Then she got pregnant, and everything that had felt theoretical about providing for a family suddenly had a due date.

I took a new job managing a real estate brokerage. It came with a considerable pay increase, the kind that changes what's possible for a family, and I asked Kim to stay home and raise our children. Not because I thought that was the only right way to do it. Because it was the decision that made sense for us, in that season, with that opportunity in front of me.

What I didn't understand yet was what I was signing up for on my end of that arrangement.

There's a particular weight that comes with being the solo financial support for a family. I know some men understand it. I know some women carry it too, more and more these days, as the roles that used to be assumed have opened up into something less fixed. But I can only tell you what it felt like from where I was standing.

It felt like the ground would give out if I stopped moving.

So I didn't stop moving. For a long time, I was basically a workaholic. I put work before everything. Before my marriage. Before my kids. I told myself I was doing it for them, and there was truth in that, but it wasn't the whole truth. Somewhere in there, work had stopped being the means and started being the thing itself.

I told myself I was doing it for them. There was truth in that. It wasn't the whole truth.

I don't have a single dramatic moment to point to where that changed. It wasn't one blowup or one ultimatum. It was slower than that, more like water finding a crack over years. I started leaving the corporate real estate job. I started putting more of myself into our family, into the farm, into a version of real estate work I could actually shape around my life instead of the other way around.

I still don't have it perfect. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easy to write this as a before-and-after story with a clean turn in the middle, and that's not what it's been. It's been a gradual pulling of my own attention back toward what I actually believe matters, a little more each year. Some weeks I still get it wrong.

But I'm getting better at it. Not because I found a productivity system or a better calendar. Because I finally figured out the order things are supposed to go in, and I stopped fighting it.

Here's the conclusion I've come to, the one I'd tell my younger self if I could sit him down before he took that brokerage job and made Kim a promise about what kind of husband and father he was going to be while he chased it.

Put your faith in something bigger than you first. God, for me. Something spiritual, at minimum, for anyone who isn't there yet. Something outside yourself that reminds you, on the days you forget, that you are not actually the one holding everything up.

Then your marriage.

Then your kids.

Then your work.

FAITH, MARRIAGE, KIDS & WORK

In that order. Exactly. Not because work doesn't matter, it does, it's how I've provided for this family my whole adult life and I'm proud of that. But because every time I let it climb higher than it belongs, something underneath it started to crack. My marriage got quieter in the wrong way. I was in the room with my kids without being in the room with my kids. And ironically, even the work itself got worse, because I was running it on fumes instead of on purpose.

When I finally put it back in that order, faith first, then Kim, then the boys, then whatever I'm building that day, the work didn't suffer. It got better. It got clearer. I stopped needing it to prove something it was never going to prove.

I think a lot of men in my position get the order backwards for a while, maybe most of us. We equate providing with loving, and they're not the same thing, even though provision is a real form of love. You can hand your family everything they need financially and still be absent from the one thing they need more, which is you, present, in the order that keeps you whole enough to actually show up.

I don't say any of this from the far side of having it figured out. I say it from a few years further down the road than the guy who took that brokerage job and didn't think twice about what he was trading. I still catch myself reaching for work first on hard days, because it's familiar, because it's controllable in a way marriage and fatherhood and faith never quite are.

But I know the order now. And knowing it, even when I don't live it perfectly, has changed more than almost anything else I've learned in this life.

Keep going.

That is not false humility. That is not a hook to get you to keep reading. That is the plain truth of where I stood for the better part of fifteen years.

I spent my late teens and my twenties in and out of jails and rehabs. Not once or twice. Over and over, on a loop I could not seem to break. Some of those stays were because a judge ordered it. Some were because I had run out of other options. And if I am honest, and this is the part that still humbles me every time I say it out loud, some of those stints in rehab were never about getting clean at all. They were a performance. A way to mend the path just enough that my family would trust me again, just long enough for me to find a new way to scam them out of money.

I am not proud of that. But I am not going to sand it down either. That was who I was.

There is one day I remember with more clarity than almost anything else in my life. I was standing in the middle of a trap house on Hiawatha Street in Columbus. I do not need to paint the whole picture for you. If you know, you know. And if you do not, be grateful.

I took my last hit of crack. And I stood up, and I walked out the door.

Not because someone made me. Not because a judge told me to. I walked into rehab that time because I wanted to. Because I wanted my life back.

That was the first day of the rest of my life. I did not know it yet, not fully. But something in me had finally turned a corner that all the court orders and all the forced stays never could.

Getting sober did not hand me a family, a farm, or a career. It just gave me a chance. I had to build every single thing after that, one hard year at a time. And for a long time, I built it my way, on my own strength, and I told myself that was enough.

It was not until three years ago that the next part of the story started, and it started in about the most unremarkable way possible. I began going to church with Kim. Not because I had some burning spiritual hunger. If I am being completely honest, I went because I wanted to be a good husband. She wanted to go, and supporting her mattered more to me than whatever reservations I was carrying about faith.

So I sat in the pew. Week after week. And I told myself I was just being a good husband.

But something wears on you when you keep showing up, even for the wrong reasons. Slowly, without my permission, it started to work on me.

About a year into that, Kim and I were deep into figuring out what our life with farming was actually supposed to look like. I was sitting on a job that paid very well, and I was miserable in it. The kind of miserable that follows you home and sits at your dinner table. I knew I had a hard decision in front of me, the kind where walking away from good money for the sake of your own sanity sounds reckless to everyone around you.

I found myself at Polyface Farms in Virginia, curious, unsettled, trying to picture where all of this was actually headed. I was standing alone on a hillside, looking out over pasture as beautiful as anything I had ever seen. And I did something I had genuinely never done before in my life. I prayed an honest prayer.

God, show me the direction. What's next.

And I heard it. Not in my imagination, not as a stretch, not as something I talked myself into after the fact. As clear as I have ever heard anything in my life, standing alone on that hillside, I heard:

"Keep going."

That was it. No blueprint. No five-year plan laid out for me. Just two words, and somehow they were enough to move on.

I left the job. We kept building the farm. We kept raising our boys. And two years ago, I finally stopped treating God like a landlord I was renting from and started to actually understand that I was not renting anything. None of it was mine to begin with.

The pigs rooting through the mud. The cattle grazing at dawn. Kim, still choosing me every single day. Lucas, Tommy, and Oliver, each one of them teaching me something different about patience and love that I never could have learned in a trap house on Hiawatha Street. The real estate business that somehow grew past twenty million dollars a year, built by a man who once could not be trusted with a twenty dollar bill.

None of it was earned. All of it was given.

I think about that man on Hiawatha Street sometimes, standing there with the pipe still warm in his hand, deciding to walk out the door. He had no idea what he was walking toward. He just knew he could not keep walking toward what he already had.

He did not know there was a hillside in Virginia waiting for him. He did not know there was a wife who would stand beside him through the rebuilding. He did not know there would be three sons who would call him Dad. He did not know there would be a farm, or pigs, or cattle, or dirt under his fingernails that actually meant something.

