for the love of dads

A few days ago, I watched this tik tok of fathers patiently waiting for their daughters to come out of the Taylor Swift concert in Wayne County, in their full dad stance glory, and I began to tear up. When I shared it with you, a lot of you had the same emotional reaction too.

How could we all be crying at the sight of fathers just standing there? Maybe it’s because the divinity of fatherhood is in the ordinary. It’s not in the grand gestures, the big gifts or demonstrative showings, it’s in the incalculably small ways that dads are just gonna dad.

In my case, it’s not so much what my dad said to me, as much as the things he did for me. While motherhood can come alive in the being, a lot of fatherhood happens in the doing. And while both require a ridiculous amount of work, and that mothers still do exponentially more of it, the tik tok made me think about the white space of fatherhood, the parts that we don’t see, and that we might take for granted. The beauty of the swiftie dad video is that it shows the part that daughters don’t get to see. Every young girl will come out of the show and see her dad, not the hours that he spent waiting for her.

It made me reflect on my own childhood. When my dad would come and get me at the end of the day at daycare, I would just see him. I didn’t see all the stress and deadlines he has to wiz through to leave on time, the hour-long commute to the post office, and the traffic he had to wiggle his way through in order to make sure he didn’t have to pay extra for being late again. My sister and I would be strapped in the backseat bombarding him with specific demands and elaborate questions. “What’s for supper?” we would eventually ask to which he would always answer an immediate deadpan “food.” I just thought it was his recurring comedic bit, but now I’ve come to understand that he probably literally had no idea what he was going to put together to feed us and how he was going to do it all over again the next day.

The concept that my dad didn’t already know how to dad, never occurred to me. Parents naturally come on pedestals. The idea is that children are also watching their parents grow up, is far too complex for a child’s brain to grasp (and even sometimes adult brains for that matter). Eventually, some dads get kicked off their pedestals, but mine never did. His opinion, thoughts and ideas just became more important to me with as I grew older, which made the sting that much worse when I felt like I was disappointing him. We talked about this at length on our episode of Man Enough about fatherhood.

Dads can be harsh. They can be brutally honest about topics that moms will sometimes astutely evade. What’s helped me a lot is to remember that dads have their own love language. I’ve come to see my father’s words less as a measure of my worth, and more as a measure of his attempt to be useful to me. I’ve even noticed that I’ll have the most contact with my dad when he’s “providing” and helping me with a specific task like finding an apartment or figuring out money problems. I love when I get to spend more time with him, but I guess I wonder why there needs to be purpose behind it. Is it that dads are more comfortable showing love in action, rather than words? If moms want to be needed, do dads just want to be useful?

And then add all the restrictive masculinity scripts that limit men’s ability to express and communicate their feelings, and you get a whole other layer of misunderstanding and confusion.

But what if some of our dads’ communal love language was more complex and multifaceted? What if it couldn’t be quantified by words, but rather with gestures that say I love you, without saying I love you. I asked you to tell me if this resonated with you on instagram, and your responses moved me so much that I wanted to share some of them. Thank you to everyone who shared them with me.

How did your dad say I love you, without saying I love you?

“Prom dress shopping with me!”

“Buying me pads and tampons and not making it a big deal.”

“He carpeted the stairs after I fell and split my ear open on the corner of the bottom step.”

“Took my friends and I to see NSYNC & learned every lyric so he could sing along”

“Recorded the OC on VHS every Thursday night while I was at ballet class”

“Met me at the park after a breakup on a bike he also brought another bike for me.”

“Step dad would buy me chocolate when I had period without me asking or telling him I had it.”

“Drove 2 hours at 3am to pick me up from camp because I was homesick.”

“He made me a lot of floral vests.”

“Wearing his sunglasses at every airport drop-off (divorced split custody) to hide his tears.”

“By listening to me when I disagreed with him.”

“Always checking the oil and tire pressure in my car when I come to visit.”

“Whenever I am home, he always offers to make me a coffee even though I could do it.”

“Every Saturday and Sunday when im home as soon as I wake up a homemade breakfast feast waits for me.”

“Finding the lowest gas prices on any trips between CO and Los Angeles for me before I left.”

“He made a point of learning and asking me about things I was interested in.”

“Remained steady, calm, reliable through divorce and custody changes when mom could not”

“He read the book I wrote for teenage girls.”

“Made it his mission to laugh every day.”

“Making me breakfast the morning after my suicide attempt.”

“Never being in a rush.”

For me, my dad said I love you with waffles. If you’ve read my book, you know all about the fact that my dad made waffles for our family every Sunday and that this ritual deeply marked my childhood. I received so many requests for the recipe since the book came out, which I haven’t shared until now! Here is my dad’s original recipe with his own personal addendum.