Father’s Day has a way of making a person look backward before they look forward. Like standing in the yard after everyone has gone quiet and realizing how many men had to do their best without a map.

People talk about fathers as if the job comes with instinct. Like a man becoming a dad awakens some ancient code in his bones. Maybe that happens for some men. I do not know.

What I know is that a man can want to do it right and still have no idea what right looks like.

That was my dad.

My grandfather came back from Vietnam a different man. Though I never met him, what I do know came through family history, fragments, and the shadow he left behind. I was told that war destroyed his mind, and he could not hold it together, so he left. He started another life, with another family, somewhere else, and never spoke to his old family again.

So my dad grew up without his father.

No model.

No steady old man in the house showing him how to discipline without anger, how to love without rescuing, how to be gentle without becoming weak, or how to hold authority without turning into a tyrant.

He had to figure it out.

And in many ways, he did.

He became a veterinarian. He served the public. He worked hard. He took my younger brother and me fishing in the mountains. He took us hiking. He put us in Boy Scouts. He gave us campfires, cold mornings, trout streams, pine cones, and the kind of quiet that only happens when boys are tired from walking uphill.

That was his language.

He may not have had the words for everything. Most men of his generation did not. But he showed up. He gave us presence in the form he understood.

When the Kid Is the Problem

Of course, I was not an easy kid.

That is the polite version.

From about twelve years old into adulthood, I created a lot of wreckage. Skipping school. Fighting authority. Drinking. Getting arrested. Collecting misdemeanors like some people collect baseball cards. Jail. Probation. The county-funded character development program.

I can make jokes about it now because I survived it.

But it was not funny at all back then.

Yet, my dad was there through most of it.

He bailed me out of jail. He co-signed my BS. He helped when I actually needed help. He gave without malice. He worried without sleep. He kept showing up in the ways he knew how.

Though love without a clean boundary can become something else.

Around my teenage years, our relationship drifted sideways. It was still father and son, but it also became a strange kind of friendship. Codependent in places. Too much “I’ll help you out of this one” when what I needed was “No. You are going to sit in the consequence long enough to learn from it.”

As an adult, I can now see it from a different perspective.

If a man is never shown how fatherly authority works, he has to invent it under pressure. That is hard. Especially when the kid he loves is spiraling. Especially when the kid is smart enough to manipulate, wounded enough to need help, and self-destructive enough to turn every lifeline into another noose.

That was me.

I was not looking to be free, even though I would have said I was.

I was looking for something solid enough to push against.

That is one of the strange things about being a youth. A lot of us at that age test boundaries because we are trying to find out if anyone is actually holding the fence. We push, and push, and push, not always because we want the fence to break, but because some part of us needs to know it is there.

When the fence keeps moving, we move with it.

I needed love. I also needed a line.

The tough love eventually came. It took years. By then, I had built a whole identity around being a problem. The Black Sheep of the family. But when the line finally showed up after waking up in a jail cell on Easter Day, I took it as if my life depended on it. It did not fix everything by itself. Nothing does. But it interrupted the pattern.

And sometimes that is where change takes shape.

The Mentors Who Filled the Gaps

Nobody becomes himself alone.

I certainly did not.

There were men along the way who filled in parts of the picture. An uncle early on. Teachers and Professors. Farmers. Men who owed me nothing but gave me something anyway.

One of the most influential was Dr. Harry Ako at the University of Hawai’i. He was not soft with me. He did not flatter me. He did not treat my potential like a delicate little houseplant that needed misting twice a day.

He expected me to think. He expected me to work. He expected me to stop being sloppy. He expected me to defend my ideas and then go back to the lab bench when the data did not agree with my mouth.

He had authority without needing to perform dominance.

That was new for me.

A lot of people confuse authority with volume, punishment, or control. But real authority has a different texture. It is calm. It is clear. It does not need to win every little moment. It can say, “This is the standard,” and then let reality teach the rest.

I needed that.

I needed men who were willing to tell me the truth without turning it into humiliation. Men who could hold a standard and still leave the door open. Men who could correct me without making me feel like I had to disappear.

That is a kind of fathering. Not biological fathering. Not legal fathering. Not the kind that shows up on a birth certificate. But functionally, yes.

Later, when I began working with justice-involved youth, I started seeing the same pattern from the other side.

Kids without fathers at home. Kids with fathers in jail. Kids with parents working two or three jobs. Kids raising themselves through screens, school discipline, peer pressure, trauma, and whatever adult happened to be around that week.

People call them bad kids because that is easier than looking at the circumstances they came through. Most of them are simply untethered.

They do not have enough solid adults in their lives. They do not have enough honest authority. They do not have enough people who can call them on their nonsense and still be there the next day.

So when I work with them, I do not try to become inspirational. That word makes my skin crawl a little.

I just tell the truth.

