Hani. Six years old, turning seven in August. I walked into the playroom to check on progress. Zeeves was sitting cross-legged on the floor playing a small brown toy guitar my parents had brought her. Yaana was flipping through her fuzzy rainbow notebook, looking at old drawings. And Hani was grabbing toys and putting them into their baskets, one by one, the only person in the room actually doing the job. I stood in the doorframe. Zeeves -yellow light. Yaana- yellow light. Hani, you’re the only green light in there. And he’d go back in satisfied. That’s who he is at his best - earnest, a little needy in the way I secretly love, the kid who just wants to know he’s doing okay.

By noon he was a different creature entirely.

Join the Journey

It started with a nasheed. The girls were singing a song he’d claimed as his own. Qalbi fil madinah. My heart is in Medina. And apparently so was his patience, because he had none left. He came to find me in the living room. My wife had just handed me an iced coffee - her homemade cold brew in a Bodum glass, nutmeg sprinkled over the cold foam, the kind of thing that means a Sunday is supposed to go well - and I’d had about a minute to sit with it, slowly swirling the foam into the coffee, before Hani arrived. My wife was beside me, her own glass balanced precariously on the sofa ledge, already on a call, Hani trying to climb over her to register his complaint.

He didn’t want reassurance this time. He came in hot.

She handed it to me with her eyes. I took over. I tried to redirect, tried to talk it through. He escalated. So I threw him over my shoulder, carried him upstairs, and we wrestled.

This is a thing I do with Hani. Physical energy needs somewhere to go, and if I don’t give it a destination, he finds one on his own. I told him if he could count to ten while I pinned him, he could go back downstairs. He fought back hard. His sisters heard the commotion and came in, which made everything worse, so I locked the door and threw him on the bed.

And then he went somewhere I hadn’t seen before.

There were tears - real ones, the kind that come from somewhere deep and involuntary. But the fury underneath them was something else. He was scratching, kicking, screaming. This was not the child who asked me three times if he was doing a good job. This was a lion cub who had decided that his baba was the enemy, and he was going to communicate that clearly.

I hate you.

I love you.

You’re stupid and you’re ugly and you’re dumb.

That one made me pause. Not because it hurt - I’m a grown man, I can absorb words from a six-year-old. What stopped me was the question underneath: where did he learn that this was the right thing to say in this moment? How did he know that ugly and dumb were the words you reach for when you want to wound someone you love?

And then a scratch. A small one, on my forearm. And something happened.

I was in the back of a living room in Kansas City. My phuphoo’s apartment. My dad’s sister’s place. I don’t remember what I’d done - I remember the feeling. I was eight years old and I wanted to run, and I couldn’t run, and I was flailing my limbs at a man who was just holding me. Pinning me down. Not laughing. Not angry. Just holding me until whatever it was passed through.

I came back when I felt the scratch.

Here’s what I understood in that moment, looking at my son: I had done this. I had been this exact child in this exact state, convinced that my father was the enemy, and my father had just held on. He hadn’t taken the bait. He hadn’t matched my fury with his. He had absorbed it. And I was looking at a six-year-old who needed the same thing.

I’m beautiful on the inside, I told him. And I know I’m smart because I know what my son needs right now.

He threw a pillow. Then a towel. Then he reached for the mason jar on my wife’s bedside table.

I let him throw the pillow and the towel. The mason jar was different - I drew the line there, quietly, and he knew I meant it. He made a run for the door. I blocked it. He knocked over the Dieffenbachia (basically a bamboo like tree with big leaves) - the one my wife had just repotted, the one that had lost most of its leaves over winter and was slowly, carefully trying to grow back. Soil went everywhere. He looked at me with those eyes. The ones that say: what are you going to do about it?

He wasn’t going to leave until that room was clean.

Then I looked at him properly. His face was flushed. He’d been sobbing so hard for so long that he had no tears left - just the ragged breathing and the red cheeks and that particular exhaustion that lives just underneath rage. I filled the mason jar and held it out.

