u/JetreL

I've been going through some personal discovery and have had a run of hard times lately. I wanted to share a few things from some Stoic readings and videos that might help other dads who are struggling.

Some of these ideas are part of why I started this group years ago. I didn't really understand Stoicism then, but the concepts made sense to me. Take responsibility for yourself, help each other out, and keep moving forward even when things don't go how you hoped.

I work in a very high-stress role, and I often listen to Stoic videos on YouTube while winding down or trying to sleep. A lot of it comes back to accepting what's happening and figuring out what you can actually do about it. I'm still working on that myself.

A few things have stood out to me.

You can do your part and still not get the outcome you wanted.

You can't make the other parent see things your way. You can't make someone want a relationship with you. You can't guarantee that doing everything right will make things work out.

But you can decide how you handle yourself. How you talk to people, what you'll put up with, whether you keep your word, and how you show up for your kids. It's hard when you've put in the effort and things still fall apart. That doesn't mean you're worthless or a bad dad.

Accepting what happened doesn't mean you're okay with it.

You can be hurt or angry about how things turned out. You can stand up for yourself and set boundaries. Accepting it just means being honest about where things are so you can figure out your next step.

I think a lot of us are grieving more than the relationship. We're grieving the family life we expected, seeing our kids every day, and growing old with someone. That's a lot to lose. It takes time, but we still have a life to live, even if it looks different from what we wanted.

Try to catch yourself when you're filling in the blanks.

>“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
>
>Seneca, Letter 13

I'm sure plenty of us know what it's like to replay a conversation, check the phone again, or lie awake thinking through everything that could go wrong.

Sometimes there's a real problem to deal with. Sometimes we're making guesses and treating them like facts. I'm trying to get better at asking myself: What do I actually know? Is there anything I can do about this right now?

If there is, do it. If there isn't, another hour of worrying probably isn't going to help. Easier said than done, I know.

Own your mistakes, but give yourself a chance to move forward.

If you messed up, own it. Apologize if you need to. Fix what you can and work on doing better.

But beating yourself up every day doesn't fix anything either. A relationship ending doesn't mean you'll never have a good one. Making mistakes doesn't mean you have nothing left to offer.

Don't wait until everything is sorted out to enjoy your life.

>“While we are postponing, life speeds by.”
>
>Seneca, Letter 1

It's easy to tell yourself you'll feel better once the divorce is done, the money is settled, or you meet someone new. Those things matter, but there will probably always be something you haven't figured out yet.

In the meantime, our kids are growing up. Call a friend. Get out of the house. Do something you've been putting off. Enjoy the time with your kids when you have them. Having a good day doesn't mean you're suddenly over everything. You're allowed to enjoy it anyway.

If you're interested, a few books to look into:

• The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. Short daily readings, so it's easy to spend a few minutes with it.
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
• Letters from a Stoic by Seneca.
• How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson.

One line from a video has stayed with me: you're allowed to finish the day without finishing the future.

I liked that. You don't have to figure out the rest of your life tonight.

I'm still figuring this stuff out too. Some days I handle things better than others. Having people to talk to helps, and that's part of why this group is here.

Anyone else spent any time with Stoicism? Anything that's helped you or stuck with you?

Anyway, thanks for listening. Always remember, you have value, you're heard, and you're not alone. You've got this!

One of the things nobody really prepares you for with separation or divorce is how hard it can be to share your kid(s).

Some of the times I found myself the most depressed were around pickup and drop-off. Before pickup I would sometimes get so low that I almost wanted to call my ex and tell her not to bring them over. Not because I didn’t want my kids, but because I knew I was starting that whole emotional cycle again.

I remember one time arguing about schedules with my ex. I wanted the kids during that period and they didn’t want to give me the time. My optimistic side, which is weird because I’m normally very pragmatic, kept thinking they would see reason. I sat beside the window for hours waiting for the car to pull up, almost like a dog waiting for someone to come home. It never did. I remember how disappointed and frustrated I was. You don’t really understand how much this stuff can affect your life until you are living it.

The hours leading up to drop-off were hard too. You might still have half a day together, but you don’t really want to start anything because you know there is an end coming. It becomes really easy to spend the time you still have thinking about how little time is left instead of enjoying the time you actually have.

