The handful of years after 18 is a period of adult limbo, with coffee spoons of responsibility doled out over time. Apart from the arbitrary legal checkboxes, you are beginning to make a lot of other adult-like moves. Getting credentialed. Having a first “real” job, meaning one you will do for a long time. Living on your own, perhaps, or living with other adult-ish people. Doing all your own grocery shopping and cooking.

You are also going home a lot, most likely—sleeping in, getting home-cooked meals, checking in with mom and/or dad.

And how are they doing? Turns out they are in limbo, too.

Now that I have two children who are past 18 years old and one on the cusp of it, I realize that young adults in this stage of life are not the only ones living through a middle passage. Parenting has its own limbo, matched to the kids’ adult limbo. The shift is both gradual and sudden. Every now and then, you have a shock of recognition: this person whose diaper you used to change can get through their days without you. They can do more and more for themselves.

You might not want to be done doing for them. You might want to keep overseeing them, providing input. That does not matter, because they are not asking for your input. They are assuming they don’t need it. And in many cases, they actually do not need it.

Then there will be a moment out of the blue—probably during a meeting at work—when your phone will ring and you find out that they need full oversight, and they need it now. They are encountering some Hard Adult Thing for the very first time. They will have had a car accident and not know about calling the police or the insurance company or interacting with the driver who hit them/they hit. They will experience the American healthcare system on their own, and they will receive the nauseating patient bills that system generates. They will grapple with some other corporate or governmental bureaucracy that adults come to accept as a part of life but that take practice and patience to navigate.

Did you prepare them for each one of these Hard Adult Things? You did not, either because it did not occur to you or because you did not want to freak them out.

They will need a resume—a real one, even though there’s not much real to put on it yet. They will fail at something of consequence—not just sports or a class exam, but something that hurts, like a job or, worse, a relationship. They will make a mistake that costs them real money—money they do not quite have. For the first time, it will occur to you that even if you have the money, you shouldn’t give it to them, because they are adulting.

The upside of all these situations is that they have come to you to ask for help. You get to parent again! But also, they may not ask. You may not even hear about the Hard Adult Thing until it’s already resolved—or left unresolved. That is their choice to make, as an adult-like person. And if they do ask for help, you will need to recognize that the help they are asking for is different from the kind they used to ask for. They are no longer a child needing instruction. They are an adult needing input.

But not too much. Just the right amount. And from just the right person.

And here’s the real kick in the pants: that person will not always be you.

This is perhaps the trickiest part of parenting limbo: Your kid will be able to hear from other adults things they cannot hear from you. You will have said a thing to them 10, 20, 50 times. You will have told them exactly what they needed to hear. But they will not have heard you. You are the adult in the Peanuts cartoon, a nonsense voice in the background. An NPC. Then you’ll hear of some other adult—a teacher, a mentor, a random podcast host—who told them the exact same thing you’ve been saying, only it has come as a fresh revelation. Your adult kid heard it as if for the first time, and in a way, that’s what they’ve done. It’s as if you never said it.

Your job in this moment is to nod and smile and thank the good lord. Your job is to refrain from saying That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! Saying that will do neither of you any good, and their good is your goal. (Sometimes, you’ll still say it. You, too, are learning.)

Parenting limbo requires you to change your parenting reflexes. You have to lean in as the moment requires, but also let go as the season requires. If you’re anything like me, you’ll need some calibrating. Sometimes you’re going to talk to your adult kid as if they are 12 years old. That is going to irritate them—and indeed it may hurt them, because it’s no longer appropriate for you to talk to them that way.

The leaning in part is easy for any involved parent—that’s what you’ve been doing since they emerged from the womb. You have honed your instincts to give them what they need, provide feeding, clothing, counsel. When they wobbled their first steps, you were there to catch them if they fell—though you also had to restrain yourself back then. A little stumbling is the key to learning to walk. You don’t prevent the baby from falling over. You create space—moving that sharp-cornered coffee table, blocking off those stairs—and watch them wobble.

Adult kids will do some wobbling, too. Your job is to make space for it.

Some parents of adult kids never figure all this out. I’ve only partially done it myself, and indeed I’m writing about it here to get this lesson through my own thick skull. I’m in parenting limbo. I’m learning to make space, to balance letting go and leaning in. I’m starting to suspect that parenting limbo will last for the rest of my life.

The seeds were planted when he was five years old and I took him to his first Nuggets game. I remember having a game plan to ply him with intervals of popcorn and cotton candy so that he wouldn’t get bored.

It turned out the Nuggets’ game plan was entertainment enough—Kenneth “the Manimal” Faried blew his mind that night, and mine too.

We started following the Nuggets together basically from then on. A full-size Ty Lawson poster was the first sports poster that hung in Henry’s room, and if you’re asking “Who is Ty Lawson?” that is exactly my point. Loving a team means living with and loving (well, mostly) all of its players. You can have Lebron. We’ll take our boy Ty.

As Nuggets fans know, it was during the 2020 pandemic that this squad really emerged and that the Nikola Jokic-Jamaal Murray two-man game clarified itself into a force that could wreck the league. The Nuggets became the first team in NBA history to have two 3-1 comebacks in the playoffs, and Henry and I soaked up every moment of it. It was such a gift to a sheltering-in-place father and son. He was also recovering from a surgery early that summer and had a lot of couch time. We watched SO MUCH basketball together. When NBA games weren’t on we watched classic 1990s games on YouTube. We rewatched The Last Dance on repeat until his sisters (understandably) revolted. Henry—then 13—also took in a ton of NBA lore on his own, and within a few months I realized he knew more about NBA history than I did. I could still beat him in driveway 1on1, but he was gaining on me.

Nuggets fans know well what happened to the team from there. The 2021 Aaron Gordon trade, which made us immediate contenders. Murray’s ACL tear a few weeks later, which crushed our hopes and led to two consecutive lost playoff runs. Then the 2022-2023 title team, when Henry was 16 and just the best basketball hangout partner I could ever have hoped for, right here at home. The late-night Christmas Day game that year is a core memory—we woke up the girls upstairs when Gordon dunked on Shamet. And there were many school nights when we stayed up WAY too late watching midseason games that did not really matter, except of course they mattered. Then they finally won it all, and we had Nuggets Nirvana.

Henry was still 16, with two more years left at home. We were ready to watch the Nuggets win two more championships in a row, or at least one. Surely—with the best player on the planet and the greatest two-man game of the modern era (yes, fight me)—the Nuggets were a rising dynasty.

Instead, we’ve been in a darker sports fan timeline. The Nuggets collapsed in a Round 2 Game 7 at home the next season against the terrifying Minnesota Timberwolves. They surged through injuries to take the surging Oklahoma City Thunder to a Game 7 in Round 2 the next year, but couldn’t get over the hump. Then this year ended in a crushing Round 1 embarrassment against an injury-decimated yet fierce Wolves team. It’s over—this season, this era. The Nuggets’ future is either uncertain or bleak.

Henry goes to college two time zones away. I mostly watched this season’s games alone. We texted about the big moments here and there.

For Game 6 on Thursday night, I drove 40 miles to meet a dear friend and fellow Nuggets diehard, Rob (center in the photo above), at a sports bar midway between our houses. After the loss, I called Henry on my way home. We talked about what went wrong. We talked about how this Nuggets era is likely over for good. The first team Henry really loved, and the one I’ve loved more than any other. The one I loved with my son.

“I don’t even know where to go from here,” I said.

“Me either,” he said.

“Go Broncos?” I offered.

“Yes,” he said. “Go Broncos.”

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And off the reporter goes. They talk to the current mayor, and the one before that, and the one before that, sometimes reaching all the way back to Henry Cisneros. They talk to longtime activists and local academics. They visit the historic West Side, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. They admire the taquerias and the murals. They talk to new residents who moved here for relative affordability. Then they talk to longtime residents who are not making ends meet even as they work two or three jobs.

They publish a story like this, which came out in the New York Times this week:

Or a story like this, which the Texas Monthly published 18 months ago:

As those almost-identical headlines indicate, these stories tell the same story about San Antonio. So does this New York Times story on affordable housing from 2023, and this other 2021 New York Times story on downtown development. So does this viral 2020 photo capturing the day 10,000 cars showed up to the San Antonio Food Bank in the early days of covid.

The local press here issues their own fresh takes on poverty every now and then. I still remember one of the first San Antonio Express News headlines I noticed upon moving to town a decade ago: “Once again, San Antonio leads on inequality.”