He just knew he wanted his life back. He had no idea how much more than his old life was waiting on the other side.

People ask me sometimes how a guy goes from smoking crack in a trap house to growing his own food, raising his own animals, and building a life he once could not have imagined even as a joke. I used to think the answer was willpower. Grit. Deciding hard enough and wanting it badly enough.

I do not think that anymore.

I think the willpower got me out the door that day on Hiawatha Street. But everything after that, the farm, the family, the faith, the whole beautiful and undeserved shape of this life, that was not me pulling myself up by anything. That was a God who did not give up on a man who spent fifteen years giving Him every reason to.

I did not find my way to this life. I was carried to it, one hard year at a time, by a hand I could not see until I finally stopped and asked for it.

Keep going.
— Aaron

It was a great trip. Genuinely one of the best experiences Lucas and I have had together, the kind of thing we already know we're doing every year now. But somewhere around day two, both of us hit the same wall at the same time, in our own ways. I missed her. She missed me. It wasn't the trip that was the problem. It was just how strange it felt to be apart that long.

I know couples who swear by the opposite. Girls' weekends. Guys' golf trips. She goes to the lake with her sisters, he goes on a fishing trip with his buddies, and they come back refreshed, better for the distance. I'm not going to tell them they're wrong. But I'll tell you the truth: that's never been us, and three days apart this summer reminded me why.

✦ ✦ ✦

Kim is my best friend. Not in the greeting-card way people say that. I mean she is the person I want in the room when something good happens and the person I want in the room when something falls apart. I don't want a week away from her to miss her more. I already miss her by dinner if we've had a hard day and haven't really talked.

We believe marriage is a team. And a team doesn't take turns being on the field.

That doesn't mean we don't ever need space. It means when we need space, we don't reach for a plane ticket. We reach for each other and figure out what's actually wrong. Usually it's not "I need a break from my spouse." It's "I need a break from being tired," or "I need a break from being needed by everyone at once." Those are different problems, and running toward a cruise ship doesn't fix either one.

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

That's the part people skip past. It's not just companionship. It's labor. Marriage is work you split, not a feeling you maintain.

✦ ✦ ✦

Nowhere is that truer than with our three boys. Lucas needs a very different kind of attention than Tommy does, and Tommy needs something different than Oliver, who's still young enough that his needs are mostly physical but won't stay that way. There's no manual that covers all three of them at once, and there's definitely no manual that tells you which parent should handle which moment.

What we've learned, nine years in, is that neither of us can do this alone, and neither of us is supposed to. Some days Kim is out of patience by two in the afternoon and I tag in without being asked. Some days I'm the one who's snapped twice already and she steps in and takes over before I say something I'll regret. Neither of us is the strong one and neither of us is the weak one. We just know each other well enough to know when to switch.

There's no perfect way to parent three boys who need three different things. There's just showing up for each other enough that nobody has to do it alone.

That's what I thought about on that drive home. Not that Lucas and I shouldn't do this again, because we already know we will, every year from here on. But it settled something for me about why Kim and I don't chase separate trips of our own. Kim held down the farm and Tommy and Oliver by herself those three days, and I missed her the whole time in a way that surprised me, even in the middle of a trip I wouldn't trade. Nine years in, and she still fills in where I run out, I still fill in where she runs out, and somewhere in that constant handoff is the whole marriage.

One day, they stop running to you first thing in the morning. The sound of little footsteps in the hallway, the weight of a small body climbing into your bed before the sun is even up, all of it fades into silence and a closed bedroom door. Nobody tells you which morning is the last one. It just becomes the pattern, and one day you realize the pattern changed a while ago and you were too tired, or too busy, or too caught up in the next thing to notice.

Lucas turned seven this year. Seven. I still remember when he could not walk across a room without narrating it to me. "Dad, look. Look, Dad, look." Every rock. Every stick shaped a little bit like something. Every crayon drawing that was mostly scribble but was, to him, a whole world he needed me to see. That is starting to quiet down now. Not gone. Just quieter. He still has things to show me. He just does not need me to see all of them anymore. Some of them are just his now. And that is supposed to happen. That is what growing up is. It still catches me off guard every time.

The love does not leave the room. It just stops needing an audience.

With Tommy it looks different, and I have had to learn that different is not the same as less. He does not run at me with both arms out the way some kids do. He shows me he loves me in his own language, in his own time, on his own terms, and I have had to slow myself all the way down to learn how to read it. But I have watched him find his own quiet moments too, the ones where he used to need me right there and now he does not. He is teaching me, again, that connection does not always look like what I expected it to look like. It just matters that I keep watching closely enough to catch it.

Oliver is still in it. Still small enough that his whole day still runs through me and Kim. Still reaching up to be held. Still falling asleep against a shoulder with his breathing slowing down into something even and small and impossibly trusting.

I know, because I have already watched it happen twice, that this will not last either. That one day he will stop reaching up too. So right now, when he reaches, I put everything else down.

One day they stop holding your hand when you walk. And it is not dramatic. There is no fight, no announcement. Their hand is just in their pocket instead, or swinging free, and you feel an emptiness that has nothing to do with them loving you less and everything to do with them needing you less in that particular way, in that particular moment, on that particular sidewalk. It is growth. It is supposed to happen. It still leaves a mark going through you.

They stop falling asleep in your arms. That little head on your shoulder, the sound of their breathing slowing down, those moments end without an announcement either. There is no last time stamped on the calendar. It just becomes the last time, quietly, and you only know it in hindsight, usually months later, when you realize you cannot remember the last time it happened.

They stop bringing you their treasures. The leaf that looked interesting. The scrap of paper folded into something. The rock that was, for one afternoon, the most important object in the world because they found it and they wanted you, specifically you, to have it. That pure, unearned, spontaneous love just slows down. Not because it is gone. Because it grows up, the same way they do.

My father was a pediatrician for over forty years. He spent his whole working life around childhood, around growth charts and milestones and parents who wanted to know if their kid was doing it right. He died three days before New Year's, before he ever got to retire, before he ever got to just be a grandfather without a schedule. He did not get a warning either. None of us did.

I think about that more than I say out loud. He knew, professionally, better than almost anyone, how fast these years move. And it still was not enough time. It is never enough time. That is not a reason for despair. I have come to believe it is closer to an instruction.

Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Childhood is not a rehearsal. It is not a draft version of the real relationship that comes later. It is happening right now, in this exact stretch of ordinary days, the ones that feel repetitive and long and sometimes make you tired down to your bones. And while they still ask to be held. While they still call for you across the house for no real reason at all. While they still want you specifically, out of everyone in the world, to see the rock. That is the whole thing. That is not a small season before the real one starts. That is it.

One day these moments become memories. You do not get to choose which day that is. You only get to choose what you do with the ones you still have.