Then they leave and the house is quiet again.

I think another hard part is realizing how much parenting happens in the boring everyday stuff. Dinner, homework, driving somewhere, grocery shopping, hearing some random story about school, or just hearing them moving around the house. When your kid(s) aren’t with you every day, you still want to be involved and know what is happening in their lives, but sometimes it feels like you are getting their life in pieces.

There is also a lot of pressure to make every weekend count, especially around holidays when the time feels even more precious. I had to learn that every weekend doesn’t need to be action packed. Kid(s) need downtime too. They need boring Saturdays, chores, movies on the couch, sleeping in, playing outside and complaining that there is nothing to do.

Getting back to the basics helped me. Your house needs to feel like home, not like a weekend destination where you have to constantly entertain them. Some of the best weekends with my kids eventually became the ones where we really didn’t do much of anything.

A few practical things helped too. I changed my schedule so drop-off became taking my kids to school in the morning and then going directly to work. That helped a lot because there wasn’t this big goodbye followed by walking back into an empty house. It was just a normal school morning and everyone went on with their day.

For midday drop-offs, grabbing ice cream or doing something small on the way could be a nice way to end the time together without making the whole day about the upcoming drop-off. Although that didn’t always work when it was too close to a meal. I’ve fielded that text barrage before…

I also found that having something planned for myself after drop-off helped. It didn’t need to be anything major. Go to the gym, work in the yard, start a project, grab dinner, whatever. Having somewhere for your mind to go was better than coming home and just sitting in the silence.

Another thing was learning not to constantly watch the clock. If you have six hours left with your kid(s), spending those six hours thinking about the fact that you only have six hours left doesn’t give you any more time. It just takes away from what you still have.

I also had to build a life for the days my kids weren’t there. That was hard at first because enjoying that time can almost make you feel guilty. But sitting around waiting for your next custody day isn’t healthy either. Exercise, projects, friends, hobbies, working around the house, whatever gives those days some structure and keeps you moving.

I think there is also something important about keeping small connections going when your kid(s) aren’t with you without making them feel like they have to constantly check in. A quick text, sending them something funny, asking how something went at school. Just little reminders that you are still there and interested in their life.

Holidays were always difficult for me, and so were long weekends. Sometimes even having a really good weekend made the drop-off harder because you knew how quiet the house was about to become. Holidays can also create this weird pressure that every minute needs to be special because you know you may not have that same holiday with your kid(s) next year.

Over time I think you learn that being a good divorced parent isn’t about trying to cram seven days of parenting into the few days you have. It is about being present when your kid(s) are there, staying involved when they aren’t, and accepting that sometimes a completely boring weekend together is exactly what everyone needs.

I’m not posting this to remind myself of the miserable parts which has been gone for me for some time. I’m posting it because there are ways to make some of this easier, and sometimes just knowing someone else has dealt with the same thing helps.

What are some of the little things about sharing your kid(s) that surprised you by how much they affected you?

If you found something that made one of those things easier, what did you change? If you haven’t figured out how to deal with something yet, share that too. Someone else here may have gone through the same thing and found something that helped.

I got a wild hair this morning and decided it was time to freshen up a few things around here. Some of the graphics, descriptions, rules and wiki content were written 5, 10 or even almost 15 years ago. The community has grown quite a bit since then, and so has what we’ve learned from each other.

So today I updated:

• The banner and community icon
• Community description and status
• Community Guide
• Community Highlights
• Parts of the rules and moderation guidelines
• The main wiki and information about the purpose of the community

None of this fundamentally changes what r/DivorcedDads has always been about. If anything, I’m hoping it does a better job explaining it.

The other moderators and I are passionate about maintaining a community centered around healthy growth, fatherhood and support.

Divorce can bring out anger, grief, fear, loneliness and a lot of uncertainty. There needs to be room to talk about those things. But there also needs to be a path forward.

We’re not trying to create a place where everyone agrees with each other. We’re trying to maintain a place where dads can ask difficult questions, share what they’ve learned, get support when they’re struggling and hopefully become healthier people and better fathers along the way.

