read some of the notes my students gave to me on my last day. They were, I thought as I read them proudly, remarkably aware and mature and kind. One of them, from a girl named Emily, whose eyes carried an undeniable sadness after I told them I was leaving, wrote perhaps the best coda to the entire thing: “I know this is going to be really hard but because of you I know I’m capable of getting through it.” My eyes began to water as I looked at a soft wind brushing a tree in our front yard. Rory stood a few feet in front of it, scooping mud into a cup and pouring it out into the mulch, her dress soaked through and turned brown. The juxtaposition — my students in my hand and my daughter in front of my eyes — was almost too fitting. 

A day later, Emily’s letter still fresh in my mind, 16 miles into a 20-mile run, I broke down crying. I stopped, alone in the mountains, enveloped by a gray mist, and yelled into the clouds I was running through, “I just wanna know I didn’t do anything wrong. I just wanna know I did the right thing.” 

I thought back to the leaves dancing in the wind outside our garage. How do you ever know, really, if you’re doing the right thing?  

What I’m doing now for work — writing for a running website, doing test prep — is not as important as teaching because it can’t be. One of the few benefits of working in public education is that you never had to question if what you were doing every day was valuable. Some days were more influential than others, of course, and some felt like glorified babysitting. But teachers’ consistent daily presence in the lives of young people is perhaps their most irreplaceable trait. 

The time with Mayla and Rory, though — that’s been a godsend. I used to picture fatherhood as a series of grand moments: taking your kids to get ice cream, jumping over the waves with them at the beach, watching them blow out the candles on their birthday cakes. Those are important, of course, but what I’m learning is that time — consistent, daily, unfettered time — is the most valuable currency. Mayla and Rory don’t really know I made an emotionally draining career change; Mayla just knows that I take her to school most mornings and Rory knows I read her Moana book before putting her down for her nap most afternoons. This time, too, is not linear. Like a pre-tariffs investment, it compounds: A couple songs that we played on the way to school have now become part of Mayla’s morning playlist (everything from Chappell Roan to John Denver to The Lion King soundtrack). I asked Rory if she wanted to eat lunch with me one day and now she expects to sit in my lap and pick the potato chips off my plate every afternoon. We played in the backyard a couple days in a row after lunch; now we’re out there almost every day, identifying dog poop I need to scoop and playing “I spy” as they swing. I’ve been around them and Carly so much more and that’s felt important. 

I miss my students, of course. I miss their energy and life and incessant questions. I miss hearing about their soccer games on the weekend and making inside jokes with them. I miss the UNC gnome we named Smithy who watched over our class and the Wheaties box that I placed on whichever student particularly impressed me the previous day (they “ate their Wheaties”). I miss being a part of their lives. 

Until I left I didn’t realize how much teaching had become a core part of my identity — not lesson planning and grading, but working with good people who care, being a public servant, fighting the good fight. Teaching is not a blue-collar job but neither is it white-collar, and I enjoyed living in that in-between. 

I don’t think I’ve taught my last day. The ending felt too abrupt, too forced: I had to choose between my family and my students and maybe one day I can choose both. Maybe I’ll go back in three months or three years or three decades. Maybe these three months were a break, a step away from the frenetic pace of teaching. Maybe the only way to evaluate everything properly is from the outside. If I do go back, I’ll have a better sense of my limits and priorities. I will, I hope, be better. 

But, as Carly has reminded me time and again, just because I no longer am a teacher doesn’t mean I never was. The lessons, the jokes, the memories — they will endure. There is part of me still in my classroom. 

I approached this entire thing trying to identify the right decision. But maybe that misses the point. Maybe there is no “right” choice; maybe it’s just a choice that I had to make and I made it and now I have to deal with the good and bad parts. Both were defensible; both were “right” in their own ways. Maybe that’s how life goes. 

Maybe I should stop thinking about it. 

Your last day, a Friday in February, arrives. After reading in the woods and watching videos and playing outside and a frantic going-away party, finally, mercifully, the bell rings. 

This is it, you realize with startling clarity right then: the last moments of your career as a teacher. 

So you wait, trying to extend it perhaps, trying to stop time, trying to remember these final minutes because you know it will never again be the same. You stand there, at the end of the hallway, waiting for your soon-to-be former students to hear their name called to walk outside to their parents’ cars, waiting to say goodbye and wondering if you said everything you’d wanted to say because this is your final chance to be their teacher. You wait in silence. 

“Emily Harper.”

The name comes in a shrill from the walkie talkie. Emily, whose note will bring you to tears two months later, stands up, grabs her backpack, makes her way toward you. Her eyes are puffy and red.

“I’m gonna miss ya, Emily,” you tell her, wrapping her in a hug. “Be good.” You’re self-conscious about your parting words and watch her as she wordlessly walks away. You hope that all of the memories — the day she wore mismatched shoes just because, her monthly suggestion for your new watch background, the sticky note from you she still keeps in her binder — go with her. 

You repeat this with a dozen more students and it doesn’t get any easier.