All this coverage is the same big story: San Antonio has old money pockets and new money pockets, but also lots of little-to-no-money pockets. Why hasn’t all our economic uplift actually lifted people up?

Old timers in San Antonio—and one resource we’re very rich in is elders—will tell you that we’ve come a long way over the course of their lifetimes. I talked to a bunch of them when I first moved here and was reporting on poverty myself, and I got to know their stories. Within their living memory, their urban core neighborhoods did not have running water or electricity. Massive imbalances in public school funding between affluent and low-income districts were both normal and legal. Many Brown and Black parts of town did not have paved streets or sidewalks. In the low-income East Side, the city did not see fit to pave side streets until the San Antonio Spurs built their stadium there in 2002.

None of this progress—or basic justice—happened on its own. No natural economic tide saw to the rising of all boats. The elders who say we’ve come a long way can say that because they made it happen. They brought the city’s attention to the conditions they were living in. San Antonio has an incredible history of community activism—regular folks joining their voices to demand that the public investment always flowing northward into the new and affluent Anglo neighborhoods also flow in their direction. They organized and planned and built coalitions and got laws passed and policies changed.

They are still at work. And actually, their work is not just activism—it’s economic and neighborhood development. Development does not just look like cranes in the sky and big businesses moving to town. It looks like people calling on their city to invest in the places where it’s under-invested.

I was at a public event recently where some bright young people were on a stage talking about the ongoing problems of economic and racial segregation in San Antonio. An elder stood up at one point and started making the point I’m describing above—that we’ve actually come a long way in fighting poverty and inequality. He was one of the people who participated in the organizing of the 1960s, 70s, 80s that led to structural improvements across town.

A few people began to boo him, assuming he was trying to tell them to stop complaining. But he wasn’t saying that our problems are behind us. He was agreeing that they are very much still with us—but also telling the bright young people that we know how to address them. We have to do what the elders did. We have to be both visionary and strategic. We have to work across lines of race and class and perspective.

That man is holding a different story about San Antonio. The one the media is telling by looking at the big economic picture is pretty similar to the one that the bright young people were telling that night: San Antonio has enormous wealth and opportunity combined with enormous poverty, and the economic divides run along racial lines. And that story is true. But it’s also true that the very people who have been pushed down have long been pushing back, building up, finding ways to preserve what they have and improve upon it.

From time to time, they’ve made big surges, had huge victories, raised both the floor and the ceiling of San Antonio—reshaping what is and what is possible.

I’ve only lived here a decade. I can’t lay much claim to San Antonio’s story myself. I’m plenty sober about how hard it is to create real and lasting change—to cultivate a new story. But I’m also plenty sick of seeing the same headlines about San Antonio. I want to align with our elders in helping people see how far we’ve come while also building imagination about how much farther we can go.

More on this to come…

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Notice the oxygen tubes, for starters, and the orange medical tubing behind her head next to the humidifier cup. She’s lying in a hospital bed in Florence, Alabama. We’d be there another few days before deciding it was time to put her on home hospice. Her 10-year battle with cancer was nearing its end.

Those 10 years were not all a battle. Note the gorgeous wedding ring—she’d also found new love in those years. Rather, she had rekindled an old love with her high school sweetheart, Jack. They’d broken up when my mom was 19. She’d met my father a few weeks later and made the mistake of marrying him just a few more weeks after that. It took her four decades to find her way back to Jack.

Mistake, I say—but here I am typing these words, a product of that mistake. I’m no mistake, and neither is my sister, nor the lives we’re living and the children we’re raising that are part of my mom’s legacy. I just wish—bitterly, sometimes angrily—that my mom’s life would have gone different. She deserved different.

Note the pink flowers on her nightgown. “Pink is my signature color,” Mom liked to say, and magnolia flowers were her signature flower. She exclaimed over pretty much every magnolia tree she ever saw, letting out a gasp and an exclamation as if the thing had popped up from the ground before our very eyes. A few years ago, my sister and me got matching magnolia tattoos on our right forearms in her honor. Mom, of course, would be absolutely mortified by the fact that we have tattoos. But mortifying her was always fun.

Note the IPA. That is what really marks the photo and makes it my favorite. She’s kicking one back in a hospital bed—Mom, of all people! Lifelong teetotaler, Al-Anon expert, longtime sufferer in a marriage to a raging alcoholic, now sipping on a beer. And not just any beer—a bitter, hoppy, acquired-taste India Pale Ale.

“It settles my stomach,” she’d say with a grin. I agree—that’s why I like IPAs, too. Mom loved big flavors—strong coffee, spicy peppers, over-rich chocolate pudding. For years, she made my sister and me drink something called Barley Green that tasted like you were licking the front lawn. She was a devotee of apple cider vinegar, mixing a few table spoons with water just about every night after dinner.

She’s passed all that along to me—the big flavors and especially the apple cider vinegar. My fridge has lots of IPA—mostly non-alcoholic, and if Mom were alive I bet she’d share my delight in the growth of NA craft beer, so you can enjoy the close-enough pleasures of the drink without the downsides.

Forty years of her adult life—her life with my dad—was largely bound up with those downsides. She first realized he was a drunk on their honeymoon, when she was all of 19 years old and still getting to know this guy she’d only met a couple months before. His drinking drove them into deprivation and hardship of all kinds, and she hated the stuff—she told me many times that alcohol was of the devil. When I started abusing booze in high school, she was rightly terrified.

But I cut it out. I didn’t drink at all for years, then settled into the pleasures of moderation in adulthood. I didn’t tell Mom, though—I knew she would assume the worst about where this was headed.

In 2002, when Mom came to visit my wife and I in Boston for Thanksgiving, she noticed some Sam Adams in my fridge.

“Are you drinking beer, son?” she asked.

“Um…yes,” I said, feeling nervous. “I like it with dinner. And we like to drink with friends. We’ll have wine on the table at our Thanksgiving dinner this week. Our friends will probably bring a few bottles.”

This was a big revelation, and I’d known it had to happen. I’d been looking for a way to break the news to her that sparkling apple cider wouldn’t be the only special drink on offer.

Mom stood there for a moment, taking it in. Then, just: “Be careful, son.”

A few days later, someone at the Thanksgiving dinner table asked Mom if she wanted any wine.

She took a moment to think it over. Then she obliged: “Sure, I’ll try some.” She didn’t much like it, but it sure was fun to raise a glass with her that day.

Years later, after Dad was gone, after her initial cancer diagnosis, after the first year of radiation and chemo, after reconnecting with Jack and settling into a new life with him in Alabama, Mom called me one evening.

“Guess what I’m doing,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Having happy hour!” she said.

“You’re doing what?”

“It’s happy hour!” she said. “Jack makes the best margaritas.”

Mom never became much of a drinker, of course. But she enjoyed those happy hours with Jack many times, and I’m glad she was able to do that.

One more thing to say about this photo: Come to think of it, Mom may or may not have really wanted an IPA that day. She must have been feeling awful, lying there. I mean, I’m sure she wanted it a little, and if memory serves, it was her idea. But I think she proposed it for me. She knew I’d be delighted by sharing one last happy hour with her.

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I could use some advice. Because for me, every morning is a kind of puzzle: How to do I use this first precious hour? It’s unlike any other hour of the day. I’m almost always the first one up in my house, and I have space and time to myself. There are a few necessary tasks: start the coffee, feed the pets, visit the loo. But there’s also open space to live and move and feel my being.

And that open space creates a kind of paralysis.

I could sit in silence. Do some mindfulness breathing.

I could move my body. A few minutes of yoga while the coffee brews. Maybe put on my shoes and go for a walk with the dog who is begging me to do just that:

I could read something reflective. Scripture? Maybe some poetry? Spirituality lit?

I could glance at the day’s calendar, peek at the to-do list I made the day before.

I could practice Spanish.

I could pray.

There is one thing I should not do: look at my phone. Or get online at all. But let’s assume I avoid that temptation, because on the mornings I don’t, much of this is moot. But let’s assume I behave myself: Now what?

You might tell me: Do whatever. All these options are good. Don’t over-think it. And I would tell you: Thank you, but that is not how my brain works.

Options have long left me paralyzed. When I was a little kid at the store with my mom, sometimes she would tell me I could pick out something for myself in the candy aisle. That opportunity was a mini-crisis. I’d stare at the rows of Skittles and Nerds and red licorice and Milky Ways and just freeze. Mom would eventually have to count backwards from ten and force my hand. I always waited until the 1.