We completely understand that approach isn’t for everyone. Sometimes people aren’t looking for growth yet. Sometimes they just want somewhere to be angry, argue or prove they’re right. There are other places on Reddit for that, we even list some of them in the sidebar. We want to protect this space for the dads who do want what we’re trying to build here.

And this community isn’t built by just the moderators. It’s built by all of us. (if you don't think I'm talking about you, I am)

Every helpful response to a dad who’s struggling matters. Every person who comes back years later and shares what they learned matters. Every person who reports something that’s making the community worse instead of joining the argument matters. Your participation is what has kept this place going for almost 15 years.

One of the new Community Highlights is a post that probably best explains where I hope we continue going:

“Divorce takes away a lot of the life you thought you controlled, but gives you a chance to decide what can remain.” Read the Community Highlight

I’ve also updated the main wiki, which is a good place to start if you’re new here:

Why we're here Wiki

Community Rules Wiki

If something doesn’t make sense, we’ve missed something, or you have an idea that would make the community more useful, let us know.

And if you haven’t heard this message enough around here yet:

You’re never alone. You are seen. You are important.

Keep showing up. Keep growing. You’ve got this!

I started this group almost 15 years ago because I was looking for support and answers myself. Ironically, it didn’t really start growing until a lot of my own problems had stabilized and I was further down the road.

At the time I was trying to figure out the same things a lot of guys who come here are trying to figure out now. What happened? Can I fix it? What happens with my kids? What happens to the house, finances, friends, holidays and everything else I assumed would just continue the way it always had?

Looking back, I think one of the hardest parts of separation and divorce is realizing how much of your identity was tied to a life you thought you controlled.

You were a husband. You were part of a family under one roof. You probably had routines and plans for years into the future. Maybe you assumed you would wake up next to the same person, retire together, watch your kids grow up from the same house and spend holidays the way you always had. Then suddenly a lot of those assumptions disappear.

That loss of control can make you desperate to get it back. You want your spouse to understand your side. You want them to change their mind. You want answers that make everything make sense. You may want to convince friends or family that your version of events is the right one. You start trying to control things that, in reality, were never completely yours to control.

You cannot control whether someone loves you, forgives you, stays married to you or understands your side of the story.

You cannot control what they tell other people or what they choose to do with the rest of their life.

What you can control is what you do with yours. That sounds simple, but I think that is where a lot of the actual growth from divorce starts.

Separation and divorce are survivable. Your life is not over, even when it feels like the life you knew is. You can come out of it healthier, more self-aware and even a better father than you were before. But that doesn’t happen automatically just because enough time passes.

At some point you have to take a hard look at yourself too.

That doesn’t mean blaming yourself for everything that happened. Responsibility and blame aren’t the same thing. Someone cheating doesn’t mean you caused them to cheat. Someone being abusive doesn’t mean you caused the abuse. Someone else’s addiction or destructive behavior belongs to them.

But almost all of us have something worth examining.

Maybe you worked too much and told yourself it was for your family. Maybe you enabled behavior for years because keeping the peace was easier. Maybe you stopped standing up for yourself. Maybe you drank too much, checked out, stopped listening, took the relationship for granted or became more interested in winning arguments than understanding the person you were arguing with.

Sometimes the lesson is also that you tolerated things you shouldn’t have tolerated. Figure out what belongs to you, work on it and leave the rest where it belongs.

Because if you walk away believing you did absolutely nothing wrong and there is nothing about yourself worth changing, there is a pretty good chance you eventually bring the same version of yourself into the next relationship and wonder why some of the same problems show up again.

Use this as a wake up call.

Not as punishment and not as proof you failed. Use it as an opportunity to take inventory of your life and decide what you want to keep, what needs to change and what you don’t want to carry forward anymore. That’s actually how/why I started this sub; I was laying in bed, basking in my own misery, feeling sorry for myself, when I got angry (at myself), and decided tomorrow I was going to take action and set a path to my own personal recovery.

So if you need help figuring that out, get it.

• Therapy isn’t weakness.
• Antidepressants aren’t weakness.
• Being overwhelmed isn’t weakness.
• Sharing your feelings isn’t weakness.
• Admitting you don’t know all the answers isn’t weakness.