Kim gave him her best shot, but Lucas was stubborn from the start. He had a giant head, and when her blood pressure began dropping, they rushed her into an emergency C-section. Eight pounds, eleven ounces. Lucas Joel Singerman made his debut into the world that day, and nothing about him has been small or simple since.

He was planned. Kim and I went through some fertility treatment to get there, but it moved quicker than we expected. And once he arrived, he was unlike anything we could have prepared for. We used to call him our mutant baby, because he was huge, chunky, in the 95th percentile for everything. He wasn't walking at nine months, he was running. Climbing out of his crib before we were ready for that stage of parenting. Those memories are some of the sweetest I have. Some days I wish I could go back to them.

He had his own funny way of talking, sometimes with what sounded like an English accent, sometimes a southern twang. Even then he was inquisitive, smart, and determined, the same way he is today.

✦ ✦ ✦

Looking back over his life, I can't believe how fast he's grown. He's lost every trace of his baby and toddler features. Kim always asks me if it makes me sad watching them grow up like that, and my honest answer is usually no. I love watching who they become. But today, it's hitting me a little differently.

Out of all my kids, Lucas is my mini me. He acts like me, talks like me, looks like me. He's smart in a way that's ahead of his age, especially when it comes to reading. He's in first grade reading at a fifth or sixth grade level. His attention to detail is better than mine ever was at his age, and I notice it constantly.

Every man wants to see his son surpass him, and I have no doubt Lucas is going to pass me up.

There's not many things in life I enjoy more than watching my kids grow up. Lucas is no exception to this. There's something about watching a person take shape right in front of you, watching them figure out who they are before they even know they're doing it, that never gets old to me. I know Lucas will be good at whatever he puts his mind to in life. I don't say that as a hope. I say it because I've watched him long enough to know it's true.

It's strange, because my own parents used to say I'd be the one they never had to worry about financially, the one who beat to his own drum and figured things out, faced everything head on. Drop me in any city in the world with no money, and I'd find a place to stay, a way to make money, a way to feed myself, faster than my siblings would. Not because they weren't capable. They're all successful, wonderful people. I was just built differently, more determined, and a social butterfly.

That's exactly how I look at Lucas now. I have no doubt that whatever he sets his mind to, he'll be great at it. I feel the same pride watching him that my parents felt watching me. It's a strange thing to recognize yourself in your child, to watch traits you've spent a lifetime living with show up in someone so much smaller than you, someone who hasn't had the years yet to understand what those traits will cost him or earn him. I see it in the way he studies things before he touches them. I see it in the way he doesn't ask for help until he's tried everything he can think of on his own. That's me. That was always me.

✦ ✦ ✦

But he also scares me the way I scared my parents. He's so independent, so much his own person, that I worry about him falling in with the wrong crowd, or leaning too hard into that same instinct to go his own way. It keeps me up at night sometimes. It's one of my greatest fears for him, that he finds himself on the same path I found myself on for a stretch of my own life. I don't want that for him. I want better for him than I want for myself, which I guess is the whole point of being a father.

Happy seventh birthday, Lucas.
Watching you become you is one of the best things I've ever gotten to do.

I'm not talking about any of that.

I'm talking about what my wife asked me last night before I fell asleep. We were lying in bed and Kim turned to me and said, "What do you want to do tomorrow for your birthday?"

I didn't answer right away. I actually had to think about it. That pause probably surprised her. And then I told her what I wanted.

I wanted to pull potatoes.

“I want to garden with you and the kids. I want to get my hands in the dirt. I want to pull the potatoes and mulch the garden. That's what I want for my birthday.”

Kim didn't join me in the garden. She was inside making my favorite meal: soup beans and cornbread, with butter pie for dessert. That's her gift to me. That's who she is. While I was out teaching our boys where food comes from, she was in the kitchen making sure dinner would taste like home.

We pulled 150 pounds of potatoes out of that garden. My boys were right there with me. We talked about composting. We talked about soil. We talked about how something you put in the ground in the cold comes back to feed your family months later. There's a theology in that if you're paying attention. There's a sermon in every season of a garden that no building with stained glass windows has ever preached quite as well.

"There's a theology in that if you're paying attention."

My kids don't understand what yesterday meant. Not fully. They're too young. They were just boys doing what they were told, digging in the dirt, complaining a little probably, getting muddy, wondering when lunch was. And that's exactly right. That's exactly how it should be.

Because the moment isn't for them yet. The moment is being stored up. It's going into them the same way those seeds went into the ground, quiet, unseen, without fanfare. They don't know they're being shaped. They just know their dad wanted to spend his birthday with them in the garden instead of somewhere else.

That will mean something to them someday. I believe that with everything in me.

Twenty years from now, I hope one of my boys is standing in a garden of his own. I hope he's got a kid next to him, small and impatient and not quite sure why they're doing this. And I hope something in his chest pulls him back to a June morning in our garden, his dad's 42nd birthday, his hands in the dirt, the smell of composted earth, the weight of a potato freshly dug.

I hope he smiles without knowing exactly why.

That's what I'm building here. Not a brand. Not a legacy in the way the world means that word. I'm building a memory that outlives me. I'm building a version of home that my kids will carry in their bodies even when they can't articulate it. Even if they move to a city. Even if they never farm a day in their adult lives. Even if they don't follow the path Kim and I have walked.

I want them to know that home is where the people are. That the most important thing you can do with a life is be present in it. That birthday celebrations don't require a reservation or a destination. Sometimes they just require dirt under your fingernails and your family close enough to call.

"I'm not building a brand. I'm building a memory that outlives me."

Proverbs tells us that a good man leaves an inheritance for his children's children. I used to read that as something financial. I don't anymore. The inheritance I'm leaving is this: a way of seeing the world. A posture toward ordinary days. An understanding that the sacred is almost never found in the spectacular. It's found in 150 pounds of potatoes. In soup beans. In butter pie. In a wife who knows what her husband needs before he does and gets to work making it.

The world spent my birthday arguing about a billionaire.

I spent it richer than he will ever be.

- Aaron

My answer is always the same too, and it never seems to satisfy them.

One bad day.

These animals have one bad day. Everything before that is good ground, good food, open space, and care. They are not stuffed into a warehouse. They are not standing in their own waste under fluorescent lights. They live the way God intended animals to live, close to the earth, doing what they were made to do. And then it ends, quickly, and they're gone.

"The people most upset about the one bad day are usually the same people who have no idea where their bacon came from or how it lived."

Here's what I've noticed. The people who ask me that question with the most concern, the most visible discomfort, are almost never people who raise their own food. They're people who buy it wrapped in plastic under bright lights, people who have successfully removed themselves from every inconvenient truth about what it takes to eat. And because they've removed themselves from it, the weight of it has nowhere to go. It becomes sentimentality. They feel something about the idea of the pig without ever having looked one in the eye.

