stay at home father

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.