Sometimes you need somebody outside of your own head who can help you separate what actually happened from what fear, anger and grief are telling you happened.

There’s no prize for going through one of the hardest periods of your life without help.

Another thing I’ve learned over the years is how much damage comes from needing to be right. You see it in relationships and you see it here on Reddit. People stop listening to understand and start listening for the next thing they can argue with. Every disagreement becomes something that has to be won.

I’ve actually had to ban a few people here recently because they became so focused on proving their point that they stopped listening altogether, including when they were asked to follow the rules of the group.

That’s one of the reasons this place is heavily moderated. Guys often arrive here scared, angry, embarrassed, depressed or completely lost. The goal should be helping each other through that, not winning internet arguments.

Always remember the human.

That lesson applies to divorce too. You don’t need to answer every accusation, correct every detail or respond to every angry message. Sometimes there is nothing useful left to say. Sometimes listening is more important than defending yourself, and sometimes understanding what someone is saying doesn’t require agreeing with it.

We generally encourage reconciliation here when there is something healthy left to reconcile and both people genuinely want to work on it. I still believe marriages are worth trying to save when both people are willing to do the work.

But you cannot reconcile by yourself.

At some point, if it becomes clear the marriage is ending, you have to stop trying to negotiate the relationship and start handling the divorce. Custody, property, money, schedules and legal agreements eventually become business.

That doesn’t mean you have to become cold or hostile. You can still be decent and fair. But not every financial decision or parenting disagreement needs to become another argument about everything that went wrong in the marriage.

The same thing applies to coparenting.

The better you learn to coparent, the easier your life is going to be in the long run, and more importantly, the easier your kids’ lives will be.

Good coparenting does not mean saying yes to everything. It doesn’t mean letting your ex walk over you or trying to buy peace. You can be cooperative and still have boundaries. You can disagree without making your children part of the disagreement.

Keep them out of the middle as much as you possibly can.

Your children aren’t your messengers. They aren’t your spies. They aren’t your therapist and they don’t need to hear every detail about why the marriage ended or who you think was responsible.

They will understand more as they get older. Let them get there without making them carry your divorce for you. And give yourself a break while you’re figuring all of this out.

You are going to make mistakes. You’ll probably send something you wish you hadn’t sent, react emotionally when you should have waited or look back a few years from now and realize you would handle something completely differently today. That’s growth.

Your kids don’t need you to handle every moment perfectly. They need stability, consistency and a dad who keeps showing up.

Take care of yourself too. It sounds basic because it is.

• Sleep.
• Eat reasonably well.
• Exercise.
• Keep your house in order.
• Stay on top of work.
• Go outside.
• See friends.
• Go to therapy.
• Find hobbies again.
• Spend time with your kids doing normal things that have absolutely nothing to do with the divorce.

And pay attention to the small wins.

Sometimes progress is getting through an entire day without checking what your ex is doing. Sometimes it’s not responding to the message that would have turned into a two-day argument. Sometimes it’s cleaning your house, going to the gym or making dinner instead of sitting on the couch thinking about everything you lost.

Sometimes it’s laughing with your kids and realizing you went a few hours without thinking about any of this at all.

Those things count.

I also think one mistake we make is trying too hard to get our old life back. In many cases, that life wasn’t working very well or we wouldn’t be here.

The goal doesn’t have to be becoming exactly who you were before the separation. Take the things from that life that were good. Learn from the things that weren’t. Leave behind the behaviors, relationships and habits that were hurting you and build something healthier from here.

And don’t rush to fill every empty space.

Being alone can be uncomfortable, especially when you’ve spent years or decades as part of a couple. Loneliness can make almost any attention feel like connection. Give yourself enough time to know the difference.

Your past is your past. You can’t rewrite it, but you can learn from it. Own what belongs to you, stop carrying what doesn’t, stand up for yourself where you need to and decide what kind of life you want to build from here.

Divorce takes away a lot of the life you thought you controlled. It also gives you a chance to decide what remains.

Your relationship with your kids. Your values. Your health. Your friendships. Your career. Your integrity. The way you treat other people. The way you allow other people to treat you. The father you choose to be and the person you become afterward.

