The Greatest Gift of Fatherhood

When resistance dies, presence is born.

A friend asked me recently how I deal with being tired as a new father.

Ember is nine months old today, and we’re in a chapter where she wakes every couple hours through the night—maybe teething, maybe just practicing how to sit up at 2AM, as if our bed were her dojo.

I told her there are two kinds of tired.

There’s the physical tired—the simple fact of less sleep, the body asking for rest it won’t get. That’s just mathematics.

But there’s another tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. It’s the exhaustion that comes from resistance to what is, from the part of me that judges reality as inconvenient.

That part has had to die. And it has been dying, over and over, in the crucible of fatherhood.

This is the gift at the heart of fatherhood: all the spiritual deaths.

Every time I’ve resisted what’s actually happening—because Ember is fussing while I want to journal, because she’s done eating when I have other plans—I feel it immediately in my body. I feel a contraction, a turning away. The luxury of avoiding this tension for hours or days is gone.

With a baby, there’s a persistent on-ness I cannot escape. The only way through is to feel it.

I’ve broken down from overwhelm. I’ve felt through the heartbreak of not having energy for creative work after another sleepless night.

I’ve recently dissolved the illusion that I’m “too tired to be present.” That story is just an escape hatch—from the sadness, the helplessness, the quiet ache of not showing up the way I want to. But there’s infinite power available in presence, always.

The other morning, Ember woke up early, sunlight barely streaming through our bedroom window. I could have slept more—my body wanted it. But something had shifted. Where before there would have been grogginess, resistance, the desperate hope that if I ignored her she might let me rest—this time there was just alertness.

I felt the simple choice to meet what is. My baby was awake. Rather than resist reality, I could get up and play with her while Kiki slept some more.

So I did. I slipped out of bed and into presence. We played peek-a-boo with my robe. I made sounds that sent her into fits of giggles. I fashioned her a new breakfast. And in that early morning light, before Mamma woke, I discovered a capacity for presence I’d never known. Not despite the tiredness, but through it. The resistance had died, and what remained was just this: my daughter, awake and alive, teaching me how to be the same.

What remains after each death is a deeper contact with reality than I’ve ever known. I’m experiencing a presence and relationship to life itself that I couldn’t access before Ember arrived. I’m living a truer life—forged in the moment-to-moment requirement to meet what’s actually here.

Time itself feels fuller and more dilated—because fewer and fewer parts of me need to be elsewhere.

Our friends often say that Ember is one of the most awake and aware babies they’ve ever seen.

I know a big part of that is the way we parent her. We practice aware parenting—a way of being with her that honors her emotional truth. Once her needs are met, if she cries, we don’t shush or bounce or distract her. We hold her. We witness her. We let her feel what she needs to feel.

And almost every time, she moves through it completely. Her body softens. Her breath deepens. She returns to presence—clear and radiant.

It’s not always convenient. But she’s teaching us how to stop resisting feelings just because they’re loud or inconvenient—how to trust that when emotion is fully met, it dissolves into clarity and presence.

Even now, when I notice I’m not listening to her—or to life—I feel it instantly. I feel the drain on my body of subtly pushing against reality.

And I see it for what it is: another part of me needing to be held the same way. Another part of me ready to die into something truer.

This is how the fire of fatherhood shapes you. In fractured nights and surrendered plans. In choosing presence over the story of exhaustion. In dying to every idea of how things should be and meeting the fierce, relentless grace of what is.

Nine months in, and I know with bone-deep certainty: Ember is teaching me how to live a truer and truer life. The same fluff I’m learning to cut through as a father—the stories, the resistance, the convenient escapes—I’m cutting through everywhere. In relationships. In my creative work. In how I move through the world.

I’m not working in the traditional sense right now. That’s been a conscious choice—and a deep privilege. I’ve oriented this season of life around fatherhood, around writing, around listening for what wants to move through me. Not as a pause from purpose—but as a deeper entry into it.

I’m honing my sword of transmission. When I support friends or offer reflections to people in my life now, there’s a deeper listening available—a more powerful and subtle attunement to the truth and energetics underneath what’s being said. I’m surprised by this capacity. I didn’t have access to it before.

This is Ember’s gift to me. She’s showing me that the way through is always the same: feel what’s here, meet what is, let the resistance die. And from that death, something truer is born.

The way I create, express, and move through the world will never be the same. Fatherhood has carved me open—and what’s been revealed is presence.

This is the greatest gift of fatherhood: The resistance dies. And in its place, presence is born. What remains is life itself.

I’d love to hear how fatherhood—or any season of soul refinement—has stripped you bare and shown you something true. What has fallen away? What remains?