I used to travel a lot for work, and I’d have open evenings to myself in New York City or some random American downtown. I cannot tell you how many nights I wasted hours circling blocks trying to decide where to eat, where to drink, what does Yelp say, what about Google Reviews, until finally it was 10pm and my feet hurt and I had to pee.

You might tell me this is a problem I need to talk to a therapist about. Now that I am writing this all out I am thinking that maybe you are right.

But for now, let’s focus on waking up. It happens every day. I’d like to do it well. I’d like to make the most of it. It’s a little gift of time. It’s also a little crisis of opportunity.

As bad as I am at making decisions like this, I’m pretty good at embracing advice. I wrote a whole section of my memoir about my search for father figures, but that was also a search for counsel, advice, recommendations on how to live. I’m not a go it alone kind of guy. I love trying new things that come strongly recommended.

So to my original question: How do you wake up in the morning? What’s your routine? Any practices you’re particularly proud of, or that you just enjoy?

Tips and tricks for staying offline, being creative, and finding internal space are especially welcome.

Let me know. Meantime, it’s 6:00 a.m. and I’ve already done a bit of yoga and finished writing this post. Pretty good morning. But tomorrow is coming soon, and I could use some advice.

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That is a confession, not counsel. To be clear: this way of addressing anxiety is unwise. I know that, and did it anyway.

Then I talked to one of my kids, who was asking questions about ICE’s growing presence in communities nationwide and the killing of Renee Good and how the story is being framed and what’s happening in Venezuela and Are we going to take over Cuba? And also Greenland? and so on. However you personally read or respond to these events, one thing they share is extreme unpredictability, plus a sense that ordinary people like us have no agency over any of it. Systemic volatility seems to be the norm right now, and there’s a sense that we’re caught in a spiral with no end in sight.

But someone I love asking me about these things shakes me out of my fog. I could never say to them: This is hopeless. We are well and truly ruined.

And because I can’t say it, I’m reminded that it’s not what I believe. It cannot be.

We talked about how these kinds of events are not a new normal, and indeed they are not even new. One reason it’s so vital for American students to be educated about America’s many sins of the past is that it helps us see that we’ve always been doing the work of repair. We’ve always had to and always will.

I do think I was honest with my kid that I’m deeply rattled right now. But I also said that I am working my way toward hope. My saying it became true only as I said it. I’d not been feeling hopeful until I was confronted with someone I love who also was not feeling hopeful.

I’ve debated this move with other parents before. Shouldn’t you level with your kids? Shouldn’t you give them sufficient warning about serious trouble when you believe we’re in serious trouble? And if you’re feeling desperate, shouldn’t you be honest with them about that? Aren’t you just pretending to feel better when you really feel despair?

The people we love don’t just hear facts from us—they respond to posture. And as postures go, despair is paralyzing. It renders you stuck, mute, inconsequential. Despair is also isolating. Hope is relational. Hope binds us together, gives us a way to link arms for the road we’re going to keep walking. Despair leads to withdrawal. Hope says our presence and our actions matter, even when outcomes are uncertain.

Hope isn’t a coping mechanism. It’s an ethical stance. It steadies us. If we’re mindful of the bonds we share with the people we love—and indeed with all of our neighbors—I believe we’re obligated to choose hope.

recently published an essay on his Substack by Nir Eyal about the scientific case for praying whether you believe in the efficacy of prayer or not. Eyal tells the story of a 1950s experiment where a biologist named Curt Richter placed rats in buckets of water to see how long they’d struggle to swim before giving up and drowning. Most died within 15 minutes.

But randomly, Richter saved some rats, rescuing them before they sank into the water. Then he put those rats back to see how long they’d survive. The rescued rats—the ones who now believed rescue was possible—swam for an average of 60 hours.

Richter said the subject of his research was hope and hopelessness. A hopeless rat doesn’t paddle for long. But a comforted rodent who learns “the situation is not actually hopeless [will] become aggressive, try to escape, and show no signs of giving up.” Take two creatures of similar biology and physiology. The one with more hope will fight harder, swim faster, live longer.

Belief doesn’t change physics, of course. Hope does not guarantee survival. But Richter’s experiment suggests that introducing hope into a dangerous environment can extend effort even when the environment is not going to change.

Hope is not denial; it is endurance under pressure. Hope also tells you to stem the tide of those podcasts and constant YouTube videos about the most worrying things in the world. I’ve not done that as completely as I should just yet, but I’ll get there. It’s vital that I do so, because hope is something that has to be practiced for others, even when I’m not inclined to practice it for myself.

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Meanwhile, it’s Thanksgiving weekend, which at its best can be one of the best weekends of the year. It’s that way for us this year because my family of five is all together for the first Thanksgiving in three years. My heart is full of gratitude, so it’s time for a gratitude list.

1. Kitchen time. I’ve spent the better part of two days in my kitchen this week. We moved into an older, smaller house this spring, with a kitchen that can quickly get a little cramped and a lot messy. It’s a happy space, and I’ve used every nook and cranny of it this week.

2. In related gratitudes: leftover apple pie for breakfast. (And Sue Li’s new apple pie recipe. I skipped the cream but her shingle top method is a keeper.)

3. My kids—22, 18, and 15—are hanging out together. Hitting the YMCA, grabbing breakfast tacos, going thrifting. What an absolute delight. There’s no guarantee that siblings will be friends, and there have been seasons where I wasn’t sure it’d be true for these three. But it’s a gift to watch it happening now.

4. I just got interrupted from writing by my oldest daughter, who invited me to go to the gym with her. Yay.

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5. Ok, back now. I had a great workout—finally, I’m getting far enough into recovery from my rib fracture that I can move my body again.

6. Did I mention that I broke a rib the weekend before my book was published? That accident—falling off a tall step ladder onto the corner of a cabinet, breaking one rib and bruising several more—was good fodder for laughter at a few of my book events. If you’ve read The Father You Get, you know how absentminded and (relatedly) accident-prone I am. I almost had to cancel my first two book events in September because I was in so much pain. But pain + time = comedy, and thanks to some clarity I’d achieved while storying myself, it didn’t take much time at all to laugh about my broken rib.

7. These kittens, which entered our lives a few weeks ago.

   

8. Inter-species friendship. (Hat tip to my friend Katie for the phrase.)

   

9. Unexpected new pets—the dog also entered our lives this year. And I’m grateful for the fact that I’m feeling grateful for her at all, because I initially hated this dumb dog. She earned every bit of that hate. Then she won me over. I’ve been meaning to tell her story here, but recently when I told it to a friend he said, “I don’t think you should tell that story to many people.” So it’ll have to wait. Pain + time = comedy, but sometimes you need a lot of time for the comedy to kick in.

10. San Antonio, which turned out in full force for the Food Bank’s Turkey Trot yesterday. We ran through some of my favorite parts of this underrated city. It’s a complicated place, but I love it.

    

Storying yourself is learning and creating. Exploring all the caverns of memory and feeling that are inside you, gathering up the resources you find, and turning them into a coherent narrative. Making a character of yourself, figuring out the character’s motivations and goals. Finding the rising and falling action. Choosing themes and kneading them back into your story little by little. Making choices about what to say and what not to say—being willing to cut all the stuff that doesn’t belong to the story you’re making, even as it all belongs to your life.

If you’d asked me when I began this project what story I was going to tell, I would have told you that I was going to tell you the story of my father and one of my father figures. I’d had a bad dad and a harmful relationship with at least one father figure, and I figured those stories would more or less unfurl and speak for themselves.

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But what I actually found as I wrote was that I did not know what those stories were. Not in a way that was coherent and shareable. With my dad, that was quite literal: I knew almost nothing about the man. But I did not realize how little I knew until I sat down to write. I knew my experience, but I didn’t know his. I didn’t know what had shaped the man who had shaped me. So I had to do some discovery, some reporting on this man who had managed to escape this world without letting anyone know who he was. That then became the focus: how do I find the story of a father who never shared his story?

But even once I’d tracked down Dad’s old drinking buddy and gotten a hesitant family member to share some information with me, I still didn’t know what to make of it all. I spent months trying to turn what I’d learned into a coherent narrative—something that would not just be a series of anecdotes or a biography of my father, but a through line from him to me that would help me make sense of who I am.

