Field Note on Fatherhood

My daughter asked me a question so simple, but it stopped the world around us. She looked at me with that particular seriousness young children reserve for their most curious moments and said, “Daddy, how do you cry?”

The moment was unmistakably true. Her question was heavy. For a second, gravity folded time in on itself. My memory jumped back to my own childhood and then shot forward into the person she was becoming, teasing me with glimpses of my own arc along the way.

It wasn’t a question about technique. A three-year-old doesn’t mean it that way. She was trying to understand the architecture of emotion before she had the language for it. I witnessed her mapping the way feeling moves inside her world. And the way she watched my face… she was studying not just what I said but how I said it.

Sometimes the smallest moments feel like the biggest. It felt like she was asking me how to be human.