+
Sign up for
The Upworthiest
Our top stories of the day delivered straight to your inbox.
More

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

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

True
Fathers Everywhere

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.

From Your Site Articles
Family

15 tweets that only married people will understand

This article originally appeared on 09.06.17


Being married is like being half of a two-headed monster. It's impossible to avoid regular disagreements when you're bound to another person for the rest of your life. Even the perfect marriage (if there was such a thing) would have its daily frustrations. Funnily enough, most fights aren't caused by big decisions but the simple, day-to-day questions, such as "What do you want for dinner?"; "Are we free Friday night?"; and "What movie do you want to see?"

Here are some hilarious tweets that just about every married couple will understand.

Keep ReadingShow less
relationships
Democracy

A man told me gun laws would create more 'soft targets.' He summed up the whole problem.

As far as I know, there are only two places in the world where people living their lives are referred to as 'soft targets.'

Photo by Taylor Wilcox on Unsplash

Only in America are kids in classrooms referred to as "soft targets."

On the Fourth of July, a gunman opened fire at a parade in quaint Highland Park, Illinois, killing at least six people, injuring dozens and traumatizing (once again) an entire nation.

My family member who was at the parade was able to flee to safety, but the trauma of what she experienced will linger. For the toddler with the blood-soaked sock, carried to safety by a stranger after being pulled from under his father's bullet-torn body, life will never be the same.

There's a phrase I keep seeing in debates over gun violence, one that I can't seem to shake from my mind. After the Uvalde school shooting, I shared my thoughts on why arming teachers is a bad idea, and a gentleman responded with this brief comment:

"Way to create more soft targets."

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Paul Rudd made an incredibly kind gesture to a bullied kid who had no one to sign his annual

The nicest guy in Hollywood strikes again.

via Wikimedia Commons

Paul Rudd in 2016.

Passing around your yearbook to have it signed by friends, teachers and classmates is a fun rite of passage for kids in junior high and high school. But, according to KDVR, for Brody Ridder, a bullied sixth grader at The Academy of Charter Schools in Westminster, Colorado, it was just another day of putting up with rejection.

Poor Brody was only able to get four signatures in his yearbook, two from what appeared to be teachers and one from himself that said, “Hope you make some more friends."

Brody’s mom, Cassandra Ridder has been devastated by the bullying her son has faced over the past two years. "There [are] kids that have pushed him and called him names," she told The Washington Post. It has to be terrible to have your child be bullied and there is nothing you can do.

She posted about the incident on Facebook.

“My poor son. Doesn’t seem like it’s getting any better. 2 teachers and a total of 2 students wrote in his yearbook,” she posted on Facebook. “Despite Brody asking all kinds of kids to sign it. So Brody took it upon himself to write to himself. My heart is shattered. Teach your kids kindness.”

Keep ReadingShow less
heroes
Trending Stories