Certainly Lucky

I used to think being a father meant teaching. Teaching my daughters to ski. To drive. Teaching them to be kind. How to lose without collapsing, how to win gracefully. It took me years to realize that fatherhood is less a profession than it is a long negotiation with your own certainty. Certainty about what matters, about what is safe and about what success looks like.  Certainty about which roads lead somewhere worth going, and which ones do not.

Love, for starters. Not the easy version. Not the cinematic version. The real version. The version that survives slammed doors and hurt feelings, distance and disappointments and half-truths and silence and let downs that daughters and dads don’t see coming. The one that survives the gradual understanding that neither of you gets to be exactly who the other hoped for, and that somehow love finds a way to remain anyway.

At first, you spend years protecting them. Then, without realizing it, they begin protecting parts of you. Not from danger exactly. From irrelevance. From forgetting what matters. From taking yourself too seriously. From confusing achievement with meaning. I’ve spent entire afternoons worrying about things that disappeared the moment one of them sends a single line of text.

As they’ve gotten older, I’ve become less certain of many things. One thing I remain remarkably uncertain about is when to help and when to keep my mouth shut.

Their mother and I spent years trying to get the balance right. When to help. When to back off. When to insist and when to listen. When to make it a little easier and when to let life do what life has always done best; teach its own lessons.  The difficulty was that the answer usually revealed itself long after the decision had been made.

Father’s Day has a way of making a person reflective. At least it does for me. Mostly I find myself reflecting on how much of fatherhood I nailed, how much of it I fucked up and how much remains open for some sort of negotiated memorandum of understanding.

Funny thing is, when I take inventory, I rarely find myself thinking about the things I worried about most of the time. Grades, teams, practices, goals, colleges, papers. Those felt so important in the moment. What I remember instead are songs, inside jokes, shows, projects and conversations that happened because we were stuck together somewhere and neither of us had anywhere else to be. Ordinary moments that somehow survived while all the things I thought would matter faded into nothing.

Maybe that’s what surprises me the most. The relationships I value today weren’t built during the milestones. They were built in the spaces between them. Thousands of ordinary moments stacked on top of one another until one day I looked up and realized they had become a life.

My daughters have taught me many things though perhaps not in the way I had expected. They taught me that love and agreement are not the same thing. That people become themselves on their own schedules. That worry is often just love with nowhere to go. And that some of the most important things in life arrive quietly, disguised as ordinary days.

Whatever else Fatherhood may have been, my daughters never had to wonder whether their father loved them. If I left them with nothing else, I left them with that. Love, it turns out, is the one thing that survives, even when certainty doesn’t.

And in turn, I never had to wonder how lucky I was.