He told me he didn’t want water.

I told him I was going to let go of it anyway.

He watched the jar start to tilt, grabbed it, then looked at me. Baba, can you give it to me please. Fine. I gave him a sip. He said that’s enough. I said it wasn’t, not after crying that long. He considered this, then drank almost half the jar, and somewhere in there his breathing changed.

I told him about something from Islam. If you’re standing and you’re angry, drink water and sit down. If you’re sitting and you’re still angry, lie down. Let your body change what your mind can’t. And the reason, I told him, is that when we have too much energy and nowhere to put it, there’s a little squirrel that gets loose inside the rocket ship and starts pressing buttons at random.

He laughed. Not a big laugh. A small one, surprised out of him.

Baba, I need a hug.

I know, baby. Come here.

We sat at the edge of the bed for a few minutes. Then I asked him: vacuum and fix the room, or shower, change, and fix it after? He chose the shower. I vacuumed up the soil while he was in there - the Dieffenbachia back in its pot, still intact, still trying - and when he came out smelling like Herbal Essences shampoo from Costco, we fixed the room together. By 12:15 he was in the car with his sisters, heading to his grandparents’ house, asking about lunch.

I thought about my dad the whole drive back.

When I dropped the kids off, I mentioned to him that I’d been writing. That I write about his mindset sometimes. He smiled. Not a big smile. Just a quiet one, the kind that means something landed without needing to be said out loud.

My son called me ugly and dumb. He was wrong about ugly. And the dumb part - I don’t know. I still do some stupid things. But that afternoon, holding on while he threw everything he had at me, I think I got close to understanding what a good father actually looks like.

It looks a lot like my dad in a Kansas City living room. Holding on. Not matching it. Just staying.

He smiled when I told him I’d been writing about him.

That’s enough for me.

You see someone on the playground with the same light-up sneakers as you. “Wanna be friends?” you ask, with the casual confidence of someone who has never once been told no in a way that stayed with them. And just like that, you have a friend. Nobody tells you that you will spend your adult life quietly grieving that simplicity.

My eldest figured it out in about thirty seconds last spring.

We were at a petting zoo. The kind of event that shows up in your calendar after your wife organizes with two weeks of group chats and a laminated sign-up sheet, and I show up to having packed exactly nothing. Zeeves spotted a girl her age near the goats. Walked up to her. Said something I couldn’t hear. The girl laughed. Zeeves laughed. They disappeared together toward the rabbits.

That was it. That was the whole process.

I stood there, watching her go holding my phone . And I felt something I wasn’t expecting. Not pride, though that was there too. Something quieter. Something closer to loss. Like I was watching a version of myself I used to be - easy with people, unbothered by the possibility of no - disappear around the corner with her.

I became a father in my mid-twenties, when everyone in my social circle was either busy climbing up the corporate ladder, getting engaged or just starting to figure out who they wanted to be. For a while, I was the most responsible one in the group by default - the one who knew where the nearest hospital was, who carried Tylenol, who left parties early because someone needed to be up at seven for day care.

Then September 15th, 2021. Yana was exactly five months old and the other two were going chaotic. My wife asked if i could take a kid with me, so I brought her in the car seat attachment and drove to my buddy’s house to do some wedding choreo in his basement. She slept through the whole thing, completely unbothered, while eight grown men tried to remember which foot went first.

I remember when i walked into the basement , the guys saw the car seat, looked at me, and went: “Waaow, sir ji - baby coming in tow as well! What a cheetah yaar! Balancing a kid and the boys at the same time.”

Everyone laughed. I laughed. It was a good line.

But I remember driving home that night thinking: that’s what I am now. The guy who brings the baby. The one who gets the impressed-but-also-pitying compliment for simply showing up. My friends were in the part of life where weekends were still theirs. I was in the part where you negotiate a two-hour window with your wife and show up grateful for it.

Neither life was wrong. They just weren’t the same life anymore.

