And I kept showing up anyway.

That is the whole secret of that particular era of fatherhood, the only thing I really figured out: you keep showing up, cheerfully, into the teeth of the eye-rolling, because the showing up is the message and the eye-rolling is just weather.

I sat in the front row of every excruciating middle-school play, every off-key band concert, every science fair, in my taped boots, grinning like a fool, because I had made a promise at a kitchen table at three in the morning that they would never be alone, and alone includes the terror of scanning a crowd at your worst age and not finding your person in it.

They found me every time.

Embarrassing, gray, waving too hard — but there.

Always there.