Finally, it’s 3:15. Time to go. You say goodbye to your few students remaining. The last one, because of course it is, because God knows you need this, because maybe this is a movie, is Jayden, one of your favorite students of the hundreds you’ve ever taught, who came from a different school this year and didn’t know anybody and who looked like a lost deer for the first month, wide-eyed and hesitant, but who grew into it, who made close friends and started cracking jokes and loved to watch soccer highlights with you, who worked hard and said, “Too-da-loo, Mr. Harms” every time he left your classroom, who represents the reason why you got into this stupid, wonderful, irrational, draining, redeeming, imperfect, infinitely important profession eight years ago. 

He smiles as you walk up to him. God bless him. You needed to see that smile one more time.

You extend your hand to dap him up. He catches it perfectly. The crisp sound echoes through the emptying hallway.

“Family first, Mr. Harms,” he says with a smile, and two months later it still makes you cry.

“That’s right,” you tell him, and walk back to your classroom for the last time.

Dear Rory

Dear Rory,

I’m sorry it took me so long to write. Since your arrival six months ago, life has been predictably busy. I started this website to record moments and memories of being a father when your big sister entered our world two-and-a-half years ago, and since then every piece has been about her. But I want you to know that is not a reflection of my love for you. 

In fact, it’s the opposite: Mama and I have been working hard to make sure you and Mayla have everything you need, and writing necessarily takes a back seat to those more important obligations. Some days, like yesterday when I had to work late, that means I leave before you wake up and get home after you’re asleep, and Grandma and Mama take care of you. I want you to know that if I could be home with you, I would, that my absence does not indicate a lack of love but rather an abundance of it. Last night you woke up upset a little after midnight; rubbing your tummy as you fell back asleep was more important than anything I did that day. 

I used to think, before you were here, that I had a finite capacity of love, doled out in parcels here and there to who and what I valued most—as if love were like time or energy. I worried that when you were born that I wouldn’t feel the same way about you as I do Mayla. I’ve never been happier to be wrong: You taught me that having a second child does not divide a parent’s love; it multiplies it. The past six months, watching you and Mayla grow, have been the richest of my life.

I was feeling down today, overwhelmed by responsibilities. So I watched a video of you on my phone: We were at the fair, waiting as Mama and Mayla ordered mac and cheese. I began tickling your belly and you squealed with glee, that thousand-watt smile staring up at me. 

I felt better after that.

Most people, when they meet you, have that same reaction. “She’s just so happy!” they’ll tell us, and we will have no retort. Your happiness is among the purest I’ve witnessed, right up there with Ama’s as she runs around our backyard. You rarely cry, and if you do you are easily soothed. When we get you up in the morning, or from a nap later in the day, your smile is impossibly true, and your laugh, as Mama puts it, is addicting. You are thrilled that you get to experience another day in your new world. I hope you never lose that.

You never stop moving. It started when you were in Mama’s belly, and it’s continued until now. Legs, arms, feet, hands—constantly in motion, forever searching and probing your physical limits. (I joke to anyone who will listen that you are going to be a Division I athlete, and I’m only like 40 percent kidding.) When we lay you on the floor, we are no longer surprised to find you several feet away just seconds later, reaching for the dog bed or putting a ball in your mouth. I hope you never lose that curiosity either. 

My favorite time of the week comes on Sunday afternoons, when I get to hold you for your afternoon nap. It’s just me, you, the sound machine, and my book. You lay on my chest, eyes closed and breathing softly, your round cheeks pressed against my shoulder, and there is nowhere I’d rather be, nothing I’d rather be doing, than sitting there with you in the quiet dark. 

I love you, Rory. You are the light of my world. I’m sorry it took me so long to write to tell you. 

Love,
Dada

30 for 30

A 30-mile journey in the mountains, to find out something important

“Have you figured out what you’re running from yet?”

The question came from a man in the dark. It was a weeknight, a few years ago, and I was stretching by my car after doing some school parking-lot loops to get in a couple extra miles after a late meeting. The question was sudden, disarming. It came from one of our school’s custodians, who had come out to his car to retrieve something during his solo night shift. 

I laughed noncommittally. “Umm.” I paused, thought. “I don’t know.”

“The correct answer is heart disease and type II diabetes,” he said, smiling. 

I laughed. “I guess I’ve never really thought about it,” I said. “I guess I’m just running from…” I paused. “Yesterday’s self? To get faster, I mean.”

He stopped about halfway between our cars. 

“You know, I was reading Craig Ferguson’s—he’s a Scottish comedian, one of my favorites—I was reading his biography. It’s called Riding the Elephant. And in it he talks about how he’s always been a runner. You ever heard of it?”

I shook my head.

“Well, it’s about all of the challenges he’s been through—addiction, heartbreak, pain, fatherhood—and something really stuck with me. And I thought of you when I read it, because I see you running, every day.”

He paused. I looked into his eyes.

“He said that he used to run from all the hurt. Until he met his wife. That was when he finally found something to run toward.”

I let the words seep into the night. Something to run toward. 

He retreated back to his car and said goodnight, leaving me alone to think in the darkness. I had been a runner for almost a decade at that point and had never considered one of its simplest questions.

What was I running toward?

Two Saturdays ago I woke up at 3:30 a.m. to run 30 miles through the mountains. About two weeks earlier I had turned 30, and it had become something of a rite of passage among my runner friends to cover 30 miles in honor of this milestone birthday. My motivation was relatively simple: I wanted to prove to myself that even though I was getting older, I could still run something long. My plan was to run from the base of Mount Pisgah to the Folk Art Center, a section of the Mountains to Sea trail that I had covered in pieces before but never all at once. My wife, Carly, and two girls would meet me at the end. This would be, if all went well, the farthest I’d ever run, in terms of both distance and time.

