Home, 2024
My kid is obsessed with faces.
Every day he draws circles with eyes and mouths, experimenting with eyebrows and angles—happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, even anxiety. Then he lines them up and asks, “What else is there, Daddy? Did I miss any?”
He wants a complete catalog of feelings, as if naming them might give him power over them. Lately, I’ve realized he’s drawing my own faces.
The day we found out we were pregnant with our third child, I felt every one of those emotions at once—anger, happiness, love, fear, exhaustion, joy, embarrassment, relief—all crashing together like waves hitting from different directions.
“Did I want a third child?”
With all my heart, but I had given up on that dream.
Life isn’t binary. Love doesn’t erase fatigue, and hope doesn’t cancel fear. For years, Dani and I had been fighting our own demons—some together, some against each other—and we’d begun to heal. We still carried the scar tissue from those years of anxiety, of sleepless nights, of holding everything together.
The house was calmer now. We were calmer now.
Over a year earlier, we’d first begun talking about having a third, but the idea felt impossible then. When the subject came up again, I defaulted to reason. Dani cried, furious and heartbroken, and I met her emotion with the worst kind of defense: calm analysis. I explained the logic, the finances, the practicalities—every sensible reason why we couldn’t—and I believed it. I convinced myself that what we needed was stability, not another child. That decision broke something in both of us. But, the right choice on paper felt like the wrong one everywhere else.
A week after Dani accepted this as fact, she found out she was pregnant.
She hesitated to tell me. Today was Father’s Day, after all. She expected anger, or disappointment, or that cold precision I’d used before, and she didn’t want to hurt me. But when she did, I felt something else entirely: relief, wonder, and joy so deep it startled me.
Because somewhere beneath all the calculations, I had still wanted this. My mind had built walls to keep us safe, but my heart—my heart had already left the door open.
Now our son sits at the kitchen table, sketching faces. He names each one, and asks if he’s captured it right.
“Did I miss any?” he asks.
I look at the page. “No,” I say. “I think you got them.”