#fatherhood

[delsincloud]

[bridferchglyn]

“Yuna Hollander POV” this, “Imagine you’re Yuna Hollander” that… Valid, valid. But let’s shine a glorious light on DAVID Hollander for a minute.

Imagine you’ve spent most of your son’s teen and adult life supporting the hell out of him and your wife as they jointly steer his career into the astral plane of international hockey stardom. You’re so proud of him, but you also worry that the focus of his life may be too narrow. You gently encourage him to smell the roses - go down Youtube rabbit holes (whatever those are), take a holiday to London, maybe even date? After years of only surface-level relationships, he develops a true friend in Hayden Pike, and you breathe a sigh of relief. He shows an interest in real estate and design, and you’re delighted to encourage him.

You’re thrilled when he gets a girlfriend after so many years alone. When they seem to break up but remain on good terms, this fuels your growing suspicion that he might be gay. Then Scott Hunter kisses his boyfriend on the ice. Shane immediately takes a call and comes back with a giddy smile on his face. That’s really all the confirmation you need.

You gently break this to Yuna (I love how the show changes that “we know you pretty well, Shane” line from her to him, because it matches characterisation they’ve added to David as an insightful father and husband). Yuna immediately wants to talk to Shane about it & make contingency plans for how it might affect his life & career if true, because she loves her kid & wants to cover all bases ASAP, but you talk her down. “Let him come to us,” you say.

Shane tells you he’s doing a silent retreat for his time off this year, but you need to charge your phone, and it’ll be good to check in on him (you always worry about him being too isolated, too lonely). So you head over only to be… well, astonished to see him kissing his arch-rival with an easy familiarity. Shit, shit, you should NOT be here. You panic & leave - let him come to you (Shane’s flight response is also inherited).

Just as you and Yuna are discussing whether you should go back to the cottage, he does come over. With Rozanov. You’re a bit shellshocked, and the whole thing is awkward as hell at first, but also… Rozanov looks at your son like he hung the moon, talks him down from a panic attack, and it turns out they’ve been doing this for almost ten years. The same ten years that you spent encouraging Shane to pursue happiness and live a full life. Of course it breaks your heart that he felt like he had to do it in secret, but he still did it.

That’s your boy.

[animentality]

[feral-ballad]

Donika Kelly, from Bestiary: Poems; “Archaeology”

[afriblaq]

In the 1970s, actress Esther Rolle—best known as Florida Evans on Good Times—took a bold stand against stereotypes in television. At a time when Black families were often depicted without fathers, she insisted that the show include a strong Black father figure. Her push led to the casting of John Amos as James Evans, breaking ground for authentic representation of Black family life on screen. Rolle risked her career by challenging executives, but her determination reshaped television history. She believed that showing a complete Black family was essential for dignity, truth, and cultural progress. Decades later, her fight remains a powerful reminder of how representation matters.”

[dark-scape]

Happy belated Father's Day to my favorite fathers in the animal kingdom: poison dart frogs! Because look at them carrying their kiddos on their backs. So cute!

Male poison dart frogs carry their young to different water sources to increase the chance that some of them survive.

[funnykidmemes]

[rainintheevening]

They're his children of course. Richard still recognizes them; it's only been two years.

And yet...

Peter is a man. Still six months shy of his draft papers, but he stands, walks, sounds like a man. He always has a pocket knife, he tips his hat to all the females, he sings in a baritone that will only get deeper and richer. The tea he makes is decent, but sometimes he drinks coffee now. He talks about horses and crops and reads Augustine. He can drive a car. He gives orders, and expects them to be followed.

They all look to him, to Peter. Helen calls him to open a jar, Susan questions how her hair looks, Lucy runs to him in tears. As for Edmund, he and Peter are curiously joined, they turn to each other with their laughter, their thoughts, their books and newspapers and letters. As often as his family swirls around him, Richard sees them swirl around Peter, a habit, he knows, born of necessity, but that doesn't prevent it from being strange. Even painful.

Peter moves to take the head of table, catches himself. They both start to say grace, stop, glance at each other. Peter takes the newspaper over breakfast, and is a page in before he remembers. And every time he apologises. Each time he smiles at his father, and it is warm, glad, even benevolent.

One of the first nights, shortly after Christmas, Peter finds him sitting in his old armchair, staring into the fire, after everyone else has gone up to bed. "Dad?" comes the question, and he looks up blinking at the tall man, lamplight crowning him in gold, blue eyes deep and dark with knowledge and certainty.