With my main father figure story—a once-prominent evangelical pastor named Ted Haggard—I figured I’d unearth a lot more insight about the late 1990s-early 2000s period when he was at his peak and I both worked for him and looked up to him. I did some fresh reporting and I wrote up a lot of material. I also wrote about the rise of evangelical Christian political power and Haggard as a harbinger of where we are today. But I cut it all, because as I storied myself, I realized it was a distraction. Fascinating, I think, and perhaps a good story for another day, another project. But it didn’t serve the purposes of the simpler, more focused story I needed to tell about my own creation—why I was drawn to Haggard in the first place, and how long it took me to allow myself to be drawn to other sources of fathering.

And then there’s the God the Father section. I thought I was going to write up a sort of intellectual history of that concept and how it worked its way into the evangelical culture that formed me. But instead, I wrote about my mom and her faith in God the Father. I storied us together. I wrote through my grief and anger over losing her too soon, and the cosmic injustice I see at the heart of her faith-filled life. I wrote about how my doubt-filled faith is part of her legacy, her life’s work. As preoccupied as I’ve been with fatherhood, the most powerful and sustaining force in my own life is a mom.

One of the interviewers I spoke with a few weeks ago told me that he’d noticed that my book doesn’t proceed chronologically, but as a process of progressive revelation. That’s right. It didn’t come out that way at first, but that’s what it became as I storied myself.

I have much more to say about storying yourself and how it works—and how we can story other things, like our cities and our neighborhoods and so on. Now that I’m thinking about this, I’m realizing how much of what I do in my work and home life has to do with storying. Let me know if you’re interested in hearing more.

To paraphrase Voltaire’s famous saying about God: If fathers did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. And if the fathers who do exist do not father us—if our dads don’t dad—we might make someone who will.

All my life, I have been a maker of father figures. I’ve met men at church and school and work, friends of friends, guys who attend the same professional conferences. I’ve admired them, felt drawn to them. I’ve wanted them in my life. I’ve struck up friendships that became mentorships that have a chance to become something deeper—a relationship with a man who could be there, always there.

We don’t tend to think of father figures this way—as things we make. We tend to think of them as things that already exist in the world. They are archetypes created by artists—King Lear, Atticus Finch, Marlin the clownfish. They are images in our life’s landscape—coaches, teachers, bosses, elders. Father figures don’t have to recognize us, or even know us. They are publicly available representations of ideal dads. We obtain their benefit from afar.

But in my experience, father figures are also an active pursuit. They are a noun that is also a verb: You father figure people, collecting the wisdom and ways of being that your child self still needs. Do you do it on purpose? Are you even aware? Not necessarily. Father figures can be made by a reflexive act of our hearts, as involuntary as a yawn. Before we know we’ve done it, we’ve shaped our images of the people we know into the dads we need them to be.

When you father figure someone you know, you hope it’s reciprocal—that this guy will see the child in you just as you see the dad in them. Some of the men I’ve figured into dads surely saw themselves as mentors, ministers, big brother-types who were down to teach me a thing or two. But for me, they were more. In my imaginative heart, I figured them as father, and me as child, wishing to be raised in the way I should go. A wandering pilgrim, I wanted to be led, but I also wanted to be nurtured. I wanted to be known in the way a father knows his child.

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It has taken me an embarrassing number of hours to summon up the nerve to type the words above. Putting this out there feels risky. Sure—young boys and men looking up to older men is the most normal thing in the world. But that doesn’t make it easy to talk about the longing. I take pride in being transparent with my closest friends, but I don’t talk about my lifelong, profligate father-figuring.

But I’m shaking off the sense of shame, because shame doesn’t tell us the truth. There is nothing wrong—or even weird—about trying to fill our dad-sized gaps. We can hardly do otherwise. We are baby sea turtles making our way to the water. We don’t know why we’re doing it—we’re just being, and being requires certain things of us. One thing being requires is fathering.

I mean this in the least patriarchal way possible.

The evolutionary anthropologist Anna Machin of Oxford University argues that the phenomenon of fathering as we know it is rooted in our very DNA. In The Life of Dad: The Making of the Modern Father, she lays out a story of human fatherhood that begins over 500,000 years ago, well before homo sapiens even existed. One of our ape ancestors, the homo heidelbergensis, became the first primate to feature what Machin calls “investing fathers”—dads who stuck around. Most male primates, she jokes, screw and flew, like in most other species. But males in homo heidelbergensis families got involved in the care and feeding of their offspring.

Why did this happen? Evolutionarily speaking, it had to—the survival of the species depended on it. Babies like us are born, says Machin, with “the helplessness of a puppy but the open eyes and ears of a chimp.” We’re a lot to handle—“dependent, immobile, energy-hungry.” If babies like this were going to survive against the odds, primate moms needed primate dads to stay close and do things for the kids—make and control fire, hunt for high-protein sources of food, cooperate with others…and teach their kids to do the same.

Machin’s research also shows that fatherhood is about more than mere survival. It’s about flourishing. Multiple studies indicate that the extended presence of fathers is associated with all sorts of positive outcomes. Infants breastfeed better and gain weight more regularly when fathers are around. With invested dads, babies are more likely to form proper emotional bonds. Then, they’re more likely to pursue advanced education, find stable jobs, and experience mental wellness.

It can be hard to talk about these things without sounding like a family values scold. Fatherless families and bad-father families are as common as can be. The United States—ground zero of family values sloganeering—has more single-parent households than any country in the world. Here, 1 in 4 children are growing up in a one-parent household, the vast majority of which—80%—are led by mothers. Those numbers do not even include families like the one I grew up in, where the dad is home but might as well be gone—too addicted, addled, or otherwise checked out to do any decent fathering.

Families can rise above all kinds of fatherlessness in all kinds of ways. Mothers are more than strong enough to do the raising, should they have to go it alone. Mine was. And other relatives may also step up to do the raising—grandparents, aunts and uncles, even siblings take up fathering slack. My sister sure did. Born five years before me, Kaysie had it worse than I did, as first-borns often do in dysfunctional families. But for her brother’s sake, Kaysie met the challenge of her ass of a dad.

Dad would start to teach me something but lack the patience or sobriety to stick it out. Kaysie kept coming up from behind to finish the job. She was the one who taught me to climb trees. She was the one who taught me to ride a bicycle. All my childhood memories of wrestling and tug-of-warring and tossing around balls are with her. She taught me to read. She taught me to write by hand. When I turned 15, she was the one who got me behind the wheel of a car. Later, she taught me to drive a stick.

With a sister like that, who needs a dad?

Apparently, we all do. I’ve tried—lordy, I’ve tried—to deny it. For years, I whistled my way through the father void in my life. But there’s no ignoring it. Like it or not, the loss, absence, or negligence of a father cannot help but leave an impact. It is a wound that nature will try to heal. And by “nature,” I mean our nature, our own raw material.

If we haven’t had proper fathering, we’re going to go looking for it. We’re going to seek repair. And we can repair—fatherlessness is not an injury that puts us out of commission. It’s just a wound we have to treat.

It was an involuntary memory brought on by the taste and smell of a red Lifesaver. Maybe you know about Proust’s madeleine? Or that scene in Ratatouille when food critic Anton Ego tastes the dish that takes him back to his childhood kitchen? That’s what it was like. When I tasted the Lifesaver, I was with Dad.

I spit out the candy right away, but it took me some moments to shake off the sickly feeling of his presence.

Dad was a Lifesaver fiend. He used them to mask the stench of his liquor, and he used them as a bridge between cigarettes when he was not able to smoke—e.g., during a church service. As the pastor preached, Dad would go through a whole pack of Lifesavers, sharing some of them with me. I could guess how close we were to the end of the service by how many Lifesavers Dad had left.

I told my sister about the Lifesaver memory after it happened, and she responded, “Oh, I haven’t had a Lifesaver in years.” She has a whole list of Dad-specific tastes and smells she knows to avoid: Mentholatum, Vicks Vapor Rub, gin, menthol cigarette smoke, and yes, Lifesavers of all kinds.

But that red Lifesaver was a shock to my system. I’d not realized it would bring Dad so close.

I put off the project of writing about my father for a long time. For years, I had people in my life telling me that I needed to write about him, but I dreaded the prospect and never really intended to do it. Heck, even after I decided to give it a go—even after I pitched a fatherhood memoir and signed a contract to write—I spent the first year writing around him. I wrote thousands upon thousands of words avoiding the man, writing in every direction but his.

