My husband doesn’t have a dad and we’re having a son—what it’s bringing up for him
At our 20-week ultrasound, the technician said, “It’s a boy,” in that bright, waiting-room voice. My husband squeezed my hand and said, “A boy.” That was all. On the drive home, he was quiet for a long time, then said, “I don’t know what a dad does.” I didn’t have a good answer.
His own dad left when he was seven. Not a dramatic exit—just gradually stopped coming for weekends, then stopped calling. By the time my husband turned eleven, he didn’t have a clear memory of his father’s voice, only a vague sense of a man who never quite showed up. We’d talked about it over the years, but always in pieces. When we got pregnant, we both assumed it might be a girl. A daughter felt safer, somehow. A son was different. A son was a mirror.
That night he started “organizing” the nursery—moving the bookshelf two inches, re-folding the stack of baby blankets, checking that the crib bolts were tight. I watched him do it twice before I said anything. Finally he said, “I want him to have a dad. But I’ve never seen one up close.” We stood in a half-finished room with the rocking chair still in the box, and I didn’t know what to say.
At first I tried to fix it. I told him he’d be a great dad, that he was already more present than his own father had ever been. He nodded, but his face told me that wasn’t landing. So I stopped. I started paying attention to what was actually happening instead of what I thought should happen.
What I noticed was that his worry came out in specific questions. Late at night, in bed, he’d ask things like, “When do you teach a kid to throw a baseball? Is that a dad thing?” Or, “What if he asks me about my dad and I don’t know how to explain it without crying?” Or, “What if he’s embarrassed of me because I didn’t grow up learning how to fix things?” It took me a while to realize these weren’t real questions. They were fears dressed up as logistics. If I answered the logistics, the fear stayed hidden.
So I started answering differently. Instead of “You’ll figure it out,” I’d ask him a question back: “What do you think a dad should be?” We started talking about what he could actually do, concretely, rather than what he thought he was missing. He said he wanted to teach our son how to ride a bike. He wanted to take him to the hardware store and show him how to pick out a light bulb. He wanted to make pancakes on Saturdays and ruin them at least once, so his son would know that messing up was okay.
We made a list of “dad stuff,” but it wasn’t a chore assignment. It was more like a map. We put it on the fridge, next to the grocery list. He added things over the next few days: “show him how to change a tire,” “watch The Princess Bride with him,” “walk him to school the first day.” The list wasn’t about being someone he wasn’t. It was about proving to himself that being a dad is a collection of ordinary moments. He could do ordinary.
Still, there are moments when it hits him from the side. Last Sunday, we were walking through the park and saw a man teaching his little boy how to kick a soccer ball. The dad was kneeling, patient, holding the ball steady. My husband stopped walking. He didn’t say anything for a minute, just watched. Then he said, “I just wish I knew what that felt like.” I didn’t list the ways he’d soon have that with our son. I didn’t offer a pep talk. I just stood next to him, and after a while we kept walking.
That’s been the hardest part for me: learning to sit with his grief instead of trying to solve it. The impulse to reassure is strong, but sometimes it just tells the other person, “Your feelings are too big for me right now.” What helps more is silence and a hand on his back. There’s no deadline for processing an absent parent.
From a child-development perspective, I’ve also started to understand that our son won’t know he’s missing a “traditional dad” because his dad will be the one teaching him whatever he teaches him. Kids don’t compare their parents to a generic ideal. They compare their parents to how they’re treated. What matters is that my husband learns the relational basics: noticing when the baby needs something, responding, and—later—apologizing when he gets it wrong. If he didn’t have an example of that, he can still practice it. “I shouldn’t have yelled, I’m sorry” is a sentence that can be learned at any age.
We’ve also been honest about the missing piece. We’re not going to pretend my husband’s dad doesn’t exist. When our son is old enough, we’ll say something simple: “My dad wasn’t able to be around much. That was hard for me, but I’m glad I get to be your dad.” That gives our son a story to understand, without expecting him to fix anything. It also models honesty about hard feelings, which is something we want him to learn anyway.
My husband has also started letting other people in. He asked my dad if he’d be an extra grandpa figure. He told one of his friends about the baby in a way that wasn’t just “we’re expecting”—it was “I’m scared I’ll be like my dad.” His friend, who happens to be a fourth-grade teacher, said something that stuck: “The fact that you’re scared means you care. The ones who repeat the pattern are the ones who don’t think about it.”
I don’t know if that’s always true, but it helped.
The nursery is mostly done now. The crib is together, the bookshelf is anchored to the wall, and there’s a pile of onesies waiting to be folded. Last night, we sat on the floor eating takeout because we still don’t have a chair in there. My husband looked at the wall where we’d hung a little forest scene and said, “I still don’t know what I’m doing.” I said, “Neither do I.” He laughed, and then he said, “But I know what I don’t want to do.” That felt like enough.
This isn’t a problem that will be solved by a baby, or by the list, or by a hundred good moments. It’ll come back—maybe on his son’s seventh birthday, maybe when he gets a note from school, maybe in the middle of a random Tuesday. But I’m learning to stop expecting it to disappear. It doesn’t need to. It just needs to be carried, and we can do that together.
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