And so there I was, driving up the Blue Ridge Parkway in the early morning hours with my best friend Jordan, climbing out of the car when we arrived in the parking lot of the Mount Pisgah trailhead. It was cold when we got out, the sun still hours from rising and the wind and elevation much stronger than down below. Wondering if we’d underdressed, we filled our bottles, organized our nutrition—an avalanche of sugary powders and gummies—and strapped on our running packs and headlamps. And then we entered the dark trail. 

The first section, down a brutal stretch of trail officially known as 151 but more endearingly referred to as “the elevator shaft,” was choppy and technical, but we nearly immediately entered that sacred running space, where ideas and conversation bounce and flow as unpredictably as our footsteps. It was just after 5 a.m. in the mountains and we were loving it. 

For the next two or so hours we talked about running and fatherhood and public education, saw one bear and two people, ran into the sunrise, and marveled at the green mountains surrounding us. Around mile 12, Jordan stopped at his car at his pre-planned departure spot, and we said goodbye. I continued down the trail on my own. 

Almost immediately I popped in Carly’s Airpods and so soon Arcade Fire and Mumford & Sons accompanied me as I glided through the mountains, enjoying their curves and undulations I’d run so many times before even as my quads began to sear on the downhills. 

And then a song came on that I listened to during my brief, post-college stay in San Diego, one of those times when life punches you in the mouth but you come out stronger, and then it hit me: I was running this not to simply to prove that I could, not merely to delay or defy the endless march of time, but for something deeper, more important: This 30-mile run represented my 30 years on Earth, those thousands of beautiful and difficult and ultimately purposeful days that had shaped me. I’d started the run with Jordan, my best friend since birth, covering miles together as we’d done countless times as teenagers through the heat of Florida. And now I was by myself, as I was after college, running forward, unaware of what awaited. I knew then that everything—the good, the bad, the in-between—had led me to that specific moment, sprinting down a mountain and pumping my arms to the music blaring through my headphones. It felt big.

A few miles later I ran into the parking lot where my friend Charlie was waiting with pickles and Gatorade. I ate a little, drank a ton, and ambled back to the trails, where 13 more miles beckoned.

Around mile 19, on one of the easiest sections of the trail and one I’d run dozens of times before, the physical and mental reality began to set in: double-digit miles to go on heavy legs and a tired brain. As it often does in low moments, doubt, about the rest of the run and its value, began to slowly creep in. 

But Charlie, as he and so many other friends had done for me throughout runs and more broadly life, powered us through the rough patch, with humor and conversation and, most importantly, by simply being there. We continued that simple, most elemental task of putting one foot in front of the other, and the miles began to clip off a little more easily, nine to go then seven then five, and soon we were two miles out from the finish, laughing and waxing philosophical and tearing into a pack of peanut M&Ms and at one point taking a wrong turn that led us to the right place.

With a mile to go, we shoveled down some more M&Ms and opened our stride. Here it was, here it always is, the last mile, that holy place of pain and joy and heart, where you find out important things and you’re no longer running but floating, drifting by the world passing at a different speed and feeling only your chest working hard and blood coursing to your arms and legs. 

I was running fast, faster than I had all day, because I finally knew the answer to my custodian’s late-night question all those years ago. 

I reached the parking lot. And then I walked over to my wife and two girls. 

Turns out I’ve been running toward them all along.

Waiting, Again

Navigating everyone’s, including my own, expectations of when your child is supposed to arrive

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

And so again we wait. Two years later, to the exact day, my wife, Carly, and I find ourselves in the same position we were in during those late winter days of March 2021: waiting for the arrival of our child, for the moment our world will shift and our lives will change. The result of that first wait, which ended 11 days after the due date, was nothing less than the light of our world, a strong little girl with a perfectly round face named Mayla.

You’d think I’d be better equipped, then, for this time. I am not. If anything, it’s worse. We were convinced that this baby, for whom we do not know the gender, would come early—that’s what they say about your second, right? The path has already been trodden by their older sibling, so they just come whenever they want, and invariably that’s before their due date, right? We’d definitely have a February baby this time, we told ourselves, no way that both babies would remain in Carly’s stomach well past their due date. No, we thought as the calendar turned from January to February, this baby was coming in a couple days, weeks at most. This baby was coming soon!

They were not. Carly thought she might be in labor the morning of Feb. 13, with intense contractions not far apart. The app on her phone told us to get our bags ready to head to the hospital; she started drafting an email to her supervisor, telling her that she’d be out of work earlier than planned. 

It is now March 6. That means every day for the past 21 I’ve been wrestling with the notion, the burden, that today could be the day. The expectation, more than anything, has wrecked me. I’ve been more stressed than necessary, and highly irritable. Every decision, from when to give my fifth graders a science test to what time I should run the next day, seems enormous, way more significant than it should be. Scheduling anything has come with the caveat that my wife could go into labor so I might have to miss it. I’m scared to be away from my phone for longer than five minutes. Every day is a swirling cocktail of emotions, of hope and excitement mixed with embarrassment and disappointment that I’m disappointed the baby hasn’t yet arrived. One day last week when I woke up Carly was unsure if I should go to work that day: She had been having consistent, strong contractions and didn’t want me to just have to turn around. I drove to work, convinced that in a few hours I’d be driving in the opposite direction, ready to experience a momentous life change. Nothing happened. Life continued that day as usual, save that I was carrying a nervous excitement-turned-disappointment in everything I did. 