But I finally did it. I summoned the will, and I tracked down my dad. I talked to the small handful of people who knew him. I found his old drinking buddy. I persuaded reluctant family members to tell their stories of him. Then I did the even harder thing: I revisited all my own memories. I sat in his muck. I wrote nasty, angry drafts of stories about him, drafts that no one ever needs to read. I wrote it all out, and learned from what I wrote. I shaped him into something coherent and shareable—indeed, shaping the stories made him coherent and shareable, turned memories of him into something I can handle.

Doing all that work led to something I could not have expected: tender feelings for my father. Not all the time, but most definitely some of the time. I feel compassion for Bill Dodd. He was not a good dad, but he was a tortured person, and now I understand why.

It’s been a good 18 months since I finished writing about Dad, and mostly I’ve gone back to not thinking about him very much. Maybe it’s easier to be forgiving when I’m forgetting. Forgiveness is lighter than anger—it’s so much less preoccupying.

But now I know that the taste of a little red Lifesaver can yank me back to him, or bring him back to me. It’s easy enough to avoid red Lifesavers, but there will be other involuntary memories. Maybe next time, I won’t spit out the taste of him so fast. Maybe I’ll sit with my senses. Maybe I’ll add to the memories, filling them out with the fuller stories I now know.

And look, THERE it is—an in-the-wild sighting a buddy sent from an indie bookstore outside Portland, Oregon.

My friend Anne texted me an encouraging word yesterday—she said that while Publication Day may feel anticlimactic, and it’s hard not to have Major Book Release buzz, this book will blossom over time. I hope she’s right—I think there are plenty of readers out there who have something to gain from reading it.

This book—short enough to be read in 2-3 sittings—was forever in the making. I was probably 20 years old the first time someone said to me, “You should write about your dad.” And this specific book idea—a fatherhood memoir structured around four types of fatherhood—first came to me in 2010. I remember exactly where I was—driving on I-25 to Denver International Airport on my way to a conference in Philadelphia. At some point that weekend, I had beers with an editor named Lil Copan, and when she asked me what I wanted to write, I told her about a book I was calling FourFathers.

I then proceeded not to write a word of it for years on end. I thought of it from time to time, but I knew that writing it would mean thinking about my dad. Thinking about Dad meant spiders crawling on my skin. I avoided it, pretended his story didn’t matter in the one I was living.

In late 2020, I pitched a book called It’s a Wonderful Book about the cultural legacy of Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life. Several publishers responded warmly (it is, truly, a good book idea!), but ultimately they all rejected it. But Lil Copan at Broadleaf Books (at the time—she’s now at Orbis) reached out and said she wanted to have a Zoom call about it. When we got on, she said they, too, were rejecting my proposal…but hey, was I ever going to write that fatherhood memoir? If so, that might be of interest.

My heart sank. I mean, I was flattered that she remembered a decade-old idea, but I still had no interest in thinking about my father.

The next weekend, I went for a trail run, and sometime around the third mile, the book’s opening section took shape in my head. I went home and wrote 5000 words. (Note: very few of those words made the final draft.)

Lil and Broadleaf signed the book—but for the next year, I promptly went back to not writing about my father. The skin spiders were one problem. Another problem is that it turned out that I did not know much of anything about him. How do you write about an empty space? But eventually—through a couple helpful cousins, through tracking down Dad’s old drinking buddy, and finally through my dad’s sister choosing to give me a peek into their childhood—I filled in that space.

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The book is about much more than my dad—it’s about father figures, especially a pastor who changed my life multiple times; it’s about wrestling with God the Father by grieving my mom and coming to terms with her own insistent faith; it’s about being a father, which means facing my own insecurities about whether or not I have what it takes to be a man. But I couldn’t do any of the work on those other parts until I had first found the story of my old man.

I’m so glad I did. I’m so glad the work is behind me.

Last night, my wife asked how I was feeling about the book coming out this week. I told her something I’ve believed for a while: This book has already given me what I needed. I now carry these stories—my dad, my father figures, and so on—as a lighter load. I’ve settled into my own fatherhood in a deeper, more comfortable way. I’ve always loved my kids, but my insecurities could compromise the way I handled many things with them and in our home. No more—or at least, much less so.

“You’re also a much better handyman,” she said. It’s odd, but it’s true. One of the most surprising outcomes of The Father You Get is that facing my male insecurities inadvertently made me a good bit handier. We moved into a 1930s house this spring and I’ve managed to do lots of things—build shelves in a little makeshift closet under the stairs; install a bathroom light switch with a bluetooth remote; stack our washer-dryer unit and build laundry storage. NBD. But I’m telling you, for years, I would lose myself—my composure, my sanity, my sense of manhood—in tasks like these. I was terrified to do these things and also terrified to admit that I was terrified to do these things.

Not so much now. I just kinda figure out it out. And when I can’t, I call someone handier (starting with my wife). NBD.

All kinds of good things can come from staring down—and sharing—your story. For me, the best thing is being glad that I am the father my kids got. I’m excited to keep being him.

Note: If you’ve read the book, please leave a review at Goodreads or Amazon. And if you’ve not bought the book yet, support your local bookstore! Tell your library to carry it! And as ever, holler at me if you want to talk about setting up a talk with your book club, parent group, church, etc.

Not everyone in our lives was in favor of our sudden romance. They weren’t opposed to anything about me and Michaela, per se—it was just the whole concept of dating, full stop.

The year was 1997, and in the circles we ran in, anti-dating fervor was on the rise.

IYKYK, but in case you don’t: In the late 1990s, a book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris became a surprise bestseller and evangelical culture phenomenon. In it, Harris argues that Christian couples should only do group dates followed by a kind of courtship period, with parents highly involved. If that sounds strange and legalistic, well, strange legalism was all part of the purity culture charm. (Harris has since spent much of his life disavowing it all.)

I never read the book until years later when I was studying evangelicalism as a religion scholar. But Michaela and I did run in those circles at the time—we were both part of a campus college ministry. A few weeks into dating, a buddy of mine from the ministry asked if we could talk. She told me about I Kissed Dating Goodbye, asked if I’d read it, and grimaced when I told her I hadn’t. She said she and several of our friends had been reading the book. She said they were worried that my budding romance with Michaela was—to be clear—against the will of God.

It was not a fun conversation. I knew in my gut that my friend was wrong. But at 23 years old, I did not yet know that my gut could be trusted.

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One of the big themes of The Father You Get is insecurity. I was an insecure guy, uncertain of most everything. I was vexed with doubt about God, about myself. I’d wake up with my stomach in angsty knots and try to untie them all day.

The one thing I was clear on in those days was that I was falling in love with Michaela. But now my friend’s critique loomed large—I was highly receptive to the suggestion that God might be disappointed in me.

I went to another friend, a pastor named Kyle Parker whose influence I was absorbing like a sponge in those days. Parker was only a few years older than I was, but in his mid-to-late 20s, the guy had the bearing of a 40 year old. He was something of a father figure to me.

I told Parker about the naysayers. I told him how it was nagging at me. I reminded him of something I’d told him many times, which was that I wasn’t even sure if I believed in God. But if people who did believe in God didn’t want me dating, maybe I shouldn’t be dating. Maybe I should break up with this woman that I loved on the off chance that God was mad at me.

As I say, I was a bundle of insecurity.

Parker listened to me unspool my worries. He nodded and grunted a few times. When I was done, I looked up at him and braced for him to tell me to kiss dating goodbye.

“Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “First, do you love Michaela?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Ok. Does she love you?”

“I think so. I hope so.”

“Ok. Do you have 1 or 2 people in your life who you trust to call you on your bullshit? Who can speak truth to you?”

“Yes, definitely. You’re one of them.”

He sat back in his chair.

“Well, then,” he said. “As for everyone else? That’s who your middle finger is for.”

Parker was not a big “screw everybody” kind of guy. He was a tree of a man, but as tender as a teddy bear. Strong, but not imposing.

He was making a point I needed to hear: Know your own mind. Trust yourself, and trust the people you’ve shared yourself with. Outside of them, don’t sweat the chatter.

Parker presided over our marriage about a year later.

I write a lot in The Father You Get about the father figures I’ve made over the years, and how making father figures has been a way of life for me. I didn’t realize I was doing this for a long time—indeed, I didn’t really put it all together until I started writing the book. But upon reflection, I’ve been an advice sponge. My dad didn’t teach me much of anything, but as it turns out, this world is full of teachers aplenty.

