From Hauling Hay to Theater Sets: What Fatherhood Taught Me About Love, Legacy, and Letting Go

The Space Between Son and Father

When I was a kid, I thought my dad knew everything. How to build a fire. How to back a trailer without jackknifing it. How to fix things that didn’t want to be fixed.

Later, I thought he knew nothing. That was around the time I knew everything, of course.

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years". Mark Twain

The truth is, my dad wasn’t around much. He was a workaholic; like a lot of men from his generation. He didn’t say “I love you,” not in words. He said it by working long hours. By never taking a sick day. By putting in the time to make sure the bills were paid and the roof stayed over our heads. That was how he showed love; through provision, not presence.

I didn’t always see it that way. As a kid, it just felt like distance. Like absence. I didn’t know then what it took to carry that weight, to love someone the only way you know how and hope it’s enough.

Then I became a father, and realized I didn’t know a damn thing either.

There’s a strange kind of reckoning that happens when you become a parent. It doesn't

Hauling hay with my father. Brutally honest work.

happen all at once. It creeps in slowly, usually during the quiet in-between moments. Sitting in the car during rehearsal. Standing backstage during curtain call. Packing a lunch when no one’s awake yet. It hits you: this is what my dad must’ve felt. This is what he never said out loud. This is what he carried.

I think my dad learned more about me in the years after I came back home than all the ones before I left. Maybe I did too. That’s how it works, I guess. Life teaches in reverse. You live it forward, but you don’t really understand it until you’re looking back.

A Different Kind of Friday Night Lights

I was a jock growing up. Football. Baseball. Basketball. Locker room sweat and smudge marks on gym floors. I knew how to run a drill, take a hit, win, lose, get back up. That world made sense to me. It was loud, physical, straightforward. No subtext. Just action and scoreboard. Success brought acceptance, and love. Failure, not so much. Not true, but what I thought as a boy.

So when I became a theater parent, I’ll be honest—I didn’t know what to do with myself. Dress rehearsals instead of double-headers. Stage makeup and lighting cues instead of game plans and whistles. A whole new world.

But I dove in. I built sets, ran power tools backstage, managed the booster club, built more sets, painted entire theatres, sometimes until midnight, and found a strange kind of joy in every splinter and paint-stained sweatshirt. It wasn’t the world I grew up in, but it became one I belonged to. And yet… it cracked something open in me.

My son, Alex mastering the art of Legos.

Watching my son stand on all the stages, under distracting lights, saying lines that weren’t his, but feeling every word like they were. I felt something I never expected: AWE. Not because he was perfect. But because he was brave. Because he was willing to stand up and try, to risk failure in front of others. Because he was reaching for something honest.

Learning Through His Struggles

I’ve learned more about myself through my son’s struggles than I ever learned in a locker room. Watching him battle nerves. Learning how to leave everything he had on stage. Finding his voice. Facing rejection and coming back again anyway. That’s the real stuff. That’s the hard, quiet kind of courage I never understood when I was younger.

Sometimes, I’d find myself offering advice and hear my dad’s voice coming out of my mouth. Other times, I’d hear something new, softer, more vulnerable. That’s when I realized I wasn’t just parenting him. I was re-parenting myself.

Writing It Into the Work

Enjoying time with my son.

That dynamic, being a son trying to understand a father, being a father trying to reach a son, shows up in almost everything I write. It’s all over my latests novel, Memories of an Ash Covered Sky. Sky and her father, Murphy, are each trying to make sense of one another through a wall of silence and time. They’ve both said the wrong things. They’ve both stayed away too long. And they both want the same thing: to be loved, even if they don’t know how to ask for it. That part isn’t fiction. That part is me.

The Things We Try to Build

Being a father isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about showing up anyway. It’s about trying to build something, even if your hands are shaking. It’s about sitting in the front row on opening night with your heart in your throat, not because you want him to be perfect, but because you’re already proud of the fact that he even stepped onto the stage.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: success and failure are temporary. Connection is what lasts. Love is in the effort. The listening. The second chances. The willingness to fail, be imperfect, to rise from the ashes and try again.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

I used to think becoming a parent would mean teaching my son how to be like me. Turns out, he’s been teaching me how to be more like him.

And my dad? He was doing the best he could with what he had. I see that now. I see him now.

My dad.

We live, we fail, we try again. We figure it out one scene at a time. When the time comes and the final curtain falls, then is the time for a new journey.

This Father's Day

With Father’s Day here again, I’ve been thinking a lot about all of this. About what I got wrong. What I tried to do right. What I learned from my dad and my son; sometimes in real time, sometimes years later. I think if there’s any meaning in this day at all, it’s in the reflection. In the pause. In the thank-you we never said loud enough. In the chance to keep getting better at this wild, beautiful, complicated, challenging thing called being human.

Thanks for reading,

Mike