The problem, of course, is not with the baby or Carly, no matter what some comments might lead us to believe (“Why hasn’t your wife had this baby yet?” “Why isn’t this baby here yet?”—as if they have autonomy). No, the problem is my, our, society’s expectation of babies arriving when they “should.” We are told, then conditioned to believe, that babies have a due date, and if, like a gallon of milk, they go past that date, they are considered “late.” If they come before it, they’re “early,” and if they are one of the rare few that are born on their due date, they are “on time.” Babies, in this view, are simply packages delivered by Amazon, or a stork.

As soon as the due date comes—I honestly dreaded it this time, because I knew what was going to happen in the following days—people from all areas of your life will pepper you for updates, look at you incredulously when you walk through the doors of your work, ask when the induction will be, greet you with “What are you still doing here?” All of it will be good-natured and well-intentioned, and you will do your best to smile and offer short, simple answers. And you will be grateful, ultimately, that you have a baby coming at all, forever aware that a child, your child, is a miracle. Plus, you understand that in their eyes, the calculus is simple: The baby was supposed to be here already, the baby is not here, what’s up with that? A baby coming a week past their due date doesn’t align with their expectations of how it should have happened (“No baby yet???? They’re so overdue. Wonder if they’ll ever come!”), and so they want to know why, and they will ask you. You will want to go somewhere, anywhere, to escape the burden of waiting. Instead, everywhere you will be bombarded with the same questions that you’ve been wondering about yourself for the past month. Perhaps what people don’t realize when they ask those questions is that, trust us, we’ve been asking, thinking about, the same ones. We do not suddenly remember that our child hasn’t been born yet when someone asks us. It’s occupied every neural bandwidth we possess for several weeks. There is no one that a “late” birth affects more than the parents of the child. We are trying to be patient.      

So therein lies the conflict: Society dictates that a baby is late if they’re not here by their due date, but the baby doesn’t know or care about when they’re “supposed” to be here. They don’t care that you want to get one more decent night’s sleep, or finish up the next project at work, or have another lowkey weekend. They don’t care about people’s expectations about their arrival, including their own parents’. They don’t care what’s most convenient for you, or for the people who ask you. They will arrive when biology dictates. 

Mayla was born 11 days late. In the past two years—which have been among the best of my life, watching her grow into a beautiful and independent and hilarious little girl—I have thought about that fact exactly zero times. When your child comes does not matter, not really, in the grand scheme of things. So long as they and their mother are healthy and safe, the timing, the due dates and questions and expectations—all of it is irrelevant. The most important truth is the most simple one: We will have a baby in our arms, soon. 

And so again we wait. The moment will come when our child enters the world and changes ours forever. And right then we will know that they came right on time.

The Magic of a Babymoon

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

The note, titled “Carly and Robbie’s Pre-Babymoon,” still exists on our phones. As I read it now, I’m struck by its scope, which was hilarious and close to impossible.

Before we were to embark on the life-changing journey of becoming parents, Carly, my wife, and I decided we needed to, and this is verbatim from the list, “Find Carly a dentist,” “Take a road trip (out West, Vermont, Maine) w/ dogs,” “Eat lots of sushi,” “Backpacking w/ dogs,” “Go to theme park” (to presumably ride roller coasters), “New sink,” “Find Carly a new job,” and my favorite, “Read books.” (Which books? Doesn’t say. Just books. I hope I read the correct ones.)

We compiled this list together, sitting on our couch, in May 2020. It was our attempt to determine what we wanted to accomplish by the time the demands of parenthood, and restrictions of pregnancy, arrived. We checked off very few of our goals. We never went to a theme park. We still have our same kitchen sink. We did not take a road trip with the dogs, out West, or to Vermont or Maine.

No, this pre-babymoon lasted a mere three weeks. Because 18 days after we wrote this note, wide-eyed and filled with anticipation, we found out Carly was pregnant. That baby is now almost two years old.

The babymoon would have to wait.

Honeymoons, which possesses one of my favorite Spanish translations luna de miel (literally translating to “moon of honey”), are familiar to me: A couple travels to somewhere remote, usually tropical, to enjoy the beginning days of their marriage and escape the stress that accompanies planning a wedding. A day after we were married, Carly and I hopped on a plane to Italy for the first time in our lives; it was magical.

A babymoon, though—what the heck is a babymoon? I didn’t know until Carly brought up the “pre-babymoon” that still occupies gigabytes on our phones that it is, simply, a honeymoon for expecting parents, a time to spend time alone together before their world is turned upside down and their hearts are filled by the presence of a child, their child. 

At first, as a 29-year-old going on 65, I thought it was one of those typically Millennial creations, like olive oil in a squeeze bottle or $20 avocado toast. Apparently, though, it was actually coined in the 90s by a British pregnancy author, who intended it to be the time spent with your new child after they were born; “[b]ut influenced by the ‘trip’ sense of honeymoon,” Merriam-Webster writes, “it soon gained another meaning: ‘a trip or vacation taken by a couple shortly before the birth of a child.’”

