Fellas,

One of the easiest mistakes to make as a father is assuming that because you missed time, you missed your chance.

Maybe there were months when you didn’t see your child as much as you wanted. There were years when work took more of you than it should have. Divorce changed the schedule. Distance changed it. Or you simply didn’t know then what you know now.

Regret has a way of turning the calendar into evidence against you. Two birthdays. Three summers. Five years. But missed time and lost opportunity are not the same thing.

You cannot go back and stand in a Tuesday night from six years ago. You can’t attend the game you missed or replay the conversation you handled badly and answer differently.

Some fathers spend so much energy punishing themselves for the years they lost that they cannot fully show up for the years they still have.

That part is gone. Tomorrow is not.

So the question becomes: “What can I build from here?”

You could spend every visit trying to make up for all the time you wish you had back. Or you could start smaller. Make sure there is something in your house that feels like theirs.

Ask about the friend whose name keeps coming up. Send the stupid video because you know it will make them laugh. Do it again. Then again.

A relationship can be changing long before it starts looking different. You are laying boards across a gap. One board does not look like a bridge.

After the divorce, Marcus and his teenage son had more distance between them than Marcus wanted to admit.

He was not estranged from him. They still saw each other. They still talked. But the relationship had gone quiet in places where it used to feel easy.

So Marcus started with one thing he could control: consistency. For the first few months, the calls were short. Every Tuesday, he called at the same time. His son answered, but there was not much conversation waiting for him.

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Practice?”

“Good.”

“Anything going on?”

“Not really.”

Five minutes later, they were off the phone.

So Marcus stopped trying to turn every call into something bigger. He just kept calling.

When they were together, he stopped treating the visit like an opportunity to repair the relationship and let some of them simply be good days.

They ate. Watched games. Rode around. Sometimes they barely talked.

Then the answers started getting longer.

“School was fine” became a story about a teacher.

Then one day, his son sent him a video first.

One afternoon he called because he needed advice about something.

His son started teasing him more. Correcting him.

Complaining about school, practice, friends, and whatever else had irritated him that day. Do not underestimate complaining. People complain where they feel comfortable enough to be themselves.

If your definition of success is, “I need to be my child’s favorite parent,” rebuilding is going to feel brutal because that outcome is too dependent on somebody else.

Break it down.

Did I call when I said I would?

Did I stay calm when the conversation got uncomfortable?

Did I show interest in something my child cares about even if I do not care about it myself?

Did I remember something they told me last time? Those are wins. Not consolation prizes.

If you measure only the final outcome, you can do ten things right and still walk away feeling like a failure because your child didn’t respond the way you hoped.

Think about planting something. You put the seed in the ground. The next morning you see dirt.

Three days later, dirt.

A week later, dirt.

But the first thing that seed does is not grow up. It grows down. It starts putting roots into the ground. Those roots push through dirt, pebbles, gravel, whatever is in the way.

Then one day something finally breaks through the ground, and that is the part everybody notices. But the visible growth came after all that work underneath.

Relationships work the same way. If you dig the seed up every night to check whether it is growing, you can destroy the very thing you are trying to grow.

Your child is still becoming somebody. So are you. Relationships are not museum exhibits frozen at the moment they were damaged. They move.

People reinterpret the past. Children grow old enough to understand things they couldn’t understand before.

A kid who ignored your advice at sixteen may call asking for it at twenty. Don’t make permanent decisions based on temporary distance.

Keep becoming somebody worth knowing. That does not guarantee the outcome you want. Nothing does.

But there is dignity in knowing you didn’t abandon the work because the results were slow.

Until next time

Barkim

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