I had always heard there was a special bond between dads and daughters. Of course I’ve never been a daughter, but I did watch a lot of Full House growing up so I’m pretty sure I got it. Now that I am on the daddy side of the daddy-daughter relationship, I can affirm that there is a difference in the relationships I have with with my daughters than I have with my son. Not that I love them more or anything, its just different. Subconsciously, I probably do end up treating them different than my boy. Extremely consciously, they love me. A lot. Sometimes too much.

Ok, maybe “too much” isn’t the right thing to say. Perhaps too completely would be more accurate. They love me like a daughter loves their dad, but they also love me like a cartoon princess loves a cartoon prince, and the way a teenage girl in a rom-com loves a teenage boy. Right now they are too young to grasp the difference between the different types of love, so they model not only the love they receive, but also the love they see, and lump it all together in a big awkward love ball. (Which by the way is a great name for a band.)

When they see my wife and I hug or kiss, they have two reactions – eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww, or jealousy. They are either completely appalled that mom and dad would smoochy kiss, or feel the need to run over and insert themselves between us to break up a hug because “hey, that’s MY daddy!” And I get that. It’s all playful and fun, and it has been and forever will be weird for a kid to see their parents being romantic. However, it starts to get weirder when they start to confuse being romantic with what an appropriate goodnight kiss is when I tuck them in.

My younger daughter is almost five, but since the time she was three (or whenever she saw her first prince kiss a princess), she developed the habit of wanting to kiss like in the movies. She’ll take one hand and put it under your chin as if to guide you in. In a way, adorable. In a larger way, kind of creepy. Especially now that she is getting older. It would send a really weird vibe if she leans in to plant one on me when I’m dropping her off for her first day of kindergarten. Kid that eats glue is just a doofus, kid that wants to make out with her dad is whole new set of problems.

She has also started applying movie quotes to show affection. Pretty much all day long my kids run around and shout stuff from shows or movies while they play. Quotes from Super Kitties, while annoying, are fine, and I’m pretty sure 60% of what my six year old says is song lyrics. But quotes from the gold-digging bitch fiancé from The Parent Trap? Not so much. I didn’t notice the first time when she leaned in for a kiss in her usual hand-under-the-chin style and said “oh Nicky.” I figured she was just being silly. Then it happened several more times and I was officially creeped out. I mean sure, it’s a little flattering my daughter sees me on the same level as a young(ish) Dennis Quaid, but I was creeped out on out on two different levels.

First, she wanted to kiss me, her father, the same way that romantic interests in movies do. Again, she is still little and doesn’t grasp that the love between us is different from the love between a mom and a dad or a fat kid and cake. But still, ew.

Second, and this part actually bothered me more, is in the little story she’s constructed in her head she has cast herself as the antagonist in somebody else’s love story. She wasn’t acting like the person who actually gets married to Dennis Quaid at the end of the movie. She was acting like the pretty lady who wore pretty dresses – who just so happened to be the worst person in the movie. Do better kid.

My older daughter is pretty much in the same love boat, except it is not so much exciting and new as it is awkward. While not outright mimicking a single character, she is definitely confusing the love she sees with the love she feels. Starting a few weeks ago, she has been wanting her goodnight kisses on the lips. At first, ok, little peck, no biggie. Now its like she’s a high school boy on a crappy date and I’m struggling to turn my head so she lands on my cheek at the last second. And even when she does land on the cheek, she lingers. And clings. Like an adorable lamprey.

Now I’m in an awkward position. I don’t want to tell her she can’t kiss me. I want her to be able to express appropriate affection and see that as a healthy part of our relationship. So I tell her that’s not how you kiss your daddy, but so far that nuance hasn’t sunk in. She knows she loves me, and she knows she wants to kiss me.

I always wanted to make a point of showing my kids affection, but did I do too good of a job? The next time one of them leans in for a kiss do I offer them a hearty handshake instead? Replace a hug at school drop off with a wink-and-a-gun? What new confusion would I create then? They’d go from thinking I’m the male lead in their personal little rom-coms to wondering if daddy doesn’t love them anymore? Maybe I’ll just get rid of the external influences. No more movies or shows where people kiss. Or hug. Or fall in love at all. But also nothing with fighting – they watch Raya and the Last Dragon and they are sword fighting around the house for a month. So, I hope they like Winnie the Pooh.