Whatever its origins, we never took one before Mayla, our now almost-two-year-old, was born: There was a pandemic tearing through the world, and the farthest we traveled in the weeks before she was born was our mile walking loop around the neighborhood. This time, though, with our days much busier and our nights centered around feeding, bathing, and putting Mayla to bed, we decided it could be good, perhaps even necessary.

So for Christmas our biggest gift to each other was nothing tangible, but a weekend away—the long-awaited babymoon.

We went to Highlands, a quaint mountain town 90 minutes from Asheville, and there is honestly not too much to report about the trip because we did basically nothing for 36 hours. And it was extraordinary.

We made a dinner reservation for 9 p.m. and didn’t leave the restaurant until close to 11. We slept, a lot. We lay in our hotel bed and watched TV and read for hours. We had a late brunch and walked around Main Street. We smelled spices inside a spice and tea shop. It snowed as we were driving there on Friday night, so we were forced to do everything slowly; North Carolina does not handle snowy roads well. And that pace, and feeling, was perfect for this weekend. It was a magical, wintry escape.

If the purpose of a babymoon is to remind expecting parents of life without children, when their responsibilities shrink and they don’t have another human to attend to, and to connect deeply with their partner and reaffirm that they are the person with whom the want to share the journey of parenting, then ours was a success. It was, in the truest sense of the word, relaxing. 

But there lingered in the back of our minds, when we were waking up late and sitting with just each other at restaurants, when there was no stroller to push through the cracked sidewalks and no books about llamas to read before bed, that we were missing something, or someone. We both, I think, try to ensure that our identity is not completely intertwined with Mayla’s, that our life and interests and time extends beyond our daughter’s, that we are not just parents. And we both, admittedly, enjoyed the long-awaited babymoon, even if there we didn’t ride any roller coasters. But by the next morning, we missed her.

So we checked out an hour early and drove home to see our daughter.

Join our mailing list!

Subscribe to the Essays of Dad newsletter, a weekly email with parenting stories, background on essays, book recommendations, and more.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

Parenting, in Sickness and in Health

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

We sat, Carly and I, in the hard plastic chairs, staring at a reflection of our family in the large rectangular mirror occupying the opposite wall. Our concern was hidden by the cloth masks covering our noses and mouths; maybe our eyes betrayed our worry. We were, more than any time I can remember as parents, genuinely scared.

Mayla, our 21-month-old daughter, had woken up the previous night, a few before Christmas, crying and coughing so hard that she threw up. But what worried us the most was her breathing: it was scratchy, clipped, labored, especially when she got upset because of the pain caused by coughing. It sounded exactly like what preceded my adolescent asthma attacks, the ones that invariably ended with me sitting in a camping chair, a clear mask over my nose and mouth delivering albuterol to my compressed airways.

It was the first time of her life that we contemplated calling 911; instead, we tried to keep calm and called, around 4 a.m., the on-call nurse, who relaxed our worry and advised us to take the normal measures to calm a cough: honey, steam, humidity. We tried, without much success, to all go back to sleep, Mayla, for one of the few times of her life, laying between us in our bed. The sun rose and we tried to get her to eat breakfast, eat and drink anything; she mostly refused, preferring to do something she almost never does: lay on the couch and watch Daniel Tiger (“Da-tah” to her). We didn’t really care what she did, as long as she didn’t get upset, because that’s when the wheezing began. We just wanted, needed, to keep her calm.

By the time we got to the doctor, she was so tired she nearly fell asleep on Carly. To pass the time and soothe our anxiety, Carly and I started flipping through old photos of her, of us, on our phone. And as I looked back and forth between the digital representation of my daughter on my phone screen and the physical one laying on Carly’s shoulder, struggling to keep her eyes open, I struggled to determine which one was real. For the first time, the pictures of her seemed more true than reality. There she was, smashing her first birthday cake and rubbing it all over her face. There she was, running through a hose in the front yard, squealing with glee. There she was, sleeping on my chest when she was just weeks old. This girl sitting next to me? No, that wasn’t our daughter: She looked so sad, tired, lifeless. They didn’t seem like the same person. I almost started crying: In those moments of high stress you start to fear the worst, and you want, more than anything, for your child to be OK, to find again that joy that you saw on the screen you held in your palm.

And that’s when I remembered coming to that pediatrician’s office almost two years ago, before Mayla was born, and walking into that room or one designed exactly like it. We were there only to meet the pediatrician and discuss Mayla’s first appointments, and thus felt relaxed, light. Our eyes then often squinted above our masks, the universal sign for a hidden smile. But I specifically remember thinking, sitting in those chairs and staring into that giant mirror, One day we’re going to be here when she’s sick and we’re going to be scared. 

That day had arrived, and it was a not-insignificant comfort to remember that visit two years ago: It didn’t heal Mayla, of course, but it offered something of nearly equal value in those frenzied, anxious minutes, hours, days when you are worried about your sick child: perspective—perspective that this is part of the deal of parenthood, especially in the snotty winter months, that your marriage vows of in sickness and in health apply, too, to your children. It was helpful, as ever, to zoom out.

