DEAR FELLOW DAD
Dear Fellow Dad,
I’ve started and restarted this letter four times. I’m looking for the proper on-ramp into today, Father’s Day. How do we speak about our fathering? Or put differently, what do we as dads need? Do we need an encouragement laced pep talk waiting to go viral? Maybe a prayer with wisdom to recast the mundane into the meaningful? Or the plain acknowledgement of joy. And uncertainty.
These needs of ours reveal what we know deeply - the fathering space is wide and deep. We’re exposed to the whole gamut of emotion. From clever humor, “Daddy, my favorite kind of nuts are donuts.” to the sneaky grief that her days of being a little girl are ending. And the relationship with these beautiful kids keeps changing. One day the language of connection is our native tongue. Next it’s an ever shifting riddle.
Think about the last two days of your fathering:
What did it hold?
What did you feel?
What did you give?
What did you receive?
What were you surprised by?
What questions were you asking?
I don’t know your specific answers, but I bet they hold a wide range. And it’s that range that I’m interested in. Especially today. What if Father’s Day was not just a celebration of the ways you’ve crushed it as a dad, but permission to acknowledge all that fathering has held:
The delight of constructing a world-class pillow fort alongside your son.
The unknowable space between giving your child agency and intervening.
The sheer privilege of watching her becoming.
The sting of sharp words you wish you could unsay.
Friend, this isn’t an invitation to navel gaze. It’s to look at the what, so we don’t miss the who. Your honest acknowledgement is where the characters of the story actually reside. The contours of a soul are never glimpsed in generality. Only in the real telling of the glorious, the excruciating, the in-between, do you find your children and yourself. And the Father whose seeing eyes cannot be dimmed.
May you celebrate this day with a fuller sense of what your fathering has held. And in doing so find your children, yourself, and your Father in new ways.
Jesse French
Restoration Project Executive Director