"I'm not who I was," Richard says, a confession, the kind a father shouldn't burden his son with he thinks immediately, but then Peter is down on one knee, reaching for the mangled hand, tender with the three fingers as he clasps strong calloused palms around them.

"Neither am I, Dad. None of us are." Peter's gaze is earnest, bright. "But you are still my father. And I will always be your son. I am forever grateful for that."

It is as if a great burden rolls off of his shoulders, and he finds no shame in leaning on Peter's hand to rise.

When the holidays end, and the four go back to school, Peter says I love you to each of them at the station.

If Peter is a man now, Susan is a lady.

She sits straight, she walks gracefully, she can cook anything as well or better than her mother. She reads the newspapers with Peter, she scolds Lucy for coming home with twigs in her hair and a tear in her stocking and wet shoes.

She talks less than her father remembers, and there is a woman's sadness in her gazing out the window or into the fire. She is also very admiring of the boys in uniforms, and Richard requests her arm on the way out of church with a father's righteous sense of protection.

But she is also gentler than he recalls, she does not shy away from his injured hand, she takes care of him without making him feel as if he needs care. She sits on a cushion by his feet as she braids her hair in the evenings, leans on his knee as she reads aloud, and Richard thinks, Not my little princess, but a queen now.

At the train station, she kisses him goodbye, and he hugs her close, and there are tears in her eyes as she says I love you.

Edmund is the closest to unrecognizable, the once-obvious four year span between he and Peter seemingly halved. He greets his father wordlessly, all shining eyes and bright smile, and his face is so close to Richard's own it makes his heart break a little.

Ed is no more little boy, he is tall, slim, oddly graceful, but his handclasp is strong. He holds himself the same way Peter does, with squared shoulders and lifted head, but he wears that nobility in a quieter fashion. He's quick to see, quick to hear, quick with a wisecrack that makes Peter laugh out loud. He plays the violin now. He returns the family Bible to the living room with an apology for having kept it since the summer holidays. He reads Agatha Christie as a personal challenge, whispers to Susan in French, and his chess games with Peter are fierce battles of strategy that Richard cannot keep pace with.

In discussions of the war and its movements, he is sober and considerate, he meets each of Peter's moods with a balancing counter, he has a way of phrasing questions that pull out stories Richard had never planned to tell.

A few nights before the children return to school, Richard sits up in bed, certain he has heard a faint cry, and he slips away from his exhausted wife to check on his children, remembering how Edmund had suffered from night terrors as a child, imagining little Lucy inflicted with some dark dream.

But all he finds is shadows in the boys' room, and quiet whispers—Peter's apologies, Edmund's reassurance, and allusions to things Richard has no context for. He lingers by the door, an outsider in his home, until silence falls, and he returns with morning light to find them curled together in Peter's bed, Pete with an arm over Ed, and the father's love is bittersweet.

They have fought their own battle over here, on the home ground, Richard reminds himself. In their own way they have each faced terror and learned to conquer or be conquered, but perhaps he can meet them somewhere in between. Only time will tell.

On the train platform, Ed hugs his father tightly, gives him a smile, tells him to keep out of trouble.

Lucy is the least changed, though she too is taller and stronger, and her eyes are deeper. She still sings, still dances, still tries to make friends with all the animals, still smiles and speaks kind and stares dreaming at the Christmas tree.

She still gives fierce hugs, still climbs into her father's lap, though her head comes up higher on his chest, on his shoulder.

But then he finds gaps in his library, and Lucy returns the medical books with a winsome apology, she asks questions about his practices in the field, she winces but does not shy away from the blood and broken things he speaks of.

Then she recites long poems, words spinning off her tongue until they become half song; she dances swift and graceful, she and Peter laughing and stepping and clapping and spinning in intricate patterns to the swing song on the radio; and it is she who, breathless, quotes Byron: "On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined!"

Her comfort is both generous and thoughtful, and she strokes her father's hair with a motherly hand that makes his eyes sting, and he kisses her fingers, looks up at her to whisper, "Don't- don't grow up quite so fast, my darling."

When she hugs him on the platform, Susan waiting for her, the boys already gone, she doesn't want to let go, and there are tears on her cheek, that he wipes away gently. "Be careful, Daddy," she whispers. "Get strong. Take care of Mummy."

"Yes, little mother," he smiles back.

And then they are all gone, and he takes a cab home, weary of his still-recovering body.

He will have to learn his children all over again, he thinks. But he is proud of them still. That has not changed.