Forty Days

On Daughters and the Men They Reshape

“The hidden harmony is stronger than the obvious.”

DK B54 — Heraclitus

I’ve sat in this chair for nearly six hours now.

Every hour I get up, knock out twenty pushups, a handful of sit-ups, stretch my legs. I take a lap around the facility and perform the duties assigned.

In truth, I’m not crushing it.

By the time this contract ends, I will have worked nearly forty days in a row. Forty days away from home, away from my children and their beautiful mother.

Spending this much time away from them is hard. With my wife and sons, I have known distance before. With my daughter, it feels foreign.

I didn’t fully understand how much having a daughter would rearrange me.

My sons are my little warriors.

I am keen on forging them into capable, dependable, respectable young men.

I wrestle them. I squeeze them. We hike, we climb, we collide. There is comfort in that physicality. There is familiarity.

My daughter is different.

The first time I used the same stern voice on her that I use on her brothers, she fell apart immediately. Not overly dramatic nor defiant.

It seemed to wound her, and that startled me.

I have always found peace in hard places—deep in the Northern woods, near cold water, where the air feels clean enough to scrape the noise from my mind, from my lungs. A little slice of heaven in Mother Nature’s abundance, far from the daily mundanity of life.

Steam rolling off a lake at sunrise. The quiet protest of morning light. Challenging woods for my brothers and I to cultivate and test our resolve within.

A sanctuary of timber reaching into a clear, unpolluted sky—comfort against a world I increasingly feel unfit for.

That feeling—the one I usually find only out there—floods within when she smiles at me.

When she runs toward me and wraps her arms around my neck.

When she looks up and says, “Dada,” as if the word itself carries safety.

I am her protector.

And somehow, she is my life preserver.

Not because she belongs to me, but because I have been entrusted with her for a little while.

No daughter deserves a tyrant.

There is a violence that lingers in my mind at times.

A hypervigilance that has long overstayed its welcome.

An adrenaline switch that flips when it wants to.

Some lingering detachment, the numbing after-effects of compartmentalization flowing through my veins.

And yet she disarms me.

A small hand on my arm.

A babbled interruption.

A curiosity wrapped in a love I am unfamiliar with receiving.

A smile that carries no suspicion of the world.

The noise stops.

I sometimes wonder if she senses it—if she feels the undercurrent in me and answers it with something softer.

Could she ever truly know the peace she brings just by being near?

I am, at times, convinced I am unworthy of such a beautiful little human being. A foolish man with too much shadow behind him.

And yet, I have her still.

Her personality mirrors her mother’s—defiant, confident, strong-willed, graceful. She has forced me to confront something I once resisted: tenderness is not weakness.

Slowing down is not surrender.

If I am to show her what a good man looks like, I must become one more deliberately.

I must become everything required to protect her against this world.

I must remain capable, sharpening my discipline.

I must remain strong enough to shoulder whatever the world throws at my little family.

I must take care of my health so I can stand as a wall for as long as I possibly can.

I must build her up and never tear her down.

I must catch her when she falls, but also step back when she insists on trying alone.

I must treat her mother with the same grace she deserves, so my daughter knows what to expect from love.

I must let her explore what the world calls manly or feminine without placing the weight of my expectations on her small shoulders.

And before all of that, I must simply be her dad.

Her tea-party guest.

Her teddy bear babysitter.

Her cool rock collector, and her pretty flower picker.

Her goofy, steady, affectionate father.

She confuses me. She amazes me.

But perhaps most importantly, she has unlocked a love I did not know existed in me.

It is not greater than what I feel for my sons.

It is not more.

It is simply different.

More patient.

Softer.

Kinder.

Forty days in a row away from home.

And yet I know the moment she runs toward me, arms wide, everything in me will quiet.

For a little while, the steam will rise off the lake.

And I will remember who I am supposed to be.

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