I was standing at the edge of a dock surrounded by a large lake at two-in-the-morning the first time I told someone that my wife Jenny was pregnant and I might finally become a dad.
I practically whispered it into the darkness to make sure that our other friends gathered back around the campfire onshore wouldn’t hear.
Jenny had only taken the pregnancy test four days earlier and we still had to wait several weeks before a doctor could confirm the pregnancy was viable, nevertheless, something inside me had already shifted.
I hadn’t planned on telling my friend Stobbs that night that Jenny was pregnant, but I felt fatherhood’s enormity all around us.
Not only was it my second time seeing Stobbs since he had become a father, but it was also my first time seeing him since he had lost his father, the man who built both the dock we were sitting on and the cottage where we’d sleep.
When the sun came up a few hours later, it would be Father’s Day and the entire extended Stobbs family would crowd onto the property his dad maintained for decades to enjoy their annual family reunion.
I went to bed that night thinking about how, even nearly a year after he had passed, my friend’s dad was still providing a place for his family to come together and celebrate.
My visits to this rural stretch of the Cayuga Lake shoreline (directly in between a cow pasture and the water) in upstate New York were an annual tradition started fifteen years earlier when I took the five-hour drive joining Stobbs and his dad for a few days of escape.
It continued every year without fail for seven years (adding in a few other friends at various times) until I moved to Texas and Stobbs moved back to Hawaii. Though we had managed to revive the tradition the year before, it wasn’t clear if this would be our last time there together.
As I looked at the family photographs hanging all around the cottage, I could literally see Stobbs growing up in front of me. I thought about how special it was for him to share the same cottage experience with his son that his father had so often shared with him.
Indeed, watching him interact with his son on this trip provided a fresh appreciation for how fatherhood had changed him.
I wondered if it might impact me the same way, which is why I confided in him at the end of the dock that night.
He said that it would, and two years later, I can say with certainty that it has. What started as a whisper has become the harmony to my life’s tune.
Fatherhood is likely the most meaningful thing I will ever contribute to the long arc of human history. At the very least it’s an accomplishment so monumental that it will remain recorded on some distant descendant’s family tree many generations from now.
There is something awe-inspiring about watching someone who descends from you develop and interact with the world. They’re their own person but also a portal back into yourself and past generations.
At times in her, I see my wife, an in-law, or one of my parents, but oftentimes I just see traces of myself.
One of my sisters-in-law said that a woman’s first child always bears a stronger resemblance to the father so he’s less likely to leave the mother.
It amuses me to think my child’s appearance is partially shaped to manipulate my emotions so I dismiss the science that overwhelmingly disputes this claim and accept it as true.
It certainly feels true.
If you had asked me two years ago if you could fall in love with someone you had nothing in common with I would’ve said no. But I had nothing in common with my newborn daughter and fell in love with her rather quickly.
One might say, “the thing in common is that you both love your wife,” which is true, but that could also be said about my father-in-law and I’m not exactly cuddling up with him for a nap.
Parenting has unlocked a new level of intimacy for me where every single thing about another person is interesting.
And the biggest blessing is having a spouse who shares that enthusiasm because I’m well aware that nobody else in the world cares that for the past two weeks my daughter has looked right into my eyes before falling asleep, smiled sweetly, and touched her nose three times.
I like to think it’s her way of saying “I love you,” but she’s more likely still just excited to know where her nose is, or is trying to insure she won’t forget that crucial knowledge overnight.
Though my daughter is only 16 months old, next weekend will be the third time I’ll have celebrated her on Father’s Day.
It’s exciting knowing I’m at the start of a spectrum of celebration that started with a whispered hope and will eventually flatten out to a 5-minute obligatory phone call.
It’s still pretty low key right now but I imagine there is a long future of finger paint, macaroni art and popsicle stick constructions in my future.
As much as Father’s Day is a day to honor the men who raised us, it’s also an opportunity for those of us who are fathers to reflect on how that’s impacted our lives.
That’s what I plan to do next weekend in between reading books about pouty fish, scribbling with crayons, and thanking God for the blessings in my life.
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