I'm not saying that to be hard on anyone. I understand it. We live in a world that has made it very easy to be soft about animals in the abstract while being completely indifferent to how they actually live. The culture mourns the slaughter but demands the product. It wants the steak without the steer.

There's a difference between sentimentality and stewardship. Sentimentality is feeling something from a distance. Stewardship is showing up every morning, in every season, and taking responsibility for a life that depends on you.

Stewardship is what I practice. Not perfectly, not without hard days, but consistently. These animals are under my care. I am responsible for the quality of their lives in a way that the person asking me that question never has to be. And because I carry that responsibility, I don't feel guilt when it ends. I feel something closer to gratitude. We gave them a good life. We honored what they were created for. We didn't look away from the hard part.

There's something deeply biblical in that. Dominion over creation was never a license for cruelty. It was an assignment of responsibility. God trusted humanity with the stewardship of the earth, which means we are accountable for how we treat what He made. Farming, real farming, is one of the few places left where that accountability is still visible and immediate. You can't outsource it. You can't abstract it away. The animal is right there, and so are you.

I don't say any of this to pat myself on the back. I say it because I think the squeamishness people feel when they find out what we do says something important, not about farming, but about what we've lost. When you remove yourself from the reality of death and provision and the cycle of things, you don't become more compassionate. You become less connected. To the land, to your food, to the basic rhythms God built into the world.

"I didn't find God in spite of the hard parts of farming. I found Him because of them. But that's a longer story, and I'll tell it."

I'll tell you something else. Getting my hands in this dirt, taking responsibility for these animals, building something on this land with my family, it has done more for my faith than almost anything else in my life. There's a reason God put Adam in a garden before He put him anywhere else. There's something about working the ground and tending living things that reconnects a man to his purpose in a way that nothing else quite matches.

I didn't find God in spite of the hard parts of farming. I found Him because of them. But that's a longer story, and I'll tell it.

For now: one bad day. The rest is a good life. And I don't lose any sleep over that.

Three boys. Three different ways of being in the world. Three different reasons fatherhood has nearly broken me and put me back together more times than I can count this year alone.

Every Father's Day is actually two days happening at once. There's the one where you're handed pancakes and a tie you'll never wear and told, in whatever language a six year old and a nine year old can manage, that you matter to somebody. And there's the quieter one, where you remember the father who isn't here to receive his own pancakes anymore, and you measure yourself against him, and you come up short the way sons always do.

My dad died on December 28, 2017, a few weeks before he was supposed to retire. He spent his whole career as a pediatrician, which meant he spent his whole career belonging, in some measure, to other people's children before he came home to his own. I used to resent that a little. Now that I run a farm and write under deadline and still somehow owe my own sons more hours than I give them, I understand it differently. You can love your work and your children at the same time and still feel like you're failing both.

He never met Tommy. He never met Oliver. He never got to see what kind of father I'd actually turn out to be, whether the things he poured into me would show up in how I raise mine. Father's Day without him doesn't ache the way it did the first few years. It's settled into something quieter, more like a debt I'm still paying, in installments, to a man who can't cash the checks anymore. So I pay it forward instead. That's the only ledger that still works.

A few weeks ago, Tommy told Kim I'm always working. He didn't say it to wound me. He's not built that way. He said it the way he says everything, plainly, like a fact he'd observed and filed away. And then he told me something close to the same thing himself. Coming from Tommy, who chooses his words like he's selecting parts for an engine, that one stuck.

You don't get to feel sorry for yourself about that on Father's Day. You get to sit with it. I have spent this past year building something for my sons, this farm, this writing, this whole effort to make sense of what it means to raise three boys who each need something different from me, and somewhere in the building I missed some of the actual boys. Tommy noticed before I did. That's its own kind of grace, I think. A nine year old loving you enough to tell you the truth even when the truth isn't flattering.

Then there's Oliver. Eight months old, still mostly a collection of needs and small miracles, the kind of baby who makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about what a life is supposed to look like before it's even begun. When we got his diagnosis, my friend Jeffrey said something that hasn't left me since.

"God isn't punishing you. God trusted you."

I didn't believe him at first, not really, not in my body. Grief doesn't care what you believe. But I've turned that sentence over so many times now that it's worn smooth, like a stone you carry in your pocket, and most days I believe it.

Oliver doesn't know it's Father's Day. He doesn't know what a father is yet, beyond the smell of someone who feeds him and the sound of a voice that doesn't disappear when things get hard. That's the whole job, when you strip it down to the studs.

Don't go away when things get hard.

Psalm 103 says that as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. I used to read that as a comparison, God being like a good father. I think I had it backwards. I think every decent thing I manage to do as a father, every time I choose patience over my own exhaustion, every time I show up after I've already failed to show up enough, is borrowed compassion. It isn't mine first. I'm just the one passing it down the line, the way it was passed to me, however imperfectly, by a pediatrician who loved other people's kids enough that I learned what love looked like by watching him give it away.

So today I am not the finished father. I'm not even close. Lucas needs me to slow down. Tommy needs me to show up instead of just provide. Oliver needs me to keep believing what Jeffrey told me, on the hard days when belief is the only thing I've got left to give him. Kim needs me to remember that being their dad and being her husband aren't two separate jobs. They're the same job wearing different clothes.

Becoming their dad was never going to be a single afternoon with a card and a truck drawn outside the lines. It's the work of every ordinary day in between. That's the only Father's Day that actually counts: the unphotographed Tuesday where you choose, again, to stay.

Happy Father's Day, to the ones still becoming.

I had a picture in my head. I think most men do.

It was the dad I'd seen growing up. Suburban. Successful. Kids running outside until the streetlights came on, coming home to dinner on the table, school on Monday, soccer on Saturday. That was the image. Not exotic. Not complicated. Just the life I'd watched, assumed I'd inherit, and never really questioned.

I've been fairly successful in life by most measures. Career, provider, showing up. I checked a lot of the boxes I thought I was supposed to check. But somewhere along the way, I started noticing that the picture and the reality had quietly stopped matching.

I never planned to be a farmer. That wasn't in the vision. And I never planned to be a father to a child with special needs. Let alone two. Let alone three boys, each one arriving with his own story, his own needs, his own particular way of making me realize I had no idea what I was doing.

I don't think anyone grows up saying they want to parent a child with autism. Or Down syndrome. I don't think it crosses most people's minds at all. It certainly never crossed mine. You picture healthy, typical, running-around kids. You picture yourself knowing what to do. You picture confidence you haven't earned yet and won't earn the way you expected.

Lucas came first. My oldest. The one who acts the most like me, which means he's also the one who shows me the most uncomfortable mirror. His ADHD, his energy, the way he moves through the world at full volume. I watch him sometimes and I think: I know exactly where that comes from. And I love him fiercely for every bit of it.

Then Tommy. Quiet in ways Lucas isn't, complex in ways the world doesn't always notice. Level 1 autism, they call it. What I call it is: a kid who sees everything differently than I do and has taught me more about patience than any book ever could.