The loneliness of fatherhood has its own particular flavor. It isn’t emptiness -how could it be, when there is always someone needing something from you. Kids want your attention. Your wife needs your help. Work wants the extra hours. Your parents haven’t seen you. The guys want to grab dinner. You are surrounded, and you are needed. But somewhere in all of that, before the bills piled high and the milk bottles filled the sink, there was a version of you that existed before the roles. Before what your wife wants you to wear. Before what your kids need you to be. And the longing for someone who knew that version of you - or who is also out there trying to find their own - can feel enormous.

We as humans need one another. Doesn’t matter how introverted you are, how much you tell yourself you just need your own space. Loneliness takes away from who we are. It takes away what makes our soul so rich in color. It’s the friendships, the company, the small experiences we have with each other. That’s the kind of species we are.

Back at the petting zoo, while Zeeves and her new best friend were already sharing stories near the rabbit pen, I noticed a man sitting on a bench maybe twenty feet away. Scrolling his phone the way you scroll when you’re not really reading anything, just giving your hands something to do. His kid was somewhere in the mix. His wife was probably talking to my wife. And he was just kinda sorta there. Present and completely alone.

I recognized it immediately. That particular stillness.

I didn’t walk over. I wanted to. I had the whole conversation in my head before I’d taken a single step. And then I didn’t take the step, and the moment passed, and I went back to holding my phone.

This is the ritual, I think, for dads at playgrounds and library events and petting zoos. Two kids run off together. Two moms start talking. Two dads stand near each other, look up, make eye contact, give the slow nod down - the one that means I see you, I’m not a threat, we’re in the same boat - and then both of them look back at their phones.

Share

A few months later, during Ramadan, our wives had become close through the homeschooling pod they were building together. The man from the bench - Moh - organized a dinner at his place for the husbands. I walked in and almost immediately recognized someone across the room. He used to be my younger brother’s classmate. Used to come to our LAN parties back in the day. Hadn’t crossed paths in years. Turns out he’d found his way into the same circle.

Moh had made deer kebabs. I’d never had deer meat before, and didn’t know what to expect, and his wife had made biryani as well. We sat down, started eating, and the kebabs became the jumping point for a conversation about hunting that I also knew nothing about and enjoyed completely. That’s how it started. Not with a deep conversation about life and loneliness and what it means to be a dad finding himself. Just kebabs, biryani, and a bunch of guys figuring out if they liked each other.

We did.

The second time we met, Moh suggested Suhoor at Denny’s. Four in the morning, the fast about to begin. He insisted on picking me up from my in-laws rather than letting me drive alone. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll have more chats on the way.” So we all piled into one car, drove through the dark, and got to Denny’s with maybe forty minutes before Fajr.

One of the guys arrived about ten minutes before the fast was supposed to begin. He leads prayers at the masjid- a man of genuine religious standing. We’d ordered for him in advance to save time.

They brought out his plate.

Extra bacon. All over it.

He stared at it. We stared at him. And then we lost it. He had to send it back, wait for a new one, and eat his Suhoor in about four minutes flat while we watched and tried not to look directly at him. He made it. Barely. We still bring it up every time we see him.

That’s a marble, if you know the concept. Brené Brown talks about trust being built like a marble jar. Small moments deposited one at a time, slowly filling something you can’t rush. You remember the detail about someone’s kid. You show up when it’s inconvenient. You share a moment that becomes a story you both tell forever. The jar fills. Strangers become the people you’d call at 4am.

The bacon plate was a marble. The carpool was a marble. Moh picking me up from my in-laws’ driveway before most of the city was awake was a marble.

He went first. At the petting zoo, at the dinner, at the Denny’s run. I watched him from a bench and said nothing, and he still found his way to making it happen.

I look back at those days sometimes. How easy it was to connect without a care in the world. No what will he think of me. No will we even have anything in common. Just two people, same sneakers, done deal.