You don’t have to listen to all of them, though. Sometimes you choose the wrong father figures for a season—you come to realize that someone you’d embraced with open arms actually needed your middle finger, or at least an index finger showing them the door. You can read that story in the book.

There's no stopping it now, no way to take back what I've done.

Not that the risk is so great. But I am nervous. I've written something vulnerable. It’s embarrassing at times. It tells some hard truths about the family I was raised in. I wrote it mostly with my own family in mind as the audience—especially my kids, my wife, and my sister. But it turns out that they are not the only people who will be reading it.

I've begun to hear from some people who have read it already. I got a note from a relative stranger the other day, a friend of a friend I was introduced to via email. He is older than I am and his life is and was very different than mine. But he said my story helped him understand his. The book got him thinking about how he'd stopped seeking mentorship—especially father figures—long ago, perhaps in response to grief over his parents’ divorce. And now he realizes maybe it's not too late, maybe it's never too late to seek out someone who can show you the way.

May there be many more readers like him.

I’ve had a few people ask what section of a bookstore it’ll be in, and I honestly have no idea. The book has a category challenge. It's male-framed, but it's not just for men. It's about fatherhood, but it's not just for fathers. It deals with Christianity, but it's not targeted to Christians. It's a memoir, but it's also topical. It's mostly a story, or a series of stories, and I think they're good and juicy and thought-provoking, but it’s gonna take some luck for readers to find them due to those category challenges—and also due to the fact that the name Patton Dodd means nothing.

I do not have much of a platform. I mostly unplugged from social media in 2018, with the exception of occasional posts on FB or IG. I have been posting more of late, but I don't like it very much. None of it feels natural to me. I will keep it up some, but I'm not counting on myself going viral or anything, and I'm not interested in engineering online influence.

The only chance this book has to find readers is word of mouth. I hope I’ve written something that people will recommend. That was my aim. My first draft of this book was thoughtful, pretty, and a bit dull, so I revised it into what I hope is a page-turner. I wanted it to be short enough to read in just a few sittings, dark enough to be true to life's pain, and funny enough to be a delight.

This book is a longshot. But I do believe in it. I believe it can create space for people to reflect on their own stories, their own families, how they were formed and how they are forming others.

It may take some time for it to find its readers. But I hope it will. And I hope you'll help. If you read it and it connects with you, please tell somebody about it.

Oh, one more thing: If you're in Washington, D.C., San Antonio, or Colorado's Front Range, I've got events coming up in the weeks ahead. (See here.) I'm also working on setting up events in other places, and I’m happy to talk about setting up one near you—or online!

Holler at me—email me, DM me on IG, or leave a comment below—if you want to come to an event I have planned or have thoughts on planning one together.

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There’s a less shameful way to tell that story, of course—a lot of life was happening in those three and a half years, and the stories I was working on were personal and hard. I’ll tell that fuller writing process story another time.

But for now, let’s focus on the strategies. This is what I did while writing the book, and this is what I still do most weeks to make space, clear decks, and type coherent thoughts into readable sentences.

Wake up and write.

If you’re anything like me, your brain has a creative sweet spot you can access if you can get to it before things get cluttered. So when you need to write, get out of bed and take the shortest path to writing.

For me, that looks like doing the bare minimum—making coffee, feeding the pets, using the bathroom, pouring the coffee—before I sit down (cross-legged on the couch) and start to type. I try not to even think about what I’m going to type. I just type.

Don’t check the phone. Don’t read the news or anything else. Don’t listen to anything. Don’t plan your day. Don’t even think—the writing will do that for you. So just wake up and write.

Write with your body.

If that creative space is closed off, the best way I know to access it is to move your body. Go for a walk. Ride your bike. Work in the yard. Take a shower. Cook a meal. Really, anything that involves moving your body can do the trick. While you’re moving your body, your mind will unfold in all sorts of useful ways.

Much of what I write starts on a running trail. Many of the best stories and insights in my book first came to me while I was moving through the woods very fast. (Note: I am 50, and “very fast” is not very fast.) A lot of my book was written while I was very sweaty and smelly—just back from a run, banging on my keyboard. If a good idea has come to you while you’re moving your body, you gotta capture it before it goes away.

Sometimes I’ll make a voice memo while I’m running and transcribe it later. That works okay, but I’ve found over time that the very best approach is to just hold onto the idea in my head until I’m back to my computer. I go from moving my body to typing as directly as I can.

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Write your first draft without judgment. And write it fast.

Every writer knows that real writing is rewriting. In fact, it’s impossible to know whether what you’re drafting is working until you’ve finished drafting it and have begun to revise. So write that first draft without judgment—just gut it out and trust yourself to improve it later.

“Fast” is relative—the full first draft of The Father You Get took me two years. But the point is that you cannot get to that second draft—and the many drafts that may follow—without finishing the first, so you might as well finish it as fast as you can.

And if you’re anything like me, you can’t really experience the pleasure of writing until you’re revising. I don’t enjoy much about first-drafting, but I do find joy in working with already-written words. So it’s a gift to myself if I find the path of least resistance to those words.

Which gets me to the next point.

Be willing to revise everything.

Every now and then, you will have first-draft sentences that are pristine and untouchable. But those are full-court shots, and they’re almost impossible to hit.

When you revise, you’re working on two levels. First, you’re improving your style—touching up sentences, improving your diction, fine-tuning your jokes, creating more tension. You’re sprucing the place up.

Second, and more importantly, you’re improving your thinking. Indeed, you’re discovering what you really think, and you’re finding out whether you’re saying it or not. Are you being clear? Are you being honest? Have you thought this through? (I bet you haven’t.)

Sometimes you’ll discover that you need more than a spruce-up. You need a total renovation. Don’t be afraid to take a sledgehammer to the whole place.

Let scary readers read it and tell you what they think.

It took me a loooooong time to let anyone except my editor read chapter drafts of The Father You Get. The people I was really scared of were my sister (because it’s partly her story, too) and my wife (because when it comes to my writing, she can be counted on to say exactly what she thinks). That is good, but that is terrifying.

I also asked a couple other scary readers to give me feedback. I had no idea where I was in the process until these readers got their hands on it. Once they read it with their scary eyes and scary brains and gave me their scary feedback, I found out something I did not yet know: I was almost done. They all had changes they thought I should make, and I made most of them. But they all also helped me see that I was much closer to the end than I realized.

Get your scariest readers involved, and let them tell you what they think.

It occurs to me that a lot of this is classic advice, and therefore maybe obvious. It occurs to me that I could sit on this post for another week or two or three. But I woke up and wrote yesterday and today, and I moved my body, and drafted quickly, then revised, and you are a scary reader. So I think I’ve checked the boxes.

Let me know what you think.

I mean this in two ways—a practical sense and an emotional sense.

I used to carry a lot of shame around my lack of practical chops. I didn't know how to do anything that adults needed to do—follow a budget, hold a hammer the right way, interview for a job, invest, talk to a mechanic, make a spreadsheet, plan a meeting. The reality is that a lot of these tasks can only be learned by experience, so me encountering my ignorance need not have been a source of shame. Yet it felt shameful all the same, especially as the first number in my age kept changing—a 2! then a 3! omg now it’s a 4! Holy crap it’s an actual 5!—and I continued to feel as if my peers were adulting at a level I’d not yet achieved.

I used to blame my dad for all this—He didn't teach me anything. And that's basically true—I mean, he could have filled some of my skill and knowledge gaps if he’d been sober enough or interested enough to fill them. But at some point he doesn't matter—the way he parented me is irrelevant to who I am today, not least because I am still becoming. I am always becoming. We all are.

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Acknowledging that we’re still becoming is a better way to be an adult than assuming you should already know things you do not yet know. It’s wiser, and it’s also kinder to oneself.

Here’s the philosopher Talbrot Brewer in his essay “An Economy of Life”:

[G]rowth does not stop when one reaches what is misleadingly called “the age of maturity.” We humans are distinguished by the fact that our potentiality is gradually given over to us… Having been born into the human world, we are called to carry on with the work of birthing, slowly hatching the human being we are called to become. The younger self must help give birth to the older self, in the medium of its own future. This means that our younger selves are called upon to parent a child whose wisdom we hope will exceed our own. To do this we must draw upon our own half-formed insights, along with whatever guidance we can find in the wider human world, to actualize goods that as yet we can see only hazily, in hopes that eventually we will see them more clearly.