Over 10 years later I can tell you there is a lot of life on the other side of this. My oldest are young adults now, I have another family, I wrote this on my phone laying in bed a with my youngest from a different partner after reading their bed time story. Your life isn’t over. It’s just a chapter you probably never expected to be writing.

And if someone hasn’t told you recently, you are important, needed and most importantly not alone.

You’ve got this!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but I watched a short today where Jimmy Carr said something that stuck with me.

“The opposite of grief isn’t happiness. It’s forgetting.”

And if you really cared about what you lost, you probably don’t actually want to forget it. A lot of guys here are right in the thick of grief.

Loss of the marriage. Loss of the future you thought you were going to have. Loss of love. Loss of identity. Loss of time with your kids. Loss of control. Loss of your home. Loss of friends. Loss of the person you thought you knew. Loss after loss after loss.

I’m over 10 years removed from my divorce now and I can tell you it gets better. It takes time and eventually some acceptance. But I don’t think it ever completely goes away either. You just learn how to carry it differently.

Grief isn’t linear. You can be doing great for months and something knocks you sideways for a day. A song. A memory. A holiday. A random dream. Your kid saying something. That doesn’t mean you’re back at the beginning. It just means some things still matter.

You can not want to be with someone anymore and still care about them. You can hate what happened and still want good things for them. You can forgive someone without giving them continued access to hurt you.

Acceptance also doesn’t mean saying what happened was okay. Sometimes it just means accepting that it happened and deciding what you’re going to do with your life from here.

Taking the high road is difficult, especially when you feel like the other person isn’t. But dragging yourself through anger, revenge, resentment or constantly trying to change how they feel usually ends up hurting you more than anyone else.

That baggage you’re carrying is yours now. That doesn’t mean you have to carry it alone. Feeling overwhelmed doesn’t make you weak or a bad father.

But at some point you probably already know what needs to change. If not, therapy is a great place to start figuring that out and unpacking some of it.

You can’t control her feelings. You can’t control whether she forgives you, loves you, regrets leaving, comes back or wants the future you imagined. The more energy you spend trying to control those things, the less control you have over your own life.

What you can control is yourself and the kind of father and man you become from here.

Start with the boring stuff. Sleep. Eat reasonably well. Exercise. Keep your house in order. Stay on top of work. Be there for your kids. Try not to use alcohol, drugs, hookups or anything else as a way to numb yourself. Get off social media if all it does is make you compare your life to everyone else’s or keeps you watching what your ex is doing.

Find healthy outlets. Therapy. The gym. Hobbies. Church. Sports. Volunteering. Men’s groups. Friends who will actually tell you the truth instead of just telling you what you want to hear. And build a life that isn’t centered around getting her back or getting even.

Your kids aren’t growing up in a “broken home” simply because their parents aren’t together. What they need is a stable, present and emotionally healthy dad. They don’t need you to be perfect. They need you to keep showing up.

Keep communication with their mom respectful and about the kids. Don’t keep trying to earn affection through gifts, favors or over-accommodating. Be kind because that’s the kind of person you want to be, not because you expect something back.

Give yourself time. When you’re in it, six months or a year can feel like forever. Ten years later it looks a lot smaller. You don’t have to erase that part of your life to build the next part.

Strength isn’t never struggling.

Sometimes it’s just getting up, going to work, taking care of your kids and making the next decent decision.

Don’t make getting her back the goal.

Don’t make revenge the goal.

Make becoming a healthy, stable, present father the goal. That’s something you actually have control over.

And if someone hasn’t told you recently, you are important, needed and never alone.

You’ve got this!

I mange several engineering teams around the globe and I had an interesting conversation with our Head of Product the other day while talking about engineering headcount, velocity, and delivery. Like most product leaders, he wants things to move faster. He mentioned that several of his contacts at other companies have said Agile is “dying” and that nobody really does Agile anymore.

That caught me by surprise especially but I know the quality of code being released at the other companies so I'm sort of not surprised.

I completely understand that a lot of companies have moved away from rigid Scrum ceremonies, story points, or doing Agile “by the book.” AI, code generation, and experienced engineers have definitely changed how teams work. I can also see why small teams, startups, or microservice-focused organizations can get away with much lighter processes.

What I’m less convinced of is that Agile itself is dead.