Now it’s fifty questions before the first move. And even then, before I say anything, there’s a quieter question underneath all of them: do I need to put on a mask for this? Which version of me shows up? Will I fit in? or will we actually belong together?

Zeeves never asks any of that. She just walks up.

I’m working on remembering how to do the same

It was Friday afternoon, and I was running on my third night with lack of sleep, a headache building behind my right eye, and a podcast launch that still wasn’t done. The render was going. My wife was finishing edits. The couch in the loft was calling me by name.

He came up anyway.

“Baba, you haven’t wrestled with me in a while.”

I looked at him. Six years old and already fluent in the art of the perfectly timed request.

“Okay Bhaiya (brother)”.

We wrestled on the bed, him pinning me, me pinning him, the girls piling in, a full five minutes of absolute chaos. And then my wife appeared in the doorway and said, in the gentle but unmistakable tone of a woman who is powerless to edit audio that her sleep deprived husband for seventy-two straight hours, needed me back to do the same thing. In exchange she offered to drop Haani and Zeeves to their next class. I restarted the render. Nobody slept.

Later in the evening, we were at a late family gathering over dinner. Cousins, family friends, the particular warm noise of a South Asian gathering that doesn’t really need a reason to happen. I found a plate of food and a room with the guys and started eating.

Haani found his friend.

They’d wrestled before, a few weeks back, and Haani had talked about it the whole ride over. His friend could take a hit. His friend was fun. Tonight, Haani had energy left over from the day and nowhere to put it, and seeing his friend offered the perfect solution.

Except his friend didn’t want to wrestle.

He said it. Clearly. “No, I don’t want to.”

Haani heard it as the first move. A little shove back. An invitation.

I saw it from across the room. I said his name, once, from behind a piece of home made naan that I hadn’t finished chewing. He kept going. I said it again. He pushed the kid harder. The kid said stop. I saw Haani’s hand go up. I swallowed the last piece of chicken.

And then my son had slapped him.

Not a tap. A slap. I watched my kid’s hand meet his friend’s cheek. I watched his eyes gloss over as the poor kid tried to hold it together.

I yelled.

Not a raised voice. Not a firm tone. My “Father” voice. The one I had kept sealed away for exactly this kind of emergency, the one I hadn’t used since before Haani was born, the one that came out of me without permission and landed on every child in that room at once. All of them froze. Even the ones who weren’t involved went silent.

I called him over.

I asked him do you want to talk about it now or in a few minutes.

He said, “I want to see mama”.

And I let him go.

A girl across the room turned to me, wide-eyed. “I’ve never heard that voice from you,” she said. “That was scary.”

I know, I thought. I know.

Share

Haani disappeared into the hallway towards his mama’s side and didn’t come back out.

Later, I found him moping through the hallway. Not crying. Just... deflated. Shuffling between rooms without making eye contact. Doing that thing kids do when they know they’ve done something wrong and it it weighs heavy on them but they can’t articulate it.

“Haani,” I said. “Let’s go talk.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“We’re going to go talk.”

I took him into the mud room. The small one off the front entrance, where they keep the cubbies for shoes and winter coats. It’s not a room you’d choose for a conversation. It’s maybe 12 square feet and faintly smells of winter shoes and spices. But it had a door, and that was enough.

He didn’t sit. He went underneath one of the cubbies. Folded himself into the corner behind the shoe slots, knees to chest, back against the wall.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stay with you.”

And I sat down on the floor beside the cubbies and I waited.

There’s a thing that happens when you stop trying to fix a child. When you stop trying to fix the thing that happened. It’s something i learned from years of being a husband that sometimes when a problem appears, you don’t need to rush into fixing it. When you decide, against every instinct, not to lecture, not to explain, not to rush the resolution. The silence takes over. And the silence has to go somewhere.

It took a few minutes. Then, very quietly

“I need a hug.”

Not an apology. Not an admission. Just the most honest sentence a six-year-old knows how to say.

I gave him a hug. A long one. I didn’t pull away from the hug first.