Then Oliver. And if I'm honest, Oliver is where the picture I'd been carrying finally shattered completely. Not violently. More like ice in spring. Slowly, then all at once. Down syndrome wasn't in any version of the future I had imagined. And it became the most clarifying thing that ever happened to me.

* * *

Here is what I've come to believe: when you make plans, God tends to change them. Not to punish you. Not arbitrarily. But because He can see the whole road and you can only see the next turn.

Proverbs says it plainly. A man's heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps. I used to read that and nod at it like a bumper sticker. Now I've lived it in a way that makes me sit with it differently. The plan I had for my life, the suburban dad with a tidy story, wasn't wrong exactly. It just wasn't big enough. It didn't have room for the farm, or for Lucas, or for Tommy, or for Oliver. And all of those things turned out to be the most important parts.

I couldn't have drawn this map. But I've stopped wishing someone had handed me a different one.

Kim and I talk sometimes about what we thought this would look like. And then we look around at what it actually looks like. The barn. The mud. Three very different boys who need three very different things from us. And somewhere in the gap between what we imagined and what we have, there's a grace neither of us would trade.

That's not a sentiment. It's not a bow on top of something hard. It's just true. The unplanned life has given me things the planned one never could have. It's given me sons I didn't know I needed to become the father I was supposed to be.

The dad I thought I'd be was capable, comfortable, in control. The dad I actually am is none of those things on most days. But he's present. He's learning. He's had his picture broken open enough times to stop clinging to it so tightly.

And that, I think, is the whole point.

What I am going to talk about is what Jesse Ridgway actually said. Not the decision itself. The words. Because the words are what the rest of us have to live with.

Ridgway, who goes by McJuggerNuggets and has built an audience of more than four million people on YouTube, announced this month that he and his wife Ashley terminated their pregnancy after learning the baby had Trisomy 21. In his public statement, he listed what he called the health challenges associated with Down syndrome and then wrote this:

"Down syndrome isn't a 'blessing,' it is objectively sh*tty from a health perspective."

He did not whisper that. He published it. Proudly. As though it were a peer-reviewed finding. As though the tens of thousands of families raising children with Down syndrome, children who laugh and love and learn and thrive, simply do not exist, or do not count, or are too inconvenient a data point to acknowledge.

And then, at the end of his statement, after announcing the termination, he wrote this:

"It will take a little time to move on, but we are excited to try again in the future and hopefully have a better outcome."

A better outcome…

I have a son with Down syndrome. His name is Oliver. I want you to sit with that phrase and tell me what it means in the context of my family. A better outcome than Oliver. I do not need to editorialize that sentence. It editorializes itself.

"He made sweeping declarations about an entire group of human beings without talking to a single one of them."

Here is what makes Ridgway's position not just hurtful but genuinely indefensible: it is not informed. He cited statistics, yes. He listed medical challenges. But he made sweeping declarations about an entire group of human beings without talking to a single one of them, without engaging with the research that actually exists on quality of life, without acknowledging what the people living this life actually report about their own experience.

The data is not hidden. It is not difficult to find. Study after study shows that individuals with Down syndrome report high rates of happiness and life satisfaction. Their families, in survey after survey, report that their child has made the family better, not worse. These are not feel-good anecdotes passed around at support group meetings. These are documented outcomes. Published findings. The kind of thing a person might encounter if they spent twenty minutes with a search engine before declaring something objectively true to four million people.

He did not do that. He formed a conclusion based on fear and incomplete information, and then he broadcast that conclusion as settled fact to an audience the size of a mid-sized American city.

WHAT THE RESEARCH ACTUALLY SHOWS

In one of the largest surveys of adults with Down syndrome, 99% reported being happy with their lives. Nearly all said they liked who they are.

In parallel surveys of parents, 79% reported their outlook on life was more positive because of their child with Down syndrome.

Among siblings, 97% expressed pride in their brother or sister. Virtually none expressed embarrassment.

These numbers do not appear in Jesse Ridgway's statement. They exist. They have for years. He simply chose not to look for them.

That is embarrassing ignorance broadcast on a public stage. And I mean that in the most precise sense: it is a person who did not know something, did not seek to know it, and then declared their uninformed position as objective truth to millions. That deserves to be called what it is.

But I want to be careful here, because there is a second issue that is just as important, and it has nothing to do with the decision itself.

The Ridgeways turned this into content.

They had been filming a gender reveal video when they received the news. They then processed a diagnosis, made a decision, and within days turned on a camera and built a public narrative around the entire sequence. The announcement went viral. The views accumulated. The platform moment happened.

I understand that some people share difficult experiences publicly because they find meaning in it, because vulnerability has value, because others walking a similar road need to know they are not alone. I believe that. I do that myself in this space, regularly.

But there is a line between sharing your humanity and monetizing a death. That child deserved dignity. What that child received was a content cycle. The announcement became the post. The post became the views. The views became the conversation that kept the name trending. And throughout all of it, the public declaration stood uncorrected: that a child with Down syndrome represents a bad outcome.

Every person with Down syndrome who has an internet connection, every parent who has stayed up at three in the morning terrified and then found their way to something they never expected to find, love without condition, every sibling who has grown up better because of a brother or sister the world keeps calling a tragedy, had to read those words.

That is what deserves condemnation here. Not a political position. Not a private grief. A man who chose a public platform, who chose to declare an entire community of living human beings an objectively bad outcome, and who monetized the announcement.

"Oliver's outcome is not a consolation prize. It is my life. And it is a good one."

I said at the start that this is not about abortion. I mean that. But I will say this: you do not get to hide behind a personal decision when you have already stepped out in front of the world and rendered a verdict on an entire group of people. You do not get to say Down syndrome is objectively worthless, gesture at a community of real human beings living real lives, and then ask for privacy when the people you just judged have something to say back.

My son Oliver is not a better outcome waiting to happen. He is not a consolation prize I settled for. He is not the hard version of the future I deserved. He is my son. He is funny and stubborn and he lights up a room in a way I genuinely cannot explain to someone who has not seen it. He has changed me in ways I am still discovering. He has made every one of us in this family something we would not have been without him.

That is not a feel-good story I am telling myself to cope. That is my life. And it is a good one.

Jesse Ridgway said that out loud about children like mine. He said it proudly. He said it publicly.

That is what this is about.

Say it out loud. Let it sink in.

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I was sitting down, actually enjoying a moment. Apples and peanut butter. Just me, a quiet minute, and a snack. Oliver was nearby doing his thing, and for a brief window, everything was fine.

Then it wasn't.

He started getting fussy, and I did what dads do. I set down the snack, picked him up, and went into the bounce-and-shush. You know the move. Weight shift, rhythmic bounce, soft shush in the ear. The one that's somehow wired into your nervous system the moment they place a baby in your arms for the first time. It just happens.

A minute went by. Maybe two. I glanced down and noticed something on my hand.

Without thinking, I licked it off.