I get that in a world were there are dads and daughters that legit have terrible relationships, that this is a parenting first-world problem. My daughters think I’m so funny and handsome that they can’t help but love me (clearly they take after their mother), boo-hoo, right? But the next time one of them sandwiches my face between their tiny hands and starts to lean in for a smoochy kiss, would it be to much to pull a Billy Madison and scream “No, I will not make out with you! Did you hear that? This girl wants to make out with me in the middle of story time! Ya got Piggy and Gerald over here talking about god knows what, and all she’s talking about is making out with me! I’m here to read everybody, not to make out with you! Go on with the Gerald!”

I’m curious to try that, but my luck they would think its hilarious, would insist on making it part of the bedtime routine, and they’d beg for it the next several hundred nights in a row. I’m just too damn lovable.

While playing a game of “Would You Rather”, my daughter asked me – would you rather cry glue or sweat maple syrup? My initial response was sweat maple syrup. While it would make exercise more challenging, It’d be delicious. However, when I thought about it for a few seconds I changed my answer to cry glue. I said that I sweat most days, but I never cry, so crying glue would be a non-issue.

My wife was not as impressed by my logic as she was appalled by what she perceived as a lack of emotion, prompting her own follow up question – “What is wrong with you?”

I’m not here to stand firm on some antiquated concept of manliness and that real men can’t, don’t, or shouldn’t cry. I’m saying that I don’t, or at least don’t often enough that I’d be worried about gluing my eyes shut should my tears to Elmer’s. Do I get sad sometimes? Sure. Is the average thing that makes me a sad enough to move me to tears? No. Some people (men, women, whoever) are more expressive with their emotions, and the bar to clear for tears to fall is set lower. I demand olympic high jump quality of sadness.

Though it’s probably more accurate to say I’ve adapted to a higher crying threshold. I look at my kids, and my two year-old son will cry if you give him the cup that he asked you to get for him. Not the wrong cup mind you, but upon receiving exactly what he asked he’ll get so upset that he’ll cry. My four year-old daughter won’t cry about getting a cup, but she will cry about not being able to sit next to her Mommy at dinner. My six year-old daughter won’t cry about a seat (thought she will yell about it), but she will cry about being blamed for something she (allegedly) didn’t do.

I get that kids cry over just about anything, and I try not to hold that against them. My first reaction when my kids cry isn’t to tell them to stop. It’s my second reaction. I at least ask what’s wrong first. If they have a legitimate reason, then I’m there to comfort them. If they are crying because they can’t get the cap back on the marker, then I politely invite them to get their shit together.

If we carry that emotional evolution up to a grown man, and odds are that unless somebody died, I’m not going to cry about it. My mom passed away when I was in my mid-20’s, and since then I think I’ve adapted to set that as my threshold. So in your average day, the saddest possible thing that could happen doesn’t come close. Outside of family funerals, I’ve maybe cried three times in the last twenty years.

• One instance that comes to mind is after my last game of high school baseball. Yes, I understand the irony that there is no crying in baseball, but baseball was over.
• Another is watching the movie My Life with my college roommate. Just two dudes hanging out on a Saturday night enjoying some fruit salad and crying about Michael Keaton. Wild college nights, amiright?
• One that I would describe as a more of a heavy mist than crying, but the one my wife brings up most often, is one lone tear falling from my eye when Jim said goodbye to Michael on Steve Carell’s last episode of the Office. I mean, they were a regular part of my life for seven years. Lots of pets die faster than that. If somebody can cry about their dead cat, I can drop a tear for Michael Scott.

Sure, I’ll get a little misty eyed listening to the Jimmy V speech, and it may seem like every time I watch It’s a Wonderful Life somebody starts cutting onions. I mean, I’m not a robot, but no actual tears are falling either. And yes, I understand the irony of Jimmy V saying you should cry everyday, but if I laugh and think then I figure two out of three isn’t bad.

People have asked if I cried when my kids were born, and no, I didn’t. I was happy when my kids were born. One of the things my wife hates most about me is that I didn’t cry when she was walking down the aisle at our wedding. I found the fact we were about to spend the rest of our lives together as something joyous and not so sad it was worth crying about. What an asshole I am.

I’ve been so happy I could do a lot of things, but cry hasn’t been one of them. I fundamentally don’t understand the concept of “happy tears.” Same goes for the notion of “having a good cry.” A good cry sounds about as good as a good colonoscopy. As I’ve mentioned before, when my daughters get married I suspect I’ll be emotional enough to cry then, because part of that will be sad for me. But in most cases, the emotional response my kids generate is either joy or anger – neither of which are tear producing.

