I need to say something about those years, because “single dad raised twins” is three words and it was seventeen years of my life.
It was lonely in a way that’s hard to explain. Not the absence of Tara — I got over her faster than I expected, once the anger burned off. It was the absence of a second adult. No one to tag in at 3 a.m. No one to say “I’ve got this one, you take that one.” No one to tell, at the end of a brutal day, that Micah said his first full sentence or that Mason finally slept through the night. I celebrated every milestone alone, in the dark, with no one to turn to and say can you believe it.
So I learned to be the whole team. The dad who threw the ball and the parent who packed the lunch with the note inside. The one who did the discipline and the one who did the comfort, often in the same five minutes. I missed things — I won’t pretend I was perfect, I was exhausted for the better part of two decades — but I did not miss them. I was there. Every day. That was the one thing I could control, and I controlled it with everything I had.