✦

It was not peanut butter.

Oliver had a blowout. And I, a grown adult man with a mortgage and opinions about coffee, ate it.

There was a pause. A long, slow, dawning pause where my brain caught up to my taste buds and the full weight of what had just happened settled over me like a fog.

I wish I could tell you I handled it with grace. I did not. I stood there in my kitchen making a face that I can only describe as full-body regret, while Oliver, blissfully unaware of what he had done to me, looked up with the kind of calm contentment that can only come from having just been fully relieved of a problem.

He was fine. He was great, actually. It was me. It was entirely me.

Nobody prepares you for the moment you realize fatherhood has completely overridden your most basic human instincts.

And here's the thing nobody tells you before you have kids: autopilot is a real and terrifying feature of parenthood. You stop checking. You stop asking questions. You just act. You bounce and shush and wipe and lick and somewhere in the middle of all of it you lose the part of your brain that used to ask "wait, what is that?"

That part is gone. Oliver took it.

✦

I called Kim in from the other room. She listened. She looked at me. And then she laughed in a way that I will be hearing for the rest of my life.

She was not wrong to laugh.

I've written about what fatherhood asks of you. The sleepless nights, the fear, the weight of raising a child with Down syndrome, the way Oliver has already rearranged everything I thought I knew about what matters. All of that is real.

But so is this.

So is the part where you eat it, literally and figuratively, because you love someone so much that your body stopped protecting you from yourself. That's parenting too. And I think it deserves to be said out loud.

Fatherhood doesn't ask you to be dignified. It asks you to show up. Sometimes those two things are mutually exclusive.

So I'm telling the story. Because I refuse to be alone in this, and because somewhere out there is another parent standing in their kitchen with that same slow, dawning look on their face, and they need to know: it happens to all of us.

The bar is on the floor. I licked it.

There's a word in that verse that's easy to skip over: finds. Not acquires. Not earns. Finds like a man who stumbles onto something he didn't manufacture, couldn't have engineered on his own. A gift that was already there, waiting to be recognized.

That's how I've come to see my wife.

Not as something I built or deserved, but as something I was given and have spent years slowly learning how to receive well.

Marriage has a way of revealing you. The patience you thought you had. The selfishness you didn't know was there. The ways you love easily and the ways you go cold when it costs something.

Kim has been good to me in the quiet, unglamorous ways that don't make it into stories. In the ordinary Tuesday mornings. In the way she keeps showing up even when I haven't been easy to show up for.

The verse doesn't say he who deserves a wife finds a good thing. It says he who finds one does. That's grace. And grace, by definition, isn't something you earned.

I think God uses marriage to finish work in us that nothing else can. Not because it's always sweet it isn't but because it's covenantal. You stay. You grow. You come back to the table. And somewhere in that faithfulness, over years, you start to look more like the person you were always supposed to be.

Somewhere in that faithfulness, over years, you start to look more like the person you were always supposed to be.

I'm still becoming that man. But I'm grateful I don't have to become him alone.

But the thing that breaks me open, the grief that still catches me off guard a decade in, is not about me at all.

It's about my boys.

My father never knew Lucas. He never knew Tommy. He never got to hold Oliver. He died before any of them were even a thought in my head, and some days that feels like the cruelest part of all of it. Not for me. For him. Joel Singerman was cheated out of three grandsons he would have absolutely loved.

He spent his entire life taking care of children. Other people's children. And then God had other planes just before he got to slow down and pour all of that into his own.

My dad was a pediatrician for over 30 years. 30 years of sitting across from scared parents and sick kids, of knowing exactly what to say and when to say nothing. He taught. He wrote. He stayed curious and alive in ways that most people don't manage half as long. He loved life with a kind of enthusiasm that made you want to be in the room with him. And he wasn't done. That's the thing I can't reconcile even now. He was not done.

He died just days before his scheduled retirement. He and my mom had plans. Real ones. Travel. Time. Each other. He wasn't done being a father. I don't think he was ever going to be done being a teacher. He would have found a classroom or a podium somewhere in his retirement and planted himself there. That was just who he was. Maybe just writing and going on walks with my mom.

And he was never going to be done being a grandfather.

He was wonderful at it. He was already a grandfather when he died. My oldest daughter knew him. My brother's kids knew him. My sister's son Sam knew him. And I have watched my sister welcome another child (Joel, his names sake) into the world since he passed, Joel will grow up hearing stories about a man he will never get to enjoy. That child will know him only through the people who Continue to speak about him.

Lucas, Tommy, Oliver. Three boys who would have wrecked him in the best possible way. My dad had this gift with kids where he could be completely present with them, on the floor if that's what it took, matching their energy, meeting them exactly where they were. Can you imagine him with Tommy? With Oliver? I think about it constantly. A pediatrician, a man who spent his career learning how to connect with children whose brains worked differently, never getting to sit across from his own grandchildren and do exactly that.

It's one of the things I will never stop being angry about on his behalf.

When Oliver was born and I was standing in that NICU, terrified and trying to hold myself together, he was the first person I wanted to call. Not to be talked off a ledge. Just because he would have known exactly what to say. He always did.

I think about him on every birthday. Every milestone. Every time one of my boys does something that makes me want to pick up the phone to someone who would truly get it. There are moments with Lucas, moments with Tommy, moments with Oliver, where I feel it so sharply it's almost physical. Not sadness exactly. More like a door that should be open and isn't.

My dad would have been the first call after Oliver's diagnosis. He would have had actual medical knowledge to offer, yes, but that's almost beside the point. He would have led with his heart. He always did. He would have said something that made me feel less alone in it.

Oliver never got to be the person in front of him.

Neither did Tommy. Neither did Lucas.

I have spent years trying to make peace with the fact that God had other plans for my father. Plans I don't fully understand and may never fully understand. Some days I get close. Most days I just hold the tension of it, the faith that there was purpose alongside the grief that it still costs something real. Maybe one day it will all make sense. Maybe it won't. I've stopped needing it to resolve cleanly.

What I know is this. My father was a man who gave his entire professional life to children, and he was just weeks from getting to exhale and enjoy his own. He was cheated out of retirement with my mom. He was cheated out of watching his kids settle into their lives. He was cheated out of grandchildren he already loved before they existed, because that is exactly the kind of man he was.

And my boys are growing up with a grandfather-shaped hole in their world that they don't even know is there.

I know it's there. I feel it for all of us.

* * *

Joel Alan Singerman, pediatrician, father, grandfather, teacher. December 28, 2017. He was not done.

What we don't talk about, at least not out loud, is how much harder that actually is than it sounds. And what we really don't talk about is how a kid's disability can become the invisible variable that changes everything about how you respond to them.

I have three boys. Tommy is on the autism spectrum. Lucas has ADHD. Oliver has Down syndrome.

And I have noticed something about myself that I'm not sure I'm proud of, but I'm certain I'm not alone in feeling it.