So I don’t think there is anything wrong with me. It’s not like I have no feelings at all, or that I don’t recognize the feelings in others. I’m not a sociopath. If anything, isn’t it a good thing to feel an emotion, understand it, but not get carried away by it? Isn’t that kind of self awareness something we want to instill in our children?

I don’t want my kids to grow up thinking I’m emotionally distant or cold-hearted or anything like that. They know when I’m happy, when I’m proud of them, and yes, when not mad at them – just disappointed. Of all the emotions they’ll see from me, is it so bad that sadness wouldn’t be one of them? Is the fact that they don’t see dad cry going to somehow stunt their own emotional development. I dunno, maybe? But I’m certainly not upset enough about it to cry.

A few weeks ago I had something of a medical concern. I am usually one to take a wait and see if it goes away approach, but this caught my attention in a way that I thought would be best not to wait and see. I’m sure you’re curious what it was. Don’t worry, it wasn’t something weird or gross. Just some blood in my urine. If it turns out that actually is weird and gross for you to read, imagine how I felt.

Upon noticing this symptom, I naturally immediately assumed I had cancer. Maybe prostate, maybe bladder, maybe kidney, maybe all of the above. Wanting to give myself the opportunity to catch it early, I made a doctor’s appointment. I tried to anyway.

After initially being told it would be several weeks until the doctor could see me, I was told to go get blood work and a urine test done and they would schedule something from there. Clearly the scheduler at the doctor’s office did not have the same sense of urgency to find out why my insides were bleeding that I did. The next day I went and filled the cup and got my blood drawn. They told me the results would be available within a day. The wonders of modern medicine! However, there is a big difference between results being available and results being understandable. The wonders of modern medicine.

As soon as I got the notification email that my results were in I went to my patient portal to see the news. Most of the results were normal, but a few things on the list had a big yellow caution icon next to them. My white blood cells were low, my bilirubin was high, and the specific gravity of my urine was low. I’m no doctor, but I have seen every episode of ER, and know that low white count is bad and high bilirubin means your liver isn’t working. I have no idea what specific gravity of urine means, but having piss that defies gravity actually seems kind of cool.

Even though I knew I shouldn’t, I Googled what that combination of results couldn’t mean. Even though I knew a medical professional is more reliable than WebMD, I was now convinced my liver was failing.

A few hours after the results were available, I got another notification. A message from the doctor – “Call my office to make an appointment so we can discuss the results.” I couldn’t help but notice she didn’t say anything about not having liver cancer. The soonest I could get an appointment was in two weeks. You can sure do a lot of thinking in two weeks.

Naturally, my first thought was how soon would be too soon to take the once in a lifetime trip for my kids to Disney World? Am I too old to qualify for Make-a-Wish? Do I go now while I am still feeling healthy, or wait until I’m more sickly and and use a wheelchair to skip to the front of the line at Space Mountain?

My second thought was I need to be more intentional with the time I spend with my family. Have I been wasting my time? Have I been spending it rather than investing it? Is this whar Tim McGraw was singing about? Should have been living like I was dying for my next thirty years instead of still getting down on the farm? Mostly I thought how strange it is that we only start to look at our time critically once we realize we might not have as much of it as we thought.

Why do we wait for some huge news or some major life event to look more critically at what we do with our time? I get that it seems completely depressing if you were constantly aware of the fact each day of your life is more day closer to your death, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it. I am sure on some level our minds purposely block those thoughts for us as a way to keep us happy, and we shouldn’t dwell on the fact we are all going to die someday. However, should thinking about our mortality depress us or motivate us? Deflate us or inspire us? Momento mori the Stoics say – remember you must die. Not to make you sad about dying, but to make you excited about living.

I tried not to dwell on anything until I talked to the doctor, and over the passing days I found myself not thinking about what might be wrong with me, but about what kind of life I want to live. I thought about how to focus on the things that matter (even started reading a book about it), about job fulfillment beyond a paycheck, about about what I really wanted to do with my time, and yes, about how long could it possibly take to tell me what my test results mean.