Then we talked. I asked him why he wanted to wrestle so badly. He said they’d wrestled before and it was great. He said I had wrestled with him that very afternoon. He said he just wanted to do that thing again, and he didn’t understand why it wasn’t okay.

And then the light bulb went off.

He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. He was trying to recreate something that had felt good. He was six, and the only model he had for what his friend wanted was what he himself wanted, and what he wanted was more of what Baba had given him that afternoon.

I reminded him about the time at Islamic school, where him and Zeeves played tag with the kids. How one of them hit him on the head, and it hurt him, even though they were just playing, even though they didn’t mean it. I asked him, “since the other kids were playing did that mean that it didn’t hurt you”?

He thought about it.

“No,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “Exactly.”

We sat with that for a moment.

Then I told him I wasn’t upset at him. That sometimes we get carried away. That now we know. That if someone says “no”, that’s a complete sentence and we stop. That we want to be kind to our friends because we want to keep our friends.

“Yeah,” he said. He was still somewhere far away. Still processing .

“Baby,” I said. “Let’s do our affirmations.”

He looked at me like I was suggesting something mildly ridiculous.

We did them anyway. I am strong. I am brave. I am kind. I am compassionate. Standing in the mud room, the two of us, in front of an audience of jackets and shoes, just saying it out loud.

Then I looked at him.

“Can you squat?”

“I can’t squat,” he said, very seriously.

“Can you do a frog?”

He thought about it. Then he squatted. Then I squatted. Then I hopped over him, and he started laughing, and I hopped again, and then we were both hopping around this tiny room like absolute idiots until someone opened the door and his friend was standing there, wanting to play.

Haani ran out to join him.

There is a voice I keep for emergencies. My father gave it to me without meaning to, just by using it himself, and I understand now what he was doing. It’s not a voice for anger. It’s a voice for stop. A voice that says: whatever is happening right now, we are not going to let it go any further.

But that voice only does one thing. It stops the moment.

Everything after it is slower work. The mud room. The cubbies. The floor. The waiting.

I didn’t know, when I sat down beside him in that little room, whether he would talk or not. I just knew that if I kept trying to reach him, he’d stay shut. So I stopped trying. And eventually he told me the only thing he actually needed to say.

I need a hug.

I think about that a lot. The yell stopped him. But it wasn’t the yell that brought him back. It was the sitting. The not leaving.

I still have my father’s voice. I hope I’m learning, slowly, to be better at what follows.

It was Wednesday evening. I pulled into the parking lot of Masjid at 7:50, ten minutes after the kids asked. That’s on purpose. Every time I show up on time, it’s “five more minutes, Baba.” So now I build in the buffer and give them the time they’d ask for anyway.

I found Zeeves and Haani exactly where I expected them. Running. Laughing. The last two kids in the lot.

“Baba, why’d you come so late?”

I smiled. “Baby, every time I come on time, you guys want more time with your friends. So I gave it to you.”

She thought about that for a second. Then we got in the car.

I asked them the question I always ask. Not “how was your day” - that gets you nothing. I asked what the most interesting thing was that happened. Let them pick the story. Let it come out naturally.

Oh boy, did it come out naturally.

“Oh yeah,” Zeeves said from the back seat. “We got bullied.”

I kept my eyes on the road. “I’m sorry, what, Jaani?”

“Yeah. We got bullied. These two kids.”

My brain did what brains do. It started running. Who were these kids. How old. What happened. Do I need to call someone. Do I need to go back. Do I need to put them in self-defense classes. Do I need to tell them to hit back harder next time. I could feel my amygdala going into a full spiral, building a case before I even had the facts.

I paused. Took a breath.

I didn’t say any of that. I asked her to walk me through it.

The story she gave me was calm. Almost flat. Some kids had made fun of her dress. Called her short. Said mean things. And then, almost as an aside, Haani mentioned they’d been hit on the head.

“Wait. They hit you?”

“Yeah, while we were playing.”