The rest of that doctor’s visit was not fun: Mayla did not enjoy, in fact actively fought against, the albuterol pumped into her nose and mouth and all of the probing swabs up her nose for the various virus tests (and no one could blame her on the latter). But she got some medicine to loosen her airways, she never had trouble breathing again, and she was better in a few days.

It was, as parents, our first true medical scare, and for that I feel fortunate because I know some parents experience scarier, more severe issues far earlier than we did with Mayla. And I’m sure those parents, as we did, at times felt helpless, wishing they could simply take their child’s pain away, transfer it to themselves, do anything to make their child better. Having a sick child is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, but it’s perhaps one of the clearest, most powerful manifestations of a parent’s love.

Mayla will get sick again, as will our second child, due to arrive soon, so our worries will likely only increase. It is simply a part of life. Which, of course, exemplifies the ceaseless oscillations of life as a parent, which can bring you the most uncontainable joys and the most genuine scares. Neither can exist without the other; they are both part of the deal.

So, yes, we’ll be back in those hard plastic chairs, gazing into that immense piece of reflective glass once more. And we will remember, hopefully, those anxious December days, when our daughter helped us remember that parenting is never easy, but it is always worth it.    

Join our mailing list!

Subscribe to the Essays of Dad newsletter, a weekly email with parenting stories, background on essays, book recommendations, and more.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

An Explosion of Language

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

The other day, after I put our daughter, Mayla, down for her nap (something I like to consider her siesta, for she takes it after a hearty lunch), I heard noise from her room through the walls of ours. I couldn’t, at first, make out what it was, just that it was something distinct from the familiar drone of her white-noise sound machine. It was higher, sweeter, melodic. 

I listened more closely for a few seconds, and then I heard it clearly: “Mama. Dada. Ama. Pay-pa. Oouu. Mama. Dada. Ama. Pay-pa. Oouu.”

Our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, from the quiet, solitary darkness of her crib, was talking to herself.

Mama is my wife, Carly. Dada is me. Ama is our dog, Ama. Pay-pa is our other dog, Paisley. Oouu is Mayla’s word for herself, a word she learned because we consistently refer to her as “You” that she says with a knowing inflection, pointing to her chest. (It’s one of those hilariously adorable things that we should probably soon fix.)

These are the members of our immediate family. They are also five of the what Carly, a speech therapist who works with children (which means she should likely be the one writing this), estimates is the 200 words Mayla knows. 

More than anything, talking has marked her transition to full-blown toddlerhood. As a baby, Mayla’s primary method of communication, like that of most babies, was crying. That soon evolved into grunts and similar noises and pointing at things. She started to do a few basic signs that we had taught her, too. But words were not a major part of her life until a few months ago. 

Mayla’s first word was baa (ball). She was 10 months old. Since then, and especially in this last month, it seems like she has learned new words every day, every minute. She is a sponge: It usually takes us saying a word a few times, sometimes only once, for her to remember it and later say it, often in the proper context, to the astonishment of her parents. She knows everyday words like wa-wa to more specific ones like puz (prayers). She knows words in three languages—English, Spanish, and American Sign Language—and basically every sound any common animal makes.

I write none of this to brag; Mayla is pretty typically developing, according to Carly, who knows these things. I write it simply to document this explosion of language, when words have become her toys.

The talking begins immediately as her day begins. When Mayla is woken up in her crib by Carly or me or Ga-ma, she almost immediately calls for the other parent and dogs to come join. Within a few minutes, she brings her hand to her mouth and says, “Et.” She wants breakfast. When we confirm her desire by asking, “You want to go downstairs to eat breakfast?” she gives a little yip, accompanied by an excited hand thrust, to indicate that we have correctly interpreted her morning wishes. 

As she waits for her breakfast to be prepared, she will tell you what Carly or I is doing in the kitchen—cük—and often demand to go ow-si to check in on the backyard trees (tus) and see if there are any aye-pa (airplanes) flying uppa (up high), where, at night, she loves to identify the muuhn. If it is cold outside, she will tell us by hugging herself, shaking, and saying “Couuu!” She will also invariably yell “Ama!” at the dog, raising the pitch and changing the inflection of her voice to indicate exasperation, if Ama is doing something even slightly impermissible. (This will never not be hilarious.)

When breakfast is ready, Mayla will ask to wash her hands in the ka (kitchen) sink, and then ask to be placed in her hai-cha to begin eating, but not before she demands her bua (bib) be placed around her neck. If we forget to give her a utensil to eat with, she will remind us, repeating fük (which sounds alarmingly close to a different four-letter word) until we bring her a fork from the cabinet. She then will often tell us what food she is eating—she knows the names of too many foods to list here, but my favorite one is ah-ka for avocado—and ask for muah once she eats all of her favorite food on the plate. Breakfast usually takes at least 15 minutes. 

For the rest of the day, Mayla spends time playing with tuz (toys), from a ta (train) to pehs (pegs), or reading büks, telling you if she’d rather read tu-ah (“The Little Blue Truck”) or a Christmas book featuring her current favorite person and word: Suh-ta. Perhaps she will then take a wuk (walk) with her Ga-ma or want to play, again, and so walk over to her parents, grab them by the hand, and demand that they get up (this she says perfectly). 