After waiting slightly less than patiently for my appointment to come, the day arrived and I went to talk to the doctor. Thankfully, the first thing she said was that while some things where high and some things were low, nothing was too far from normal to indicate something serious. No cancer. No liver failure. While it was good to hear that, I feel like that she could have just told me that in the comments she left in the test results. Or at any point in the last two weeks. We can talk about whatever else we need to talk about in the appointment, but leaving a quick voicemail to let somebody know they don’t have cancer should be standard practice. Hell, shoot me a quick text – “No prostate cancer *eggplant emoji*” would have been great.

Turns out my body is breaking down red blood cells faster than my liver can filter them out. It is exercise induced and mostly harmless. Runner’s bladder they call it. I always loved the quote from Steve Prefontaine, “Somebody may beat me, but they’re going to have to bleed to do it,” but I never thought I would take it so literally. I guess that’s the price I pay for the “free” t-shirt that comes with running a 10k.

I can relax my mind and not think about the worse case scenario anymore. Or at least what the worst case scenario was at the time. Now I know the worst thing I can do is waste my time. My talents. My energy. My life. Apologies to Tim McGraw, but I am still not going to live like I was dying. Rather, I’m going to live like I’m living.

Like many people in the modern workforce, I can work from home. Going into the summer, I knew I’d be working from home with at least one of my kids three days a week. My wife’s schedule allowed for her to be home with the kids the other two. Having two “normal” workdays in the office might not seem like much, but it did a nice job breaking up the week and gave me a change of scenery. Sitting at a computer in my basement and sitting at a computer in an office isn’t all that different, but working in a place without kids is very different than sharing a workspace with somebody who is on their summer vacation and always wants a snack.

About half way through summer I started a new job and I now work fully remote. Except for a few hours working from coffee shops, my workdays were filled with the sound of kids in the house. Until today. This morning I dropped of all the kids at school and day care and came back to an empty and silent house. It was stranger than I thought it would be.

I immediately noticed two things – I had gotten used to the noise, and I expected the routine.

When I was working without kids around, I would almost always have music on or be listening to podcast. With kids, the music was still a thing, but it was from High School Musical and there were little voices singing along. Loudly, and with most of the words wrong. Podcasts were out the window. An hour of time to quietly absorb information was in impossibility. What quiet time I could get needed to be reserved for Zoom calls, and could not be squandered. I’d rather miss out on the cast of Boy Meets World getting nostalgic than have the sounds of Pinkalicious on the background of a meeting.

Oddly, without anybody else in the house today I did not immediately jump at the opportunity to choose the music or to catch up on podcasts I’ve missed. Not because I was enjoying the silence, but because I didn’t think to do it. I had gotten used to not being able to. Now here I was sitting in a house that was too quiet. I missed the noise, or more accurately, the noise makers. It dawned on me that this was going to be my first full work week from home without any kids since the days of pandemic shutdowns. Working from home stopped feeling weird a long time ago. Working from home alone will take getting used to.

I needed to break the silence so I told Alexa to play some music. She played “Landslide”, and I skipped it. She played “Fire and Rain” and I suffered thought it. After that, she played Harry freakin’ Chapin, “Cats in the Cradle.” Alexa is a cold-hearted bitch.

In addition to not knowing how to break the silence, I also didn’t quite know what to do with myself. With kids home, we had a set routine built around reading time and snack time and TV time and lunch time and bike ride time. Now I could set my own schedule, but again, I didn’t actually think to do it. I went for a walk around the neighborhood around the same time I used to get the kids out of the house because it felt weird not to. But it never really occurred to me to eat lunch. With nobody asking if it was time to eat, I didn’t. Lunch was replaced by a series of snacks throughout the day whenever I’d realize what time it was and I hadn’t really eaten yet. We had developed a routine for the day to keep the kids busy and not stuck in front of a screen all day while I worked, but it also gave apparently much needed structure to my day, which seemed to fall apart without it.

Now the kids will have the routine of school, and I’ll have to build myself a new routine for the work day. The walks around the neighborhood will stay. The High School Musical soundtrack will be gladly cut out. I’ll even set myself a lunch time and settle into a flow that works. I am sure I’ll get perfectly used to working from home without the kids around just in time for Christmas break. I guess that is what working from home is all about – adjusting and adapting one change at a time.

The solid structure of the 9 to 5 office job is gone, and the price to pay for working from home in comfortable pants is giving up a consistent daily routine. Which, I understand that for some people sounds amazing, but when you have kids your routines are their routines. Without the structure they’ve necessitated, I have to say I feel a bit like Red after he gets out of Shawshank. I can do almost anything now, so what the hell do I do?