A few reflections on fatherhood, presence, and raising a toddler

Holding my daughter for the first time felt, in a strange way, a little like dying.

Not in a bad sense. More like a sudden collapse and rearrangement of priorities. In an instant, so much came into focus while so much else immediately became unimportant.

I could almost feel the last pieces of my untethered youth scatter to the stars as a new version of me arrived at the exact same moment she did.

It didn’t take time for fatherhood to feel real.

It took acceptance.

I should probably admit something here.

I didn’t want to be a father.

But here we are, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how wrong I was about that.

Because of that, I didn’t begin this with a clear idea of the kind of father I wanted to be. And if I’m being honest, I’m still figuring that out.

What I do know is how I hope my daughters feel about me when they’re grown.

The second one isn’t even here yet, but she’s already very much part of the story.

Fatherhood, it turns out, isn’t a role you figure out all at once. It’s something that reveals itself slowly in a thousand small moments.

The thing about toddlers is that you get to watch a human being learn how to exist from scratch.

First the laugh.
First words.
First steps.

Now my daughter can get dressed by herself. Which, when you really think about it, is insane. She had to learn that.

Most of us never think about how we learned to do any of this. Watching a toddler figure it out piece by piece makes you realize how complicated even the smallest things actually are.

Then there are the language quirks.

For a long time milk was maymay.

The whisk is still mixamixa.

If something is off in the distance, it’s “far of way.”

You laugh about these things when they happen, but there’s also a quiet sadness in knowing they’ll disappear. Slowly the words become the “right” words.

You quietly mourn those tiny linguistic fossils as they slowly go extinct.

Parenting a toddler also involves a surprising number of Jedi mind tricks.

There are moments where something simply has to happen — teeth need brushing, shoes need putting on, the park needs to be left — and the entire outcome hinges on how you frame the request.

A direct command rarely goes well.

But offer a choice?

“Do you want to brush your teeth first, or put your shoes on first?”

Suddenly the task becomes theirs instead of yours.

And when you get it right, it feels like winning a small battle of wits with someone three feet tall.

Sometimes we play music together.

I’ll sit with a guitar while she rotates between a tiny guitar of her own, a xylophone, and a drum. Most of the time we’re singing whatever Disney movie happens to be in rotation that week. Eventually she’ll abandon the original song entirely and start making up her own.

And the dancing.

The kind only toddlers can pull off — zero rhythm, zero self-consciousness, zero fucks given.

Those are the moments I wish I could freeze and live inside for a while.

I hesitate to complain about my own childhood. There were plenty of good times, and overall I had it pretty easy.

But there were also long stretches where it felt like I wasn’t the priority. I spent a lot of time entertaining myself.

My mom worked constantly as a nurse. My dad was often somewhere between musical projects, bar gigs, and long stretches in his home studio mixing recordings from his band. Eventually he found steady work touring as a front-of-house engineer for some very well-known artists.

But before that, there were a lot of late pickups.

After school.
After practice.

Standing around waiting.

I didn’t have a bad childhood.

But presence was sometimes missing.

And I knew early on that I didn’t want that to be my story as a parent.

I’d rather risk being remembered as too involved than not present enough.

There’s no guarantee I’ll succeed in everything I’m trying to rebuild right now.

Financially.
As a student.
Even as a father.

But I hope that someday, if my daughters end up reading this, they’ll understand one thing.

Whatever the outcome turns out to be…

I was giving it everything I had.