In my experience, the larger the product, the more engineers involved, and the longer the project lifespan, the more communication, planning, testing, and coordination become necessary. Whether you call it Agile or not, those problems still exist.

Over the last 20+ years I’ve worked on teams that were:

• Single developers building bespoke applications.
• Small consulting teams delivering fixed-scope work.
• Cross-functional teams with developers, QA, project managers, DevOps, and product managers with lots of ceremonies.
• Organizations where I’ve inherited organically grown systems and had to standardize processes so they could scale.
• Very fast startups that do POC and then work to refine afterwards.
• Massive institutional products that move slow and release very slow.

Every one of those environments required something different.

So I’m curious what everyone else is seeing.

• Does your company still consider itself Agile?
• If not, what replaced it?
• Are you running Kanban? Shape Up? Something homegrown? Just “ship it”?
• How large is your engineering organization?
• Has AI changed your development process in a meaningful way?
• How do you handle planning, testing, prioritization, and communication as teams grow?

I’m not looking to start an Agile vs. anti-Agile debate. I’m genuinely interested in understanding what successful engineering organizations are doing today, especially at scale. It feels like a lot of companies have abandoned the terminology, but I’m not sure they’ve actually abandoned the underlying practices.

I have my own opinions about much of this but I’d love to hear what’s working and what isn’t and what your take on the next trends for any dev at scale.

All, a friend asked me to help improve WiFi coverage across his farm. I’m doing this gratis as a favor, so I’m trying to avoid designing something that turns into a long-term support problem. I also live a few hours away from their property.

I’m a sysadmin by trade and have worked in telecom off and on for years, but I have not done much at this type of property scale.

The property has 5 buildings. The ISP ran fiber to 4–5 of them, but each building has its own independent fiber internet connection, router, and backhaul.

The main complaints are:

• They have to manually switch WiFi networks as they move between buildings. (each building has it's own SSID)
• They do not have easy network access between buildings.
• There is no cell service, so when they drop off WiFi, they are offline.

My initial thought was to install UniFi/Ubiquiti APs across the property, use the same SSID and password everywhere, and manage the APs from one UniFi controller. Existing router/WiFi would be disabled after the UniFi APs are validated.

The catch is that each building would still have its own router/network, so clients would likely land on a different subnet when moving between buildings. For example:

• Building 1: 192.168.10.0/24
• Building 2: 192.168.20.0/24
• Building 3: 192.168.30.0/24
• Building 4: 192.168.40.0/24
• Building 5: 192.168.50.0/24

My question is: how well do UniFi APs behave when they are remote/adopted across separate internet connections like this, while all broadcasting the same SSID?

I understand this would not be true seamless roaming like one flat LAN. Devices would probably reconnect, get a new IP, and active sessions like WiFi calling, VPNs, or streaming may drop when moving between buildings. For normal web/app use, though, would this be stable enough?

The rough plan would be:

• Keep each building’s ISP router/gateway in place
• Disable existing WiFi once UniFi is validated
• Add UniFi APs per building
• Add outdoor APs to fill coverage gaps between buildings
• Same SSID/password/security everywhere
• One UniFi controller for management and visibility

Would you approach it this way, or would you strongly recommend linking the buildings together with fiber/point-to-point wireless and building one routed network instead?

Main goal is to reduce manual WiFi switching and improve outdoor coverage without creating something fragile that I have to drive back and support constantly. They get a lot of harsh weather in the winter.

Graphic attached to make the layout easier to understand. (Apologies, it is AI-generated for convenience, not an exact engineering diagram.)

https://preview.redd.it/e3imapssrgch1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=21e7fd876687a9adef965087189334b993842a91

It’s been a bit since I’ve posted, and I wanted to talk a bit about showing up, staying purpose driven, and remembering what we can actually control. I’ve been with this group since the beginning. Lately I’ve had a bit of a wake-up call, and it reminded me why this place matters.

Ten+ years ago, I divorced my older kids’ mom. It was a mutual decision, but the process and the years that followed were not easy. There was conflict, pain, mistakes, and a lot of learning the hard way. This group did not really gain traction until a little too late for me, but I have always tried to return the lessons I learned along the way.