I so appreciate this insight—“slowly hatching the human being we are called to become” sounds just right to me. It’s a nice description of what adulthood actually feels like. But I also want to zero in on how Brewer says we must draw upon “whatever guidance we can find in the wider human world,” because much of our work of ongoing birthing has to do with how and where we find that guidance.

You can pick up guidance in all kinds of ways, and you should. Lord knows there are books and podcasts and videos about everything, and I use all of those sources all of the time. But it seems to me that the best sources of guidance are always relational. The insights I remember most—and I mean the full range of insights from practical tips to spiritual wisdom—are the ones that came to me from other men and women who’ve taken me under their wings in various ways.

That’s because I’m not just a machine of learning, an acquirer of skills. I’m a person made for nurturing. Like most anyone, the nurturing I had from my parents was and is incomplete. My dad provided almost none, and in that sense formed me into someone always longing for a dad. My mom was a skilled nurturer, and in that sense formed me into someone who deeply appreciates the care of a mom. Either way, I’m hooked. Whether I choose to recognize it or not, I’m always going to be looking for nurturing.

I’m not describing here a crisis or a special need of any kind—I’m just describing what it’s like to be human. We need nurturing. We’re made for it, and our desire for it will never end.

The only odd thing about any of this is that it feels strange to admit. But the older I get, the more comfortable I am with the idea that being an adult means coming to terms with all of the ways that you are still a child.

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When I was a little boy we lived in Jackson, Tennessee, and my favorite part of living in Jackson was that my dad’s whole family lived there, too. There were lots of cousins for me to play with, plus Dad’s sister, Mabel, who my sister and I called Me-Me but all the other cousins called No-No.

Whenever our Dodd foursome would go over to Me-Me/No-No and Uncle Bobby’s house for a visit, it seemed that everyone else in the family was already there. All the women might be standing in the kitchen, and they’d circle us in hugs as we stepped inside. Dad would slip through to the living room, find Uncle Bobby’s big recliner, and resume his perpetual nap.

I’d go back outside, where Uncle Bobby and Cousin Kenny and the other men sat in a circle of lawn chairs talking about the things they built with hammers, the things they repaired with pliers, the things they cut with saws, the things they killed with guns.

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I’d linger around this circle, trying to absorb who and what these men were. They would keep busy in their sitting, cleaning fish or sharpening knives or adding more dry ice to the whirring ice cream maker. I’d peek into the Igloo chest packed with the trout and catfish the men had all caught together that morning. The men worked the contents of that chest with the practiced hand precision of guitarists—grabbing fish, scraping scales, slicing bellies, scooping and rinsing guts, all of it one swift motion, as natural as breathing.

One afternoon when I was six or seven, Uncle Bobby looked over at me and said the very words I’d been willing out of his mouth: “Patton! You know how to clean a fish?”

No, Uncle Bobby, I do not know how to clean a fish. But I am so down.

Uncle Bobby helped me fumble my way through a couple trout. I looked over at my cousin, Kendra, who was doing it, too, from practice. In her hands, the fish was play-dough; in mine, a slimy pickle. I came around to it in time, developing my own confident motions and learning the pleasures of plucking out fish eyeballs to go show my grossed-out mom.

Uncle Bobby and Cousin Kenny and the other men and boys in this mix did a lot of hunting and fishing, and sometimes I’d catch wind that trips had just happened or were about to happen. There was a lot of talk of prepping the camper and lures and poles and what-so’s.

They lived in a world where men did men things and trained their boys to do those things. It was, to me, a world of wonders.

One time at one of these sit-arounds I overheard Uncle Bobby say another set of words I’d longed to hear: “Patton should go with us tomorrow.”

I almost wet myself.

“Hey, yeah!” Cousin Kenny responded. “Patton, whaddya think? Want to go shoot some rabbits?”

“Well, we’ll have to see about that,” my dad piped up from just outside the circle of men. He had come outside to smoke a cigarette. “Patton don’t know how to handle a gun.”

Dad shook his head slightly and looked around at everyone, grinning a knowing grin. He’d said it to them like there was a story behind it. Like, if only they knew. Like, if only they’d been there this one time he had labored over teaching me to shoot a .22 and it was no use and eventually he just had to give up.

“Aw, he’d pick it up in no time,” Uncle Bobby said.

I tried to decipher Bobby’s tone. Did he mean “He’d pick it up in no time . . . someday, if ever he gets a chance”? Or did he mean “He’d pick it up in no time this weekend because we are definitely taking him hunting!”

I stayed frozen in my chair, totally chill, nonchalant, whatever happens is totally cool with this little guy right here. The men kept talking. The subject seemed to change. Dad wasn’t standing there anymore. After a while, I slinked away.

Later that night, my family was loading up to go home when my mom knelt down next to me and whispered in my ear, “Do you want to go hunting with Bobby and Mike tomorrow?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Yes! Can I?”

“They want you to go. They are going to teach you. You’ll stay here tonight and sleep in Bobby’s camper. You’ll be waking up early and be gone all day.”

The next day exists in my memory like still images from a slideshow carousel. Here I am waking in a camper. Here I am riding in the truck with everyone. Here I am sitting on the edge of a ravine. Here I am holding the gun in both hands, Uncle Bobby talking me through its parts, me peering across its top, aiming, aiming, pulling the trigger, resetting. Here I am missing my target by a mile and letting out a big “Darn!” but actually feeling like I am the luckiest kid around, a boy among men who know how to do the things men know how to do.

Share The Father You Get

We also spent a lot of time with my mom’s side of the family in the northeastern Mississippi one-stoplight town of Belmont, a place that brimmed with my mom’s aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. It also brimmed with women—my grandmother had solo-raised my mom, her two sisters, and her brother. But I felt sure that her brother, Mike, was man enough for all of us.

Uncle Mike moved around as if pulled by a string, always going somewhere doing something that needing doing and fixing things that needed fixing. He drove a beautiful black truck and had other cars covered in tarps or sitting in the driveway, hood-up, mid-repair.

Uncle Mike ran the family funeral home business, and in addition to his general know-how, he could handle corpses and caskets and hearses and wearing the right suits and everything else that needed doing when someone died. Sometimes we kids would be out playing somewhere in Belmont, and we’d hear someone call out in the distance: “Mike’s got a body!” We’d run down the street to the funeral home so we could see Uncle Mike take in the fresh dead and prepare them for embalming.

Death had long been the family business on Mom’s side. Embalming a body wasn’t weird. What was weird, for me, was watching a man who was competent at anything that needed doing. He was Competence itself. Watching him do anything was like watching Nolan Ryan take the mound, a man at work ready to meet his moment.

Mike’s son, Jonathan, was slightly younger than me, but he, too, was already man enough. I looked up to Jonathan from basically the time he could crawl; to me, he crawled like a grown-ass man. Mike was Competence; Jonathan was the Son of Competence. From Mike and Jonathan, I came to learn that men had garages, and those garages had tools. Mike and Jonathan could walk over to their tools and grab one without even having to think about which one they needed to grab. They could take something apart and do something to that thing and it back together. Then they could turn it back on. It was as if they’d built the world from scratch.

By the time we were seven or eight years old, Jonathan had a go-cart, and he knew everything there was to know about it. He’d put me on the back and speed over all tarnation. I was terrified on that thing, but I tried to trust that Jonathan knew how to take corners fast without killing us both because he was an extension of his father. Then we were 9 or 10, and now Jonathan had a 4-wheeler, and again I held tight and closed my eyes as he drove us straight into the woods like a Jedi in the Endor woods.

Not long after, Jonathan had his first motorcycle, and he put me on the back of that, too. After we rode around for a while, he offered to teach me to drive. I hopped on, kick-started as he instructed (“Try again … that’s okay, do it again. … you’re almost there, try again … ooh, you’ve almost got it”), and revved the engine with his hand on top of mine, showing me how to pull back just right. Then he stepped aside, I released the brake, and the bike jack-rabbited forward a few dozen yards—right into the base of a big pine tree.

Jonathan ran over to see if his bike was okay. I hopped off so Jonathan could get back in the seat and take us safely home.