I tell them I was a mess. I tell them I drank. I tell them I got arrested. I tell them I spent a lot of time in jail. I tell them I wasted years of my life trying to prove I did not care, when the truth was I cared so much I did not know where to put it.

I don’t tell them stories to glorify them or make myself sound gritty. But because a kid can smell BS from across the room.

If I say, “You need to make better choices,” they hear another adult with “no clue” making noise. If I say, “Yeah, I was a shithead when I was younger, and here is what it cost me,” the entire conversation changes.

Not always. Not magically. But sometimes the wall drops an inch.

An inch is enough to begin.

Since starting a nonprofit farm, I have fallen into an unexpected role. Keeper of secrets. Trusted confidant. The person people tell the hard thing to. The one who can sit with ugly information without flinching, without judging, or making it about himself.

Maybe that is fatherhood, too. Not the sitcom version. The real version. The version where you become a place where someone can bring the truth and still be received.

Baby Geese and What They Actually Teach You

My Chinese Swan geese taught me more about fatherhood than I could have expected, which is as ridiculous as it is true.

I got them as newly hatched goslings when they were about twenty hours old.

And at that age, everything matters. Voice matters. Touch matters. Pattern matters. The first relationship becomes part of their operating system.

So I talked to them. I held them. I let them hear my voice. I played recordings of my voice for them. I sang to them. I probably looked insane, but farming has a way of making insanity practical.

As they grew, I started taking them outside.

At first, it was short walks through the front yard.

Then longer walks. Zigzags. S-curves. Little routes that made them use their legs and pay attention. Eventually, I had them jogging up and down the driveway.

That sounds cute until you remember what geese are. They are not lawn ornaments with opinions. They are animals with a job. Mine were destined to guard our chicken flock when we moved to the edge of the city.

If they were going to live outside, they needed to be strong. They needed lungs, legs, and confidence. They needed to know my voice and trust humans. They needed enough conditioning that when a predator showed up, their bodies did not have to hold a committee meeting.

That kind of preparation does not happen by accident.

You do not raise capable animals by tossing them into chaos and calling it natural. You condition them. You expose them to the world in small doses. You build capacity. You create trust. You let them struggle just enough to grow without letting the world eat them before they are ready.

In the bird world, we call it imprinting. But it was also parenting. The neighbors even called me ‘Mama Goose’. Others called me ‘Goose Daddy.’ I took it as an honor.

Every morning, I took them outside until they could live outside full-time. Every little walk and training session taught them that the world had structure. There was a voice to follow. There was safety, but not softness. There was care, but also preparation.

That is what a good authority does.

It does not hide the world from the young. It prepares the young to meet the world.

I see the same thread through the chickens, the geese, the youth programs, the farm, and even the way I write and teach. Something young or vulnerable shows up. It needs food, structure, protection, repetition, and someone willing to hold the line long enough for strength to form.

That is not always fatherhood in the narrow sense.

But it is father-work.

And I have been doing that work longer than I realized.

Ready Because of the Work

Sobriety gives a man his eyes back.

When I quit drinking in 2017, I thought sobriety would mostly be about not drinking. That is where it starts, sure. But after a while, it becomes about seeing.

Seeing patterns. Seeing the damage. Seeing the people who loved you the best they could because they were also trying to survive. Seeing your own responsibility without turning it into self-judgement.

I have been sober for a little over nine years now. That is long enough to stop narrating my life as a series of disconnected disasters. Because nothing is disconnected.

There was a through-line: the absent grandfather, the father who showed up without a father of his own, the boy who kept pushing past the line, the mentors who held standards, the drinking, the arrests and jail time, the brothers I lost to alcohol, the chicken farm, the at-risk youth, and the goslings running behind me like a tiny feathered militia.

All of it has shaped me into who I am…especially when I understood the ugly parts did not disqualify me from becoming useful.

They gave me a memory for what it feels like to be the kid everyone is tired of dealing with. They gave me patience for slow change. They gave me a low tolerance for bullshit and a high tolerance for complicated people.

I used to wonder if fatherhood was something waiting out in the future. Something that would begin when the right woman and the right moment arrived. I still believe that part of my life is ahead of me. But I no longer believe fatherhood starts with a birth certificate.

The practice started years ago.

It started when I showed up for kids who needed a steady adult. It started when I told the truth instead of performing wisdom. It started when I fed the flock in bad weather, trained geese to follow my voice, chose the line over the rescue, stayed sober, became more honest, and became less afraid of being responsible for something other than myself.

I do not have the whole blueprint. I do not think anyone does.

But I have pieces now.

Enough to know that love is not just affection. Love is structure, presence, preparation, truth, and the willingness to stay close enough to help carry what comes after.

So on Father’s Day, I think about my dad differently than I used to.

He gave me what he could from what he had. Other men gave me what my dad could not. The work gave me the rest.

And somewhere along the way, without noticing it, I started practicing the thing I thought I was still waiting to become.

Happy Father’s Day to all!