When dinner time comes, Mayla will often demand to hep, dragging a chair over to our kitchen island so she can stand on it and snap some green beans or pour the sweet potatoes onto the baking sheet. Once she is sufficiently fed, she will repeatedly tell us “Ah-da! Ah-da!” and shake her hands to indicate that she has indeed finished eating, and so it is time for the next stage of the evening, either bath or bud (bed). In either case, she will grab both of our hands and walk us to the edge of the stairs, a giant smile painting her face as she proudly exclaims “Toooo!” to indicate that she is walking two parents. This makes our hearts full.

Her final words of the day are often accompanied by an action: a huaa (hug) or kus (kiss) to say goodnight.     

I used to be a journalist and currently run a saccharine dad blog; Carly’s job revolves around helping young people develop language. We both appreciate the importance of words, those “most inexhaustible sources of magic,” as Dumbledore famously called them. So watching our daughter, our first child, discover their beauty and power has delighted us beyond measure.

There will perhaps come a day when her tiny, squeaky voice doesn’t bring me complete joy, or even a time when I think that she is talking too much; that day has, thankfully, not yet arrived. For now, I’m simply going to relish every Dada and oouu and kus, going to enjoy this extraordinary stage when our daughter is finding her voice.

Join our mailing list!

Subscribe to the Essays of Dad newsletter, a weekly email with parenting stories, background on essays, book recommendations, and more.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

Ultrasounds Are For Dads Again, Too

This time, I was allowed to attend my wife’s ultrasound. Were my expectations too high?

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

For 40-plus weeks, I sat alone, staring at the bricks. Every time my wife, Carly, had a prenatal appointment for our first child, now a thriving year-and-a-half-old named Mayla, I stayed in the car and watched her waddle into the birth center by herself. It was peak COVID, late 2020 and early 2021, and to minimize risk partners were not allowed in. 

This being pandemic America, there were vastly different opinions on whether this was right, but one thing mostly everyone could agree on was that it sucked for both dads and moms. Mayla was our first child and first pregnancy, and I wanted more than anything to hold Carly’s hand as we listened to her heartbeat for the first time—have you never heard the Brett Young song!—and pepper the midwife with well-intentioned but probably annoying questions. I wanted to watch our daughter wiggle and squirm and was that a smile? I wanted to, simply, be there.

Instead I watched, through my windshield, a sad little gray tree transition from winter to spring. 

Carly is pregnant again. COVID is now either under control or ignored. Partners, those parking-lot heroes from pandemic pregnancies, are allowed to attend prenatal appointments again. There are, for the first time in over a year, at least a few dads roaming the halls of OB-GYN offices, looking around curiously, wondering if they belong in this brand new world.

And so it was a few weeks ago that I walked into Carly’s OB for the 20-week anatomy scan, the second time I’d ever stepped foot in the building (the first was for an early ultrasound, but it was so short and they didn’t have a chair for me in Carly’s room that the whole thing lasted maybe seven minutes so I don’t count it; this time was for real).   

We checked in and waited; we had both taken the morning off from work so we had that excited feeling that we were doing something special (and the evergreen realization that life outside of a school building really does carry on normally). My first impressions were that it looked…like a doctor’s office: not-too-bright fluorescent lighting, friendly but not overly friendly staff, magazines strewn across wooden side tables next to pale vinyl chairs. 

About 10 minutes later we were called back by a woman with the name of a U.S. state, who led us into a dim room that had changed so many lives. The overwhelming feature of this ultrasound room was delicate machinery: computers and sleek-looking instruments and lots and lots of screens. Everything was either silver, black, or gray. There was a giant TV hanging from the wall, and the ultrasound tech had Carly lay on the medical chair across from it. I sat in a fabric chair right next to it.

The tech asked us if we wanted to find out the gender; we held strong and said no (how tempting it was, though, to say you’re not going to find out and then crack at the moment when you could). The tech then rubbed a cold jelly all over Carly’s stomach, turned on the TV, and began moving the ultrasound wand across her midsection. I rested my hand on her leg. And then, like magic, our second child appeared on the giant screen in front of us. 

Not that we could tell: There was an image on the screen, sure, but it mostly just looked like a series of ever-shifting gray shapes in a sea of black. The tech seemed to move the wand continuously, taking pictures and coding each one with a (to me) unintelligible combination of letters and numbers. She paused perhaps once or twice to explain what we were looking at, but for the most part the room was silent, save for the familiar hum of technology. 

And that’s how it was for the next 30-plus minutes. There was moment of excitement when, for the first time, we could make out our baby’s face and position: there he was, or she was, our second kid, up on the screen in front of us, kicking their little legs, squirming and shifting, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they knew we were watching them and they were saying hello, and it seemed, maybe, like we were meeting for the first time. 

Or maybe we were dreaming. The room was warm and quiet, Carly was reclining comfortably, and the light was low. I couldn’t believe it, but during the moment I had anticipated for so long, the time I was actually in the room and not FaceTiming in from the parking lot, I actually felt my eyelids getting heavy. Later Carly told me she felt the same way.

And that, perhaps, was the most telling takeaway from the ultrasound: Aside from the moment of genuine wonder and joy when we could clearly see our child, the entire experience felt oddly antiseptic, scientific, devoid of the emotional weight I had preemptively assigned to it in the solitude of my car. I’m not sure what I expected—balloons and streamers and a “Welcome, Dad! Here is a moment that is going to change your life forever!” sign?—but this was not it. I wasn’t disappointed but I was definitely surprised.

