Crossing the Threshold: A Journey to Embracing Fatherhood

Navigating trust, trauma, and transformation in becoming a father

I’m days away from becoming a father, with a baby in my arms. I’m letting myself really cherish the liminal space right before birth. I’m savoring the tea ceremonies that Candace and I have every morning in the garden room of our new home.

I’m so grateful to be in a place in life where I feel a profound peace, and where I’m both financially and emotionally capable of taking significant time off to focus on the journey of fatherhood.

This weekend, six of my dearest male friends gathered in a ritual ceremony to initiate me into fatherhood.

As we sat in a ceremonial circle, they shared the qualities they honored in a father and reflected how I already embodied those traits. They spoke of the beautiful gifts that I’d be imparting to my child.

One by one, I honored each man for the role they’d played in my journey to fatherhood thus far. I lit their candles with mine as I invited them to honor me by continuing to play the role of a healthy masculine figure in my child’s life.

They closed with a powerful ritual that brought me to tears and joy, as we burned any remaining fears, grief, and intergenerational patterns that I wanted to leave behind. I felt their hands on my back, fully supporting me as I crossed the threshold into fatherhood.

Afterwards, as I stood in the yard, my arms interlinked with theirs in a circle of love and support, I was struck by the magnitude of the moment. It's a level of community that generations before me couldn't have even dreamed of. I'm in awe of the depth of connection Candace and I have both built in just two years in Boulder, and that this is the world we get to introduce our baby into.

The ceremony, beautiful and profound as it was, represented the culmination of a long and transformative journey.

The ceremony space for my fatherhood initiation.

This morning, as I sat across from Candace during our morning tea ceremony, I was moved to tears. I felt the enormity of just how much ground I’d traversed in life to reach this point, where I’m finally welcoming fatherhood with open arms. There were so many difficult chapters I had to move through.

The first chapter spanned seventeen years with my first wife, where I didn’t permission myself to even want kids. She couldn't carry children, and our relationship was burdened by shame and guilt around sexuality. Our sexless marriage became inextricably linked to fatherhood for me — wanting children would have brought up shame around wanting sex, which would’ve threatened the relationship in ways that I couldn’t handle back then.

And so, for nearly two decades, I’d resigned myself to the likely reality that I would never become a father in this lifetime. Any desire for children and exploration of that desire were deeply suppressed.

Leaving that marriage five years ago felt like a rebirth. It reignited a sense of longing in my soul — a deep acknowledgment that my desires mattered. I can feel how that longing has threaded through time and space to this moment.

The next chapter challenged me with my uncertainty of whether I even wanted kids, when it became a possibility in my partnership. Ever since Candace and I got engaged, she’d expressed her deep desire to be a mother, but I didn’t know if it was something I truly wanted. I spent over a year moving from uncertainty to 50% wanting kids, to 70%, 80%, even 90% — but I struggled to get to a full-body yes — all while feeling the pressure of her biological clock to decide soon.

It wasn’t until my first ayahuasca ceremony in 2021 that I was gifted an upgrade to my operating system around trust and received a breakthrough. “I want kids,” I found myself declaring during ceremony. It turned out that the missing link was a trust and a knowing that everything would be okay.

Two years later, as we neared the removal of Candace’s IUD, I entered another hard chapter, grappling with the deep fear that a baby would threaten our sex life in a way that I couldn’t be with. We were struggling with patterns in our relationship where my desire for sex often triggered ruptures instead of intimacy. The pattern spiraled into a fear that our sex life would only worsen with pregnancy or a child.

Before I could be ready to bring a child into our family, I had to trust that we had the capacity to navigate the wide spectrum of emotions that accompanied sex — so that I wouldn’t be trapped in another sexless marriage. I asked for a 30-day sex container where we committed to sexual intimacy every day. And in that container, we worked on being with each other’s collapse, avoidance, anger, shame, grief, disappointment, and any number of challenging emotions that would normally have us eject.

It was hard and beautiful. And it left me trusting that sex could be abundant in our relationship, because I could trust that our nervous systems were capable of navigating hard things.

The most recent chapter this year involved navigating what felt like the last remaining question marks around the relationship — whether we could actually be with each other’s trauma patterns that fit like perfect puzzle pieces in the most intense ways. So many times, we each wanted to eject from the relationship — and ultimately, it was our willingness to walk away from what we had that finally created the space for a more loving relationship.

I am so grateful for the trifecta of iboga, ayahuasca, and bufo ceremonies this year that have directly healed the deeply rooted traumas that our fights would trigger in me. They finally allowed me to anchor in a sense of resilience in our partnership and a sense of safety in myself.

In hindsight, I can feel all the ways that the pregnancy pressurized our relationship to iron out all the kinks in our partnership and any anxiety in myself before the baby came.

In my plant medicine ceremonies, I’ve often experienced a gravitational vortex pulling me forward, a sense of inevitability that I can’t escape. In those experiences, I can feel the divine perfection that underlies all of life, a divine plan that crosses space and time.

I feel that now, as we approach the birth portal. There’s a way in which, all this time, my buried yearning to be a father — as well as what I’d previously experienced as pressure from the pregnancy — was actually our baby’s soul calling me forward, toward love and awakening.

It called me out of my first marriage and ignited my soul’s sense of longing. It called me through all the fear I felt around having children and losing my sex life. It called me through all the ruptures I felt in partnership. It called me through the unconscious anxiety and intergenerational survival patterning that kept me from being present.

An intuitive reader once told me that my child wouldn’t play small. They would play big, and they would expand me into the man I need to be, to be a good father. The conversation shifted my perspective of fatherhood from an experience that would restrict my freedom to one that would expand me beyond what I could even imagine. I feel the truth of that expansion now, from all the growth I went through to get here, before my child is even born.

Parents talk about how hard the first few months with a newborn is — the sleepless nights, the diaper changes, the nonstop feeding. I’m sure it will be challenging.

But in this moment, I’m also just tearing up with gratitude that I get to have those precious, hard experiences at all. Those challenging chapters in my journey could have turned out vastly different, and I wouldn’t be here on the cusp of fatherhood.

And in the hard moments and sleepless nights that will inevitably come with having a child, I trust myself to anchor back into the gratitude that fatherhood is even a possible life experience for me.

What a gift that truly is.