When these machines would break down, Jonathan would be at the ready with socket wrenches and screwdrivers. I’d sit on the side of the path and watch while grease and sweat splattered around Jonathan until he got the motor running. He did not despair when things broke down—he just put them back together again. I wondered: Was Jonathan’s knowledge of engines a mystery to everyone? Was he some kind of motor vehicle prodigy? Did he have the whole town talking? Or was this just the normal stuff boys know how to do?

My dad was not always with us on these trips to Mississippi. I did not know what he was doing, and I do not recall thinking much about him one way or the other. It would be years before I would come to understand how he was spending most of his time and why he was not one of those men who was capable of doing things.

A few years ago, I learned that Uncle Mike wasn’t just a father figure. He was an actual provider, subsidizing our childhoods with $100 here, $200 there. He’d send Mom letters with folded checks and short notes: “Use this to get the kids some shoes” or “Hope this helps you get some groceries.” We were often one Mike’s letter away from not being able to go to the store or buy shoes for the school year.

Mike never mentioned these donations to me, but I know about them because in 2019, about a year after my mom died, Kaysie and I spent one long evening sorting through a big plastic bin filled with old letters and cards and keepsakes Mom had never managed to throw away. Amid the detritus was a steady stream of notes from Uncle Mike, dating from the late 1960s through the early 2000s—four decades of alms sent through the mail. “Hope this helps you get through the month.” “Pay that utility bill, Dawn.”

When I asked Mike a couple years ago about the money, he brushed it off. He told me that he had sent it on the regular because that’s all he knew to do. He says he always wanted to do more for his sister and her family. I don’t know what else he could have done. I’ve thought about it—I’ve thought about what Me-Me and Bobby could have done, and Cousin Kenny, and Mike and my mom’s sisters. I’ve wondered what life would have been like if Mom had run to them, let us take shelter with them.

But no—what happened to us is not on them. For all of my father’s feebleness, when it came to distancing himself and us from family, he was a force of nature.

So in the precious time we had with them, I absorbed what I could of the men in my world. Uncle Bobby, Cousin Kenny, Uncle Mike, even little Jonathan—they were, to me, signposts toward another way of being a man in this world. I didn’t know I was doing it, but when I was around them, I was finding little bits of fathering.

Kids create a space in your heart that only they can fill. The thought that they might not ever again fill that space again is the worst thought you can have.

I hate considering such things and inviting you to consider them with me, but this godawful train of thought has been close at hand since the July 4 floods here in Texas. I work for an organization with deep roots in the Texas Hill Country, and it feels like most everyone I know either lost someone or knows someone who lost someone. The shock and scale of the loss is beyond comprehension all along the Guadalupe. The devastation was widespread and without prejudice, but some of the most haunting and horrifying losses occurred to our most precious lives—lives that had only just begun.

It’s hard to say anything in the face of such loss, except, maybe: God help them.

But where is God in all this?

The floods happened on a Friday. By that Sunday and Monday I had already been in two gatherings—one at church, one at work—where someone quoted a line from Psalm 34: The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. It’s an apt psalm to quote at a moment like that, and I quoted that psalm myself a few times when talking to friends and colleagues. That’s what we do when we’re together. We offer each other comfort.

But privately, other lines from other psalms have been coming to mind.

My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?

I am weary with moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears.

Why, O Lord, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

Before the Psalms are theology, before they are scriptures useful for any instruction, they are simply a collection of human emotions. They are human experience and feeling put to words. It can be hard to mine through the layers of tradition and sentiment that have been attached to the scriptures—some of that fine and good, some of it warped and weird—to remember this. But the Psalms are records of human experience, and the record runs the gamut. It includes feeling that God is close at hand, and it includes feeling that he is far away. It includes praise in the experience of God’s kindness, shame in the experience of his judgment, and heartbreak in the experience of his abandonment.

One of the classic tendencies of men like me is that we rush to fix things rather than sitting with people in what’s broken. The Man Mode switch flips automatically. My wife shares with me something she’s struggling with, and before she’s barely done with her explanation, I’m offering tips and tricks to make it better. My kids take a chance on describing some hard emotion or struggle, and I respond as if they’ve asked for feedback.

I’ve been told by lots of friends that I’m a good listener. It’s harder with family. Man Mode takes over more readily when talking to them. I think that’s because their discomfort is so much more uncomfortable for me. I need to fix it for them because that fixes my own problem. I want to be finished sitting with them in their frustration and pain as soon as I can be.

And when we’re faced with great suffering as a community, I think we all slip into Man Mode. It’s not wrong to offer comfort, of course. It’s necessary and good. But comfort can be cold if it does not make space for the pain that needs comforting.

So I wanted to say here, for anyone who needs to hear it, that there are lots of psalms, and all of them belong to us. There is no one right emotion, no one way to suffer. I hope God is close to those who are brokenhearted. I also hope that wherever he doesn’t feel close, he doesn’t stay away long. I hope that when he comes back, he brings the peace and understanding that a lot of us are looking for right now.

Most of the Psalms that express heartache end with some sense of resolution, some upward tick of hope. But not all of them do—Psalm 88 closes with “darkness is my closest friend”; Psalm 39 seems to end by asking God to step away. There is a time and place for the likes of Psalm 88. Prayers for the brokenhearted can be brokenhearted.

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John Kerr was a longtime director at one of our camps, and his perspective is valuable here:

“God have mercy” are the only words I can think of at times like these—that ancient cry for help and compassion in the face of incomprehensible danger, suffering, and loss. It seems too late for mercy, to be honest, for all those who lost loved ones yesterday. But still: there’s plenty of mercy needed. Recovery and restoration efforts are underway.

Please join me in showing some mercy by giving to the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund.

Finally, I made my way home, grabbed my wife’s phone, opened a finder app, and drove over to where the signal led me—in the middle of the street about a mile into my route.

My reactions during this time ranged from oh crap to I hate smartphones anyway to omg this is so friggin annoying. I was super frustrated, but I was only frustrated. I did not slip into an I suck tailspin. I did not spend the rest of the day questioning who I am and why I am the way I am and whether or not I will ever do anything right.

I cannot begin to tell you what a breakthrough this is for me.

Absentmindedness is a demon I’ve been possessed by my whole life through. On the near-daily, I lose my keys and my wallet and my parked car. My hips and thighs and shoulders are pretty much always bruised because of how often I walk into the corners of walls and cabinets and cubicles at work (sorry, colleagues). I leave stovetops burning, blue flames dancing all by their lonesome. I miss my exit on the freeway, and I may need that exit very soon, because I haven’t noticed that the gas light is on and it’s been on for miles.

I can be an absolute idiot.

I do not like this part of being me. I’m sorry that my loved ones have to put up with it. But over the last year, something has shifted.

I used to go into an I suck tailspin when I’d do something like lose my phone. My sense of shame would be overwhelming. And should my wife say something to me—something normal, like, say, “Do you know where you had it last?”—I’d flat-out crumble inside. I might snap at her for asking, I might just ignore her, but however harsh my response, it was 10x more gentle than how I was responding to myself inside.

My absentmindedness is one of the themes of The Father You Get, and it’s a theme that only emerged near the end and that I worked back through with revisions. I didn’t notice that’s what I was writing about until I was about three years into writing. (You might say I was a bit absentminded about it.) But one day I realized that one of my core childhood memories was the source of shame about my halfwit brain. Coming to that realization was one of the greatest gifts of the project.

I did not fix this lifelong handicap, but I did reframe it. I loosened its grip on me.

This may sound silly, but when I first started working on a memoir, I did not expect the project to be therapeutic. I rather resisted the idea that it would be—I’d tell people I was writing about fatherhood and they’d say, “Oh, I bet that will be really healing for you” and I’d think, “No, not really, I’m just trying to tell a good story.” I think it had to be this way—I would never have chosen to write for therapy’s sake. Heck, part of the story of my book is how long I avoided (like my father before me) dealing with the stories I needed to deal with.

Salman Rushdie has said something similar about the experience of writing Knife, his gripping account about his 2022 stabbing, near-death, and recovery. He he told Terry Gross that he did not write for the purpose of healing himself, but writing the book “changed my relationship to the event. That is to say, instead of being the person who got stabbed, I now see myself as the person who wrote a book about getting stabbed.” He cannot change the past, but he can change his relationship to the past.

I cannot change a single thing about my father, and it’s a painstaking process to change very much about myself. But I can change my relationship to the stories I hold about myself and my dad, and as I go through daily life losing phones and bumping into corners, I am rolling with the punches a bit better than before.