Why I Do This.

On finding community and trying to make the road a bit less scary for those who come behind.

On Thursday, a dozen or more friends sent me, tagged me, and texted me a link to

Matthew Yglesias

’s recent Substack post, which wondered “Where Are All the Daddy Blogs?”

I’ve written before that we’re out here, tagging some friends (

Marc Typo

Dylan Macinerney

Be A Super Dad

Kevin Maguire

etc.) and fellow dads who I’ve met through this newsletter. There is a growing community of likeminded fathers who are doing our part to normalize honest and earnest conversations about and around fatherhood. And it’s so great that we are because, I think it’s safe to say (completely unscientifically, of course) that ours is a generation of man more in touch with our emotions than any that has preceded us.

But now, I want to take a few minutes to tell you why I’m doing this. After all, cobbling together a living almost exclusively through freelance writing (with a bit of teaching hither and thither) is hard enough. Why then do I devote several hours each week to writing this newsletter, which I’ve yet to make a single cent from?

Let’s rewind about eight years, back to when Emily’s belly burst forth with what would soon become our first child, our little boy.

Actually, before we do that, let’s rewind much further than that, maybe thirty-five years, back to when I was a kid who found most of his solace, ease, and answers in books.

My mother was a voracious reader. A few-books-a-week kind of woman. Her idea of a great afternoon, a great weekend, was one spent in a book. And if it wasn’t spent in a book, it was spent in a library. And so, being her nearly-equally-book-obsessed son, I spent countless hours by her side in a tiny white library in a shady corner of Tuckerton, New Jersey. Of all of the places in my life, the Tuckerton branch of the Ocean County Library is easily one of the most important. It was there that I began to understand how the world works.

My father, on the other hand, used to claim he read so much during medical school, his brain could no longer handle reading (side story: my father went to medical school in the Dominican Republic, where everything was taught in Spanish, a language he didn’t speak at the time. And so, for several years, he would sit with his Spanish-language medical books on one side and a Spanish-to-English translation dictionary on the other, translating word for word everything he was learning. So while I don’t think the brain has a limited capacity, I do think he might have been telling the truth).

Still, what he lacked as a reader he more than made up for as a consumer of knowledge.

Somewhere around my eighth or ninth birthday, my father bought the family a set of encyclopedia. Never one for style, he converted his twelve-foot deep walk-in closet into a library for the thick, leather-bound books.

And so, for the next decade or thereabouts, my father had one answer to virtually every question I’d ask him, often whether he knew the answer or not: “Go look it up.”

All of this is a long way of saying that, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been looking toward literature, toward books for all of my answers.

So fast-forward back to eight years ago, a few weeks shy of the universe-altering night that my son was born. Throughout Emily’s pregnancy, I spent weeks, months maybe, scouring the stacks at my local bookstores, at nearby Barnes and Nobles (there are multiple locations nearby. No, I don’t call it “Barnes and Nobles.” Though I do call it “K-Marts.”), and clicking through page after page on Amazon, all in search of honest, earnest, and literary takes on fatherhood.

I wanted the books that the moms got, but for dads. I wanted to know what to expect without having to read What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I wanted to understand what fatherhood might feel like, which is only something you can get through literary writing; not the typical dad fare of books like Dude, You’re Gonna Be A Dad (not that there’s anything wrong with that book) or The Expectant Father. I didn’t want how to. I wanted how it felt.

In all my searching, I found nothing.

One friend did give me a book which I’ve since gone back to many times, which I’ve bought for several other expectant first-time fathers, and whose author I interviewed in this very Substack.

Otherwise, I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

And so, ever the DIY Till the Day I Die kind of guy, I started this newsletter. I created what I thought was missing in the world. In doing so, I’ve found that aforementioned small but ever-growing community of other dads who seem to be in search of what I was in search of. In doing so, I’ve realized that I wasn’t some sort of unicorn, some rare specimen of soon-to-be-dad who just wanted to read something real.

I realized I was just one of so many other dads, scared out of our minds, desperately looking for someone who’s done it before, someone who’s traveled the road and lived to tell the tale, someone who could say, “Yeah, man. Being a dad is hard as fuck. But it’s also the greatest thing you’ll ever do.”

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Thanks to everyone who’s been along for the ride. And thanks to all the other dads out there who are doing the work of making this once-scattered community feel a whole lot smaller.