A thank-you letter to my stay-at-home-dad husband, told through comics.

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This four-panel comic shows just how incredible stay-at-home parents are.

A thank-you letter to my stay-at-home-dad husband, told through comics.

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To my husband on Father's Day:

Our lives have changed so much now that we are parents.

I look at you with softness as you nap on the couch while our daughter naps, too. I know it has been hard on you to go from the one providing for the family financially to being the one who stays home with our daughter. I know so much of your strength has been reinforced by your ability to build homes in exchange for our future.

I see how your gentle eyes have taken on a few more wrinkles and how your beard now hosts more white hairs than before. But please, don’t stay there, longing for a time past.

Look at your strong hands and see how you are still building, this time something even more beautiful: the foundation for our daughter’s future.

Look at your hands — those same hands that have been hardened by swinging a hammer — and see how they have softened as you care for our daughter.

As I exhaustingly navigate the new waters of being the sole breadwinner, I can see you through my half-opened office door and I see hope.

I see you stare at her with gazes of love as you try to take this life and shape it into something that can work for all of us. I see you try and try again with the love for this little being as your driving force. It is stunning to watch.

I know it is overwhelming to feel like you are blazing a new path all by yourself.

But I see how you combine your love and your brilliance to make it something new — and not just any something, but something beautiful and unique that will shape her world and ours forever more.

All images by the author, used with permission.

No, it’s not easy.

I, too, feel overpowered sometimes by being thrown into a role that was different from our original plan.

I want so badly to be the stay-at-home-mommy and to enjoy those first-year experiences you are feeling while you, not me, are her primary caregiver. Yet, instead, I can only calm that feeling by leaving you pumped breast milk as I work away, hoping to make ends meet as we each do the very best we can. I will continue to honor that.

Despite what I say and how I say it, please know that beneath my sleep-deprived commentary and worry-laden suggestions, you’re doing such an incredible job.

We are so lucky.

I promise that I will continue to witness, with appreciation, how you are taking these challenging things and making them yours.

Mistakes and all, I’ll watch and appreciate as you give 300% to our daughter and our family, walking forward scared but determined with only the tools that you now know.

From my office, I will continue to send support and love as I watch how you are trying in every way, shape, and form possible to build a beautiful future for her and for us.

For all of this, thank you.

Pfizer

#ScienceWillWin

We asked three people about how vaccines have impacted their lives. Here’s what they said.

Images courtesy of John Scully, Walden University, Ingrid Scully

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Since March of 2020, over 29 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19, according to the CDC. Over 540,000 have died in the United States as this unprecedented pandemic has swept the globe. And yet, by the end of 2020, it looked like science was winning: vaccines had been developed.

In celebration of the power of science we spoke to three people: an individual, a medical provider, and a vaccine scientist about how vaccines have impacted them throughout their lives. Here are their answers:

John Scully, 79, resident of Florida

Photo courtesy of John Scully

When John Scully was born, America was in the midst of an epidemic: tens of thousands of children in the United States were falling ill with paralytic poliomyelitis — otherwise known as polio, a disease that attacks the central nervous system and often leaves its victims partially or fully paralyzed.

"As kids, we were all afraid of getting polio," he says, "because if you got polio, you could end up in the dreaded iron lung and we were all terrified of those." Iron lungs were respirators that enclosed most of a person's body; people with severe cases often would end up in these respirators as they fought for their lives.

John remembers going to see matinee showings of cowboy movies on Saturdays and, before the movie, shorts would run. "Usually they showed the news," he says, "but I just remember seeing this one clip warning us about polio and it just showed all these kids in iron lungs." If kids survived the iron lung, they'd often come back to school on crutches, in leg braces, or in wheelchairs.

"We all tried to be really careful in the summer — or, as we called it back then, 'polio season,''" John says. This was because every year around Memorial Day, major outbreaks would begin to emerge and they'd spike sometime around August. People weren't really sure how the disease spread at the time, but many believed it traveled through the water. There was no cure — and every child was susceptible to getting sick with it.

"We couldn't swim in hot weather," he remembers, "and the municipal outdoor pool would close down in August."

Then, in 1954 clinical trials began for Dr. Jonas Salk's vaccine against polio and within a year, his vaccine was announced safe. "I got that vaccine at school," John says. Within two years, U.S. polio cases had dropped 85-95 percent — even before a second vaccine was developed by Dr. Albert Sabin in the 1960s. "I remember how much better things got after the vaccines came out. They changed everything," John says.

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