Fatherhood becomes me.

“You want me to play with blocks on the floor? For an hour?”

No problem.

“Wait. Put you in the laundry basket and run around the dining room? Even though you’re going to wail like you lost a finger when I tell you that Da-da’s too tired to do it a seventh time?”

Okay.

“What’s going on here? You just yanked the tray out of the DVD player, and spiked the delicate remote control into the newly refinished soft heart-pine floor?”

Alright, sir.

I miss them when I go to work. Sometimes when they’re asleep, I want to wake them up (Jill would debrain me). To my detriment, I will usually pick up their juice cup one more time, or read them one more book. Especially if they say “Puh-weeze”, or “PEECE!”, both of which mean “please” in Liamese and Naterish, respectively. Although, now Liam mimics reading the book to me, and Nate’s only good for about half a story before he snatches the book and tries to entice us into a good chase. I can usually bring him back with the guess-which-hand-has-something-in-it game. Or I’ll say, “Where’s Da-da?” and cover my face. Seconds later, fat little fingers will be prying at my hands… then, he’s mine. He’s powerless to resist.

I try to express how I feel about them, and find that all the tired phrases I’ve always dismissed as cliches really do have meaning behind them.

I feel it in Liam’s face when his deserted playground is suddenly overrun by ten-year olds just out of little-league practice, and he panics at the top of the slide. I feel it on the back of Nate’s new haircut as he yanks his hand from mine and runs back out into the flickering storm and disappears behind the shed. I want to get between them and the unknown. I want to protect them.

And as Liam rushes to me from the bottom of the slide and the little-league boys dance like Gremlins against the sunset, I love him. And when Nate toddles back from around the shed and he’s holding a dandelion that he’d seen from his swing and suddenly remembered as we ran from the storm, I love him. And I want to pick them up at the playground and in the gathering rain and just hold them and make them understand that I would do anything for them.

One day, they’ll be the ten-year olds, and the little boys I know now will be gone. And I won’t even notice the difference until I’m reminded by a photo, or a song, or a dinosaur shirt, impossibly small. Or maybe even a dent in the floor shaped like our old remote control. But by then, my perspective will have drifted and all that will be more real than this. And there’s no way I’ll be able to express to them exactly the little people they once were, because from my new perspective, I’ll have forgotten it a little bit myself.

That makes me sad, anxious, and exhilarated—all at the same time. Perhaps “sad” isn’t even the best way to describe it. Maybe it’s more of a bookmarked nostalgia… to be referenced again later, from a different part of the story.

More than I knew I could, I just love being their Da-da.

So yes, fatherhood becomes me. And now, I’ve become fatherhood.