creative ←
fieldnotes // on fatherhood
withdrawal as leadership
2025 field note
By choice: live in the city, travel to the burbs. We travel to my Dad’s often because he (his wife) offers free food.
Sanctioned basement chaos quickly degenerates with twin toddlers. Until recently, the predictable pattern included adult supervision and cleanup, but we’ve been flirting with change.
“Alright guys, I’m heading back upstairs. I’ll give you a five minute warning to clean up before dinner. Deal?” Aria smiled and Coby gave his standard nod.
As I came back down, my expectation was steady. But I was so wrong.
The nugget was tight against the wall. Small baby toys packed and large toy cars parked. Every degree my head turned made me want to look more. The trains, tracks, and even all the components and accessories were clean in their case.
And my two kids, standing innocently with total inside joke energy. They had been holding out on me, and they knew it.
I left because I wanted the fireplace, and it turns out that was exactly what they needed.
“Wow! Great job guys. Alright, let’s go eat.”
canine companion
2025 field note
One weekend morning, my son was just a couple degrees off. I was helping his sister get ready and he was performatively turned against the wall, starting to melt down. Sometimes parenting catches you suspended between providing space or boundaries.
Our family dog strolled into the room at just the right moment. Maybe she could smell it, and I watched my son plug into one of the rarer things we experience in life.
Lenny is half Doberman and half American Staffordshire, a rescued 75lb frame of high-energy muscle with a matriarchal drive to match. Her nose was the first to smell Coby’s existence, and she continues to serve a vow.
Coby naturally gravitated into her spell, collapsing into a hug. It felt like slow motion.
“Dad, Dad… I gave Lenny a hug and I stopped crying.”
“That’s the game, my dude.”
Off to soccer we go.
a protector in the making
2025 field note
The other day my son’s internal world became legible for a few minutes. He told a story, but it was so much more. It was one of those rare moments where he felt safe enough to put something held close inside into the world as language. In the gravity of the moment, my son sat and spoke with a soft stoicism, fully present. It was a quiet reveal of a psychological schema forming in real time… attachment, identity, morality, and the anxious haunts humans inherit before they have language for them.
That morning, the air had flow you could feel. It was the day before Thanksgiving and school was closed. The gloomy November overcast was cut softly by candlelight in our apartment, and we made chocolate pancakes. In retrospect, flow always feels foreshadowy, like potential.
Like every morning, it had its usual frictions, too. Small resistances, small corrections. Serving as a soft but stubborn boundary to a four year old right in front of their twin has its own challenges. Those micro-repairs scale into a container in which he feels safe, underscoring the value of multidimensional leadership. When parents are sturdy, kids believe we can carry things with them. The story in the car was earned through ecology.
The first half of his story was simple: scared of police cars chasing him and policemen taking me away. For a four-year-old, police are a predictable symbol of something outside his control capable of separating him from someone he loves.
Then came a profound second act reclaiming his power. He named everyone in his family: his sister, his mom, our dog, all five grandparents. And he spoke about wanting to save everyone, save his family. In response to separation, my little man is holding the system together before he can define it. Making meaning before vocabulary.
These are the purest moments in fatherhood. That’s secure attachment forming live, right there in the backseat as we drove to the trailhead.
how do you cry?
2024 field note
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.