* * *

With Tommy, I can struggle. His autism doesn't announce itself the way you might expect. You look at him and see a bright, articulate, seemingly typical kid. But then the overstimulation hits. The repetitive loops start. The sensory meltdowns about eating, or textures, or the way something feels. And sometimes, these episodes last for days. Weeks, even. They grind on, and on, and on.

During those stretches, I notice my patience thins. My regulation gets harder. I find myself frustrated in ways I don't love. I catch myself snapping when I didn't intend to. The behavior is frustrating because it's invisible. Because it doesn't come with a visible marker that says "Your son is struggling right now. Be gentle." It just comes with a kid who's stuck in a loop, and a dad who has to actively remind himself to stay calm.

Lucas is different. He's pure energy. High octane. The kid wakes up at five in the morning with a thousand questions and the inability to wait for your brain to boot up. ADHD in motion. But here's the thing: his challenges don't slow me down either. I can meet his intensity with my own. We move fast. We go hard. We figure it out. With Lucas, my patience is easier to access because his needs feel actionable, tangible, something I can do something about.

Then there's Oliver.

With Oliver, I am always calm. Always patient. Always present.

Oliver has Down syndrome. His disability is visible. It's written in his face, in the way he moves, in the fact that he needs care in ways that Tommy and Lucas simply don't. When I'm with Oliver, something shifts in me. Some switch flips. I don't rush. I don't get frustrated. I don't snap. I am the version of myself that every parent aspires to be: present, patient, regulated.

And I've asked myself a thousand times why.

Is it the visibility? Does the fact that I can see Oliver's disability make me automatically more compassionate? Does the visible reminder that he needs me somehow grant me access to patience that I don't seem to have in equal measure for his brothers?

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Justin runs the Rooted Man on Substack. He's the real deal, a regenerative farmer who has been doing this life well before it was something people wrote about on the internet. He also raises Gloucester Old Spots, which is part of why I'd made the trip. I had questions. I had done research. I had, specifically, done research on whether it was safe to feed tomato plants to pigs, and I had found several sources suggesting it was not a good idea, and I wanted his take on it.

So I asked him. Very seriously. "Hey, is it okay to give pigs tomato plants? Because I've read online that it can be bad for them."

He looked at me for a second. Then he said, and I am going to remember this for the rest of my farming life:

"Pigs don't have Google. Give it to them."

That was it. That was the whole answer. And he was right. The pigs got the tomato plants, they were fine, they were thrilled, and I learned something important that day about the difference between internet farming and actual farming. One of them involves a lot of anxious scrolling. The other involves pigs eating tomato plants happily in a pasture while you stand there feeling slightly foolish.

Justin and I share a breed, and that shared conversation is part of why I wanted to write this. Because raising Gloucester Old Spots on pasture has changed the way I think about farming, and I want to tell you exactly why.

I want to tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to admit out loud: I am in love with my pigs.

Not in a weird way. In a farmer way. In the way where I walk out to the pasture first thing in the morning, coffee in hand, and I just stand there watching them root around and flop their ridiculous ears, and I think to myself, yeah. Yeah, this is right. This is exactly where I'm supposed to be.

If you've never seen a Gloucester Old Spot, picture a pig that lost a fight with a Dalmatian. Big white bodies. Black spots scattered like someone flicked a paintbrush at them. Ears so large and floppy they practically cover their eyes, which gives them this permanent expression of mild confusion that I find deeply relatable.

These are not your factory farm pigs. These are old world pigs, heritage pigs, pigs that were nearly wiped off the planet and came back. And I am so grateful they did.

Here are four reasons why I'm completely and totally hooked.

✦ ✦ ✦

REASON ONE

They're Calmer Than Most People I Know

I have three boys. Lucas, Tommy, and Oliver. Our house operates at roughly the volume and chaos level of a small airport. So when I walk out to the pasture and those big floppy-eared pigs just... amble over, look at me with their sleepy eyes, and go right back to what they were doing, it is genuinely the most peaceful interaction I have all day.

Gloucester Old Spots are famous for their temperament. They are docile, friendly, and calm in a way that feels almost deliberate, like they've made a philosophical decision to not be stressed about anything. They will literally follow you around the pasture like a dog. A very large, very round, very spotted dog, but still. Nobody is getting bitten, nobody is panicking, nobody is screaming. It's a beautiful thing. I wish I could bottle it and serve it at dinner.

Other pig breeds will remind you, sometimes forcefully, that they are animals and you should respect that. Old Spots just kind of... vibe. They are the golden retrievers of the pig world, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

REASON TWO

They Were Born to Live on Pasture (And They Know It)

Gloucester Old Spots are sometimes called the "Orchard Pig" because for centuries they lived in the apple orchards of Gloucestershire, England, foraging on windfall fruit and whatever else they could find. British folklore says those black spots are actually bruises from falling apples. That is either very charming or very dark depending on your mood, but either way it tells you something important: these pigs were built for the outdoors.

On pasture, they thrive. They forage. They graze. They root around and find things I couldn't have planted there if I tried. They don't need coddling, they don't need climate-controlled barns, and they don't need grain-only diets. They are self-sufficient in a way that makes sustainable farming actually feel sustainable instead of just aspirational.

That matters to me. A lot. I want to raise animals that are happy to be here, that are living some version of the life they were meant to live. Old Spots don't just tolerate pasture. They prefer it. And there's something about that alignment between animal and land that feels more right to me than anything I could have engineered.

"British folklore says those black spots are bruises from falling apples. That is either very charming or very dark depending on your mood."

REASON THREE

The Pork Is So Good It Should Be Illegal

Let me just say this plainly: Gloucester Old Spot pork does not taste like what you buy at the grocery store. It doesn't even taste like the same species. It is richer, deeper, more marbled, more flavorful in a way that's hard to describe without sounding like a pretentious food magazine, which I promise I'm not trying to be.

These pigs are a dual-purpose heritage breed, which means the meat carries more intramuscular fat than commercial breeds bred specifically to be as lean as possible. That fat is flavor. The slow growth, the outdoor life, the varied foraged diet, all of it shows up on the plate. High-end restaurants have been seeking out Old Spot pork for years. The European Union actually gave it a Traditional Specialty Guaranteed designation, putting it in the same category as Champagne and Parmigiano-Reggiano. A pig. In the same category as Champagne. That tells you everything.

When you raise the food yourself and it tastes this good, there's a satisfaction that goes way beyond dinner. It becomes this whole complicated thing about what food is supposed to be and where it's supposed to come from. I'm not trying to get philosophical on you, but I'm going to anyway: there is something deeply right about eating well from your own land.

There is a version of farming that is about efficiency. About numbers. About maximizing output per square foot. And then there is this: standing in the pasture on a cold morning while spotted pigs move slowly through the frost, and thinking that you'd do this even if nobody ever ate a single chop.

