Some Father’s Days, I find myself standing in two places at once. I’m the daughter who grew up wrapped in a love that never asked for anything back and I’m the mother now, watching my own Little Miss look up at her father the way I once looked up at mine. This year, that quiet overlap turned into a poem. It’s for both of them: the man who built me, and the man building Little Miss, one laugh at a time.
There was a man who held my small world steady,
who answered every need before I named it,
whose love asked nothing, kept no ledger, no condition,
just gave, and gave, and called it ordinary.
My father. The first roof over my wanting.
The quiet yes behind every door I opened.
He never spoke of all the ways he carried me;
he simply did, the way the morning simply comes.
And even now, grown and far from that first home,
I feel his steadiness beneath my every step.
And now I watch another man kneel down
to meet a smaller pair of eyes,
to chase the laugh out of her like sunlight
caught and scattered through a rainy afternoon.
Her father, hands-on in everything,
in her tangled hair and bedtime, in the silly voices,
in understanding her unspoken words and fulfilling her desires.
He turns the ordinary day into a game,
and she looks up at him the way I once looked up,
certain of the arms that will not let her fall.
How strange and sweet, this rhyme across the years:
the love I knew, now living in her days.
One built me whole. One builds her, laugh by laugh.
And I stand between them, daughter still,
and mother now, watching the same warm light
move down the line from hand to hand to hand.
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