The best way to let someone know you love them is to show them. Doing still beats saying any day. But grand gestures take us far from our comfort zones.

Fathers can struggle here. And sometimes they succeed beyond our wildest dreams.

 

At Smarty Pant’s dance recital,

the final number was a choreographed father/daughter number to a medley of timeless dance songs.

Those dads stole  our hearts.

Rehearsing; learning all those dances and performing in front of hundreds of people. Wow. The dads got a glimpse of how important dancing was to their daughters. But the daughters will remember the noble efforts of their dads that night for the rest of their lives.

 

My niece and her husband have two sets of twins. Three are boys.

For their Tiger Scout graduation, the boys had a campout on board the USS Lexington. Aaron packed four sleeping bags: three adult bags and one kiddie bag.

That night, the boys immediately claimed all three large bags, leaving their dad with a 3-foot (neon green) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sleeping bag. To make it funnier, they also left him a top bunk- with a guard rail. Before an audience of giggling and teasing boys, Aaron squeezed his 6-foot frame into the bright green bag and wiggled and scrunched into the bunk.

Though Aaron got no sleep, the story of him aboard a World War II aircraft carrier in a Ninja Turtles sleeping bag will become part of his legacy.

 

My dad, the strongest man I ever knew, was afraid of needles.

Blood he was okay with. But the mere mention of a syringe cast a ghost-like pallor  over his face. When I was eight, I was riding on the back fender of a friend’s bike. Just as we rode past my house, I decided I was ready to stop.

I stuck my foot in the wheel. Sure we stopped, but my bare foot was sliced pretty bad.  I must have screamed for an hour. There was so much blood. One of the older boys on the street carried me home.

My dad put me on the sofa and went to get his car keys. “I’m pretty sure she’ll need stiches, “ I heard him tell my mother. I cried louder.

I stopped crying as soon as he put me into the back seat of the car. The eery stillness that had come over my dad was something I had never seen.

When the nurse started cleaning my wound. he turned away. And when the doctor began to stitch my foot, the nurse brought him a chair.

He held my hand through every stitch, then apologized when he found out I would also get a tetanus shot.

When it was over, we got root beer floats.

That night, my mother told me of my father’s phobia of needles. She told me how hard it was for them to see me in pain. I’m sure that i told her it was  harder for me.

But when I became a parent, I understood.

 

Being strong isn’t always easy. Being brave isn’t easy, even for dads.

But it’s sometimes just the superpower they need to get our attention.

Do you have a story about a dad who went above and beyond (maybe even way too far!) to show how much he loved his kid?

Please share them with us!