We are better together. I may not live your exact situation, but I understand a lot of what many dads here are carrying.

Since then, I’ve raised my older kids into adulthood with mixed success, mistakes, and some missteps along the way. I can still say with confidence that I did my best, I love them deeply, and I have tried to keep showing up even when things were hard or imperfect.

At the end of last year, I made my final child support payment. I expected it to feel like relief, closure, or maybe even victory. Instead, it felt more complicated than that. Almost indifferent, but still heavy in a way I cannot fully explain. It marked the end of one chapter, but also forced me to reflect on the father I had been, the father I tried to be, and the man I still want to become.

I also have two more children in my current relationship, one bonus child and one biological child. Recently, my partner told me she was unhappy and wanted to separate. I knew we had issues, and I thought we had been trending in a better direction. From her side, it seems she was not in the same place.

We are working through what reconciliation may or may not look like. I own my part in how we got here. I could have shown up better. I could have been more intentional. I could have paid closer attention to where I had gotten comfortable.

And that is really the point of this post.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, including:

Attached
A book about attachment styles, relationship patterns, and how different people connect, disconnect, and respond to conflict.

The Intentional Father
A book about taking an active, planned role in raising your children and shaping your family. It has a religious slant, so that may or may not be your thing, but the core message is still strong.

The second book hit me pretty hard. It reminded me that, in some ways, I had started coasting. I was financially more stable. Life was moving along. From the outside, things probably looked fine. But stability is not the same thing as intentionality.

I had let comfort replace purpose in some areas. I had outsourced too much emotionally. I had allowed the day-to-day grind to become an excuse for not fully showing up in my relationship, in my household, and in my role as a father and partner.

That is not easy to admit, but it is important.

Like a muscle, if you do not work it, it does not stay strong. It gets replaced with weakness, resentment, distance, or neglect.

I do not subscribe to the hyper-masculine content that is being pushed at a lot of men and boys right now. I do not think being a strong man means being cold, controlling, angry, dominant, or emotionally shut down.

But I do believe men need purpose.

• I believe fathers need direction.
• I believe our kids need steady, present, emotionally grounded male role models.

Whether you are divorced, separated, remarried, dating, single, reconciling, or just trying to survive the current season, the foundation is the same:

• You can only control yourself.
• You can control how you show up.
• You can control whether you lead with bitterness or growth.
• You can control whether you keep healing or stay stuck.
• You can control whether your kids experience you as steady, safe, present, and reliable.

The operating model I keep coming back to is this:

• Calm authority, not dominance
• Emotional steadiness, not emotional suppression
• Household ownership, not control
• Warmth without neediness
• Boundaries without punishment
• Leadership through consistency, not force
• Accountability without self-destruction
• Growth without pretending you have it all figured out

For anyone looking for books that may help, these are some I’ve found useful:

• The Intentional Father
• How to Raise a Boy
• No-Drama Discipline
• The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
• I Don’t Want to Talk About It
• Fierce Intimacy
• No More Mr. Nice Guy
• Attached

My advice is to read slowly. Keep a journal. Write down the parts that hit you. Do not just consume the material. Use it as a mirror. Use it as a way to ask yourself:

• Where am I avoiding responsibility?
• Where am I letting anger lead?
• Where am I showing up well?
• Where do my kids need more from me?
• What kind of man am I becoming?
• What kind of father will they remember?

This does not have to be expensive. A library card, a notebook, and a willingness to be honest with yourself can go a long way.

I would also welcome other book or podcast recommendations from the group. A lot of us are trying to rebuild, heal, parent well, and become better men at the same time. None of that is easy, but it is worth doing.

Even if you are not in a relationship right now, the work still matters. You are building the foundation for how you show up in your kids’ lives, in your future relationships, and in your own life.

The long game matters. Healing matters. Showing up matters. Purpose matters.

You MATTER!

You cannot control your ex. You cannot control the court system. You cannot control every outcome with your kids. You cannot control whether someone else sees your growth, appreciates your effort, or meets you halfway.

But you can control your side of the street. You can keep becoming steadier. You can keep choosing your kids. You can keep doing the work. You can keep showing up. And over time, that matters more than you may realize.

You’ve got this!