I felt the temperature in my chest tick up a few degrees. But then I asked what they did about it. They stopped playing with them and left. I asked if they told a teacher. They said class had already ended - no teachers around. Okay. That’s actually the right answer. Crisis managed. I filed it away.

We stopped at Dada house to pick up Yana. She’d been there all evening, and you could tell - her toys were scattered across the coffee table in the living room, the particular chaos of a kid who’d had the run of the place. My sister was sitting on the sofa. I sat at the other end. Zeeves came in, went straight to her auntie, wrapped her arms around her in a hug, and settled in between us.

My sister asked how her day was.

“Oh, it was good. And we got bullied.”

My sister’s face did the same thing mine had done in the car. Zeeves ran through it again. Same version. Calm, mostly. The dress, the names, the tap on the head.

My sister’s response was immediate.

“Baby, if they hit you, you should hit them back.”

Zeeves and Haani laughed and ran off. I looked at my sister. She looked back at me. “I’d have basically said punch the kid in the mouth.”

I laughed. Because the younger version of me would have said exactly that. I still tell my kids - if someone hits you on purpose, you make sure you hit them back twice as hard so they don’t do it again. That’s not nothing. I still believe it.

But something felt off. Not with my sister. With the story. Like my heart was listening to the details and quietly flagging something it couldn’t name yet. Something was missing and I didn’t know what.

I filed it away. We drove home.

I parked. The kids ran upstairs. I hung up my jacket, took my time, came up maybe five minutes later.

I was halfway up the stairs when I stopped.

Zeeves was in the loft, in her mom’s arms. Crying. Her fists were bunched in the fabric of her mom’s shirt, face tucked in close. Not the composed Zeeves who told me the story in the car. Not the Zeeves who recounted it for her auntie like a news anchor. This was a completely different kid. Same Wednesday. Same events.

I stood in the middle of the stairs and watched.

My wife listened. Then she asked questions. Not the questions I’d asked. I had asked what happened and what did you do. My wife asked why. Why do you think they said that. How do you usually play with them. What do you call them when you’re playing together.

And that’s when the story changed.

Zeeves got quiet for a second. Then she said it. She called them names too. “Too tall.” Something else she couldn’t quite remember. They’d been going back and forth for a while, actually. And the hitting on the head, my wife gently worked out, was part of a game of tag.

Haani confirmed it. “Yeah, we were playing tag. He touched our heads when he tagged us.”

My wife looked at Zeeves. “Baby. If you call them names, they’re going to call you names.”

Zeeves started to protest. He said something about my dress. And yeah, my wife said. And you started it.

Then my wife gave them something to work with. If someone makes fun of you, repeat what they said back to them, say “Okay,” and walk away. Or ask them what makes them say that. Simple. Calm. Disarming.

I was standing on the stairs running my own mental toolkit. Full disclaimer - I haven’t updated it in a while. I’m rubber you are glue, bounces off me and lands on you. Or the classic: I know you are but what am I.

My wife was giving them something that might actually work. I was reaching for the third grade.

No punishment. No drama. Just a quiet landing.

I was still standing on the stairs when it hit me.

That feeling from Dada house - the one I couldn’t name, the quiet flag my heart had raised - this was what it was pointing at. The story wasn’t done. I just didn’t know it yet because I wasn’t asking the right questions.

I went in there to fix the problem. My wife wanted to understand it.

She wasn’t building a case. She sat with Zeeves in the loft, arms around her, and kept asking why until she got to the bottom of it. She wasn’t listening to figure out what to do next. She was listening because she genuinely wanted to know.

Same child. Same Wednesday.

I got the report. But she got the truth.

I keep turning that over. Because I thought I was doing the right thing. And maybe I was, in my way. But there’s a difference between listening to figure out what to do next and listening to actually understand. I closed that file before I’d even finished reading it.

Zeeves was in the loft. Her mom had her. Her fists were still bunched in that shirt.

And I was halfway up the stairs, watching from outside the moment.

I’m still thinking about that.