REASON FOUR

Raising Them Is an Act of Preservation

Here's something most people don't know: Gloucester Old Spots nearly went extinct. The shift to industrial farming in the mid-20th century almost killed off every heritage breed that wasn't built for a concrete floor and an indoor feedlot, and the Old Spot was no exception. By the 1970s they were critically rare in Britain. By the 1990s they had essentially vanished in the United States. The Livestock Conservancy still lists them as threatened, with fewer than two hundred annual registrations in this country.

Two hundred. For the whole country. That number made me pause when I first read it.

When you raise an animal that almost didn't make it, you feel the weight of that. Choosing this breed over a commodity pig is a small vote for doing things the right way. I'll take that.

✦ ✦ ✦

I didn't plan to be a pig person. I didn't grow up saying, someday I want spotted hogs in my pasture following me around like I'm something special. But here I am, walking fences in muddy boots, and I can't imagine it any other way.

Gloucester Old Spots have a way of doing that to you. They're just goofy enough, and calm enough, and good enough at everything they do, that you stop thinking of them as livestock and start thinking of them as part of the farm's actual soul.

I think about what Justin said a lot. Not just about tomato plants, but about the whole thing. There's a way of farming that runs on anxiety and search results and forum threads about what could go wrong. And there's another way, the way guys like Justin farm, where you watch the animal, trust the land, and let a few thousand years of biology do its job.

Pigs don't have Google.

Neither did the farmers who figured all this out in the first place. And their pigs were just fine.

Mine are too.

From the very first post on this Substack I have been promising a piece about my wife. I kept saying it was coming. I kept finding other things to write about first. The truth is I was not sure I had the words to do her justice and I kept waiting until I did. I am not sure I have them now either. But I am going to try anyway because she deserves more than another rain check.

This one is for Kim.

The first time we met was around 11 o'clock at night. We were both in pajamas. Ratty, dingy, did not plan on seeing anyone pajamas. I was with my girlfriend at the time and she was with her boyfriend. We crossed paths in the checkout line at a Kroger in Canal Winchester, Ohio and exchanged the kind of brief polite pleasantries that strangers exchange when they have a mutual acquaintance and nothing else going on.

We joke about that night all the time now.

Two people in their pajamas at a grocery store checkout line, both with other people, neither one of them thinking for a single second that they were looking at the person they would eventually build a farm with, travel the world with, raise three boys with.

If you had told either of us that night what the next decade had in store, we would not have believed you.

Neither of our plans at the time pointed anywhere near each other. I did not want more kids. Kim had actual plans to leave the country entirely and go live in Mexico. Neither of those things happened. The other relationships we were each in eventually ran their course. Life moved on the way life does.

And then one day in early 2017 I was home sick, scrolling social media, and I saw that Kim had posted about being home sick from work too. So I did what any reasonable man would do in that situation. I slid into her Facebook messages with what I can only describe as my best material at the time and asked her what she was watching on Netflix.

She did not have internet.

It should not have worked. And yet somehow it did, because the small talk that followed went on for several weeks until I finally got up the nerve to ask her to dinner. She said yes. We went to the Cheesecake Factory. She was thirty minutes late. I waited. I talked the entire time. She probably said eleven words total.

Something must have gone right because she agreed to a second date. And a third. And a fourth. And somewhere in the middle of all of those dinners and conversations and getting to know each other, I stopped thinking about dating someone and started thinking about building something with someone. About a year later I asked her to marry me.

She said yes to that too. I have no idea how I got that lucky.

✦

I want to be honest about something because this Substack has always been honest and I am not going to get soft on that now just because it is the Kim post.

Marriage is hard. Ours has been hard in stretches. We have been through counseling. We have been through seasons where the gap between us felt wide and the road back felt longer than either of us wanted to walk. We have had a colicky baby who would not sleep, a postpartum season that Kim carried quietly while I tried to hold everything else together, an autism diagnosis that arrived like a slow freight train and changed our daily life completely, and a third baby who came into the world with news that rearranged everything we thought we knew about what was ahead.

None of that is small. None of it was easy.

And through all of it, Kim did not quit. Neither did I. We chose each other over and over again, not because it was always easy or obvious but because the alternative was not something either of us was willing to accept. That is what marriage actually is, underneath the social media version of it. It is two people deciding every single day, on the hard days especially, that this person is still the one. That the promise still holds. That the work is worth it.

She changes. I change. The kids change everything. And somewhere in the middle of all that changing you either grow together or you grow apart. We chose together. Every time.

The high times have been extraordinary too and I want to make sure I say that. Australia. The Bahamas. San Francisco and New Orleans and New York City and Florida and everywhere in between. We have seen a lot of the world together and we are not done. We have built businesses together, bought homes together, planted things in the ground and watched them grow together. When I look back at what the two of us have built since that Kroger checkout line it genuinely takes my breath away sometimes.

She is not just my wife. She is the reason any of this works. The farm, the businesses, the kids, the dreams I have not even said out loud yet. She is the backbone of all of it.

Kim is the most determined person I have ever been close to. When she decides something matters she pursues it with a focus that honestly makes me feel like I need to step up my game just to keep pace with her. She is building something new for our family, a different story than either the Singermans or the Aults have written before, and she is doing it with intention and grit and a stubbornness that I used to find challenging and now find completely necessary.m

She is an extraordinary mother. I want to say that plainly because it is one of the truest things I know. She is always looking for ways to make this family healthier, stronger, more grounded. She shows up for Lucas and Tommy and Oliver with everything she has every single day. She does not have an off switch when it comes to her children and she never has. Whatever they need, she finds a way. That does not happen by accident. That is a woman who decided what kind of mother she was going to be and then became it completely.

She picks up where I leave off more often than I care to admit. She fills in the gaps I do not even always know I am leaving. She is my biggest cheerleader and my most honest mirror and the person I want to call first when something good happens and when something hard happens and every moment in between.

She completes me. That sounds like a line from a movie but I mean it without any irony at all. There are things about me that only work because she exists alongside them. She understands me in the particular way that only a person who has really chosen to see you can understand another person.

Letter to my Wife

Kim,

I started promising this post on day one and kept putting it off because I was not sure I could write something worthy of you. I am still not sure I managed it. But I want you to know that every word of this is true and none of it is exaggerated for the audience.

You walked into my life in your pajamas at a Kroger at 11 o'clock at night and somehow you are the best thing that has ever happened to me. You said yes to a first date and a second and a third and eventually to a whole life together and I do not take a single one of those yeses for granted.

You are the backbone of everything I am building. The farm would not exist without you. The businesses would not exist without you. The version of me that is actually becoming the dad I want to be does not exist without you.

Thank you for not going to Mexico. Thank you for answering the Facebook message. Thank you for being thirty minutes late to the Cheesecake Factory and letting me talk the whole time and coming back anyway.

Thank you for choosing me. Over and over again. I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve it.

Your husband

With more love than I usually know how to say out loud,

Kim's Husband. Lucas, Tommy & Oliver's Dad.

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