Maybe, and I’m guilty of this often, because of my exclusion the first time I had built it up too much and it was never going to live up to those unreachable expectations. Maybe pandemic dads now have an unrealistic and idealistic perception of their partner’s doctor’s appointments. Maybe the grass, especially from the loneliness of the parking lot, is always greener.

Maybe I simply approached the visit in the wrong way and I should focus more on the other thing that struck me from our visit: the marvel of ultrasound technology. I always knew, of course, that these machines and tools existed—we have an ultrasound picture in a frame in our living room—but watching them in action was a wholly different experience and filled me with gratitude for their existence.

Because, when Carly and I left the office that day for a breakfast date at our favorite restaurant, the only thing that mattered was that we had fully seen our healthy baby. And I could, for the first time, walk out of the building holding my wife’s hand, and this time the bricks were behind me.

Join our mailing list!

Subscribe to the Essays of Dad newsletter, a weekly email with parenting stories, background on essays, book recommendations, and more.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

Every Picture Tells a Story

Photo by Rachel Marie Photography

Every picture, they say, tells a story, and so here is ours.

This picture tells the story of our family: three humans, two dogs (here in spirit), one more (human) on the way. This picture captures one of the dwindling moments of our current family of three, a true snapshot of our life as it currently stands, among the oranges and yellows and browns of fall in western North Carolina. This picture represents our abundant joy and immeasurable love for the young person in the center of it, an unstoppable, irrepressible girl named Mayla Ruth, whose joy and curiosity, it seems, radiate from the thin, toothy smile painting her face.

This picture captures one moment from one day of the combined thousands of our lives, one we will, no doubt, look back on in years with a remember-those-days smile. This picture will, and does, make us happy. 

But this picture does not tell our full story, because no picture, even those worth a thousand words, can: It is necessarily limited by the time and place it was taken, by the disposition on the faces of the people in it, by the circumstances surrounding it. 

This sometimes unrealistic portrayal is, of course, exacerbated by social media, which often and predictably depicts the best version of the person, family, or company it represents; it is natural to hide the less desirable, to mask the parts you don’t want the public to see. But those flaws, those vulnerabilities, those missteps—they are no less part of the story, no less important to its telling, than the triumphs. 

So. Here is the story this picture, one of my favorites from a gallery by a wonderful photographer named Rachel, doesn’t tell. 

Perhaps most significantly, it does not represent the impossible challenge of trying to wrangle a 19-month-old to sit in one spot long enough to take a picture, and, if and when she finally does, look at a camera and smile. She would, of course, much rather spend time outside wandering, picking up leaves and rocks and flowers, pointing at the creek. The fact that this picture exists at all is a testament to Rachel’s photography (and stuffed giraffe).

This picture does not tell the story of how, after college, I was lost and confused and living on the other side of the country before, as so many lost and confused people do, moving home. This picture does not tell the story of how my life changed, forever, when I met the woman on the right side of it.

This picture doesn’t tell our love story, of the walks on the beach under the stars, of the impromptu dancing to Leon Bridges on condo balconies, of the challenges navigating a (relatively) long-distance relationship: the anticipatory drives to each other on Friday afternoons and reluctant goodbyes on Sunday night and sad Monday mornings. This picture does not tell the story of leaving everything and almost everyone we know and moving to another state to build a life together, of our engagement and marriage in the mountains, of the cozy one-bedroom apartment by the river and the simple rhythms and major adjustments of life as a newly married couple.

This picture does not capture the intense joy of finding out we were going to become parents or the intense worry generated by navigating a pregnancy in the throes of a pandemic, of the hours alone in the parking lots of medical offices and birth centers. It does not tell the story of the ceaseless lows and highs of the birth of our first child, of watching the person you love most endure hours of pain for the ultimate reward. 

This picture does not tell the story of the first days, weeks, months of caring for a newborn, of the significant adjustments to our life and marriage, of the inevitable tension caused by trying to figure out parenthood. It does not capture our long, challenging journey to feed Mayla, of the long nights Carly spent alone in the dark of Mayla’s room, rocking her in the chair and attempting to get her as much food as possible, of the worry we had when we discovered she dropped to the sixth percentile for weight when she was three months old. This picture does not capture the mental and physical strain of life with less sleep than we needed, of listening to our baby scream into the late hours of the night when we were all exhausted. 

This picture does not tell the story of nearly changing careers to better support our family, of the difficulties of striking the balance between the head and the heart. This picture does not tell the story of the conflicting emotions of finding out we were going to have another child, our second in two years, or the challenges of being a young parent. This picture does not capture everything our daughter has taught us, of the hope she instills in us and anyone who spends time around her.

Behind our smiles in this picture are all of these experiences, the good and bad and in-between. Every picture, they say, tells a story—but perhaps one deeper than your eyes can see. Here was ours.  

Join our mailing list!

Subscribe to the Essays of Dad newsletter, a weekly email with parenting stories, background on essays, book recommendations, and more.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

The (Relatively) Young Parent Paradox

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.    

Join our mailing list!

Subscribe to the Essays of Dad newsletter, a weekly email with parenting stories, background on essays, book recommendations, and more.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.