Auti-khala had given them the bugs the day before, as part of their Eid gifts.

Not just any bugs. Build-your-own bugs. Little kits with connectable legs and wings and antennae, the kind of toy that sounds cheap until your kids dump them out onto the floor and suddenly you have thirty minutes of silence. That kind of toy.

The kids had been obsessed since they opened them. And then the next morning came. Another Eid gathering, brunch at a friend’s place, eleven o’clock, everyone dressed and ready to walk out the door.

My wife had told them they could bring a few toys so they wouldn’t get bored. So there they were, living room floor, right beside the coffee table, packing up their bugs to take with them.

Yana was carrying Zeeves’s beetle over from the playroom. Orange and black and brown, one of those ones that looks almost real if you squint. She was bringing it to her sister.

And then she dropped it.

She didn’t mean to. You could see it in her face, the small horror of a five-year-old watching something come apart in her hands. She looked up and said the word she always says when she needs her sister: Benna. Big sister.

Zeeves did not respond the way a big sister is supposed to respond.

“Yana, why’d you break it?”

Not a question. An accusation. Screamed at a five-year-old who had been trying to help her.

My wife was faster than me.

“Zeeves. That’s not how we say this. It was an accident. How would you feel if somebody talked to you like that?”

Zeeves mumbled. That sullen, reluctant mumble of an eight-year-old who knows she’s wrong and doesn’t want to admit it.

“No.”

“So how can we say it differently?”

A long pause. Then, with the enthusiasm of someone paying a parking fine: “Okay. You broke it, Yana.” Complete with the eye roll.

My wife looked at her. “That’s not how we say it.”

Another pause. Another reluctant attempt. And then, finally, begrudgingly, a softer version. Not warm, but softer.

Yana, still teary-eyed, handed over the beetle.

Zeeves took it. Started fixing it. Standing right there in her Eid clothes beside the coffee table, holding the little orange and black pieces, concentrating. And then her hands slipped. The beetle fell. Hit the floor. Broke in almost the exact same way.

I didn’t plan what I did next. It just came out.

I looked at Zeeves and said, in her exact voice, with her exact tone:

“Zeeves, why’d you break it?”

Same inflection. Same edge. Same accusation dressed up as a question.

She froze.

Share

I paused there. Let it sit. Let her hold the feeling for just a moment. The smallness of being spoken to that way. The sting of it. The way it lands somewhere in your chest before you’ve even had a chance to decide how to feel.

Then I came next to her.

“Baby. How did that feel?”

She nodded. Small. Quiet.

“That’s how Yana felt, meri jaan.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Something had moved behind her eyes. Not guilt exactly, but something beside it. Something that looked more like understanding. Like a bulb turning on.

She fixed the beetle. Handed it back to Yana. Gently this time.

We made it to brunch. Late, but we made it.

I don’t know if she’ll remember that moment. Kids are interesting that way. They absorb things in ways you can’t track or predict. There’s no formula for it. But I think about it sometimes, the way a lesson has to be felt before it can be understood. Not explained. Not lectured into existence.

Felt.

My wife had done everything right. The questions, the redirection, the patient coaching. All correct. All good parenting, exactly as it’s supposed to look.

But Zeeves didn’t really understand until she was standing in the same spot, holding the same broken thing, hearing her own words come back to her in the same tone.

That’s the thing about empathy. You can’t teach it.

You can only help someone stumble into it.

Have you ever watched your kid finally understand something because they felt it — not because you explained it? I’d love to hear about it.

That’s the same kid in this story.

On Friday, it started in the car on the way to my sister-in-law’s house. Twenty minutes. Enough time for a quick nap. Or so I thought.

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“I hate this.”

“You’re disgusting.”

Five minutes of that, then silence. She’d crashed. I thought we were good.

We pulled into the driveway and my oldest, full of love and zero situational awareness, leaned into the back seat and announced,

“Guys, we’re here!”

My youngest opened her eyes. Not the slow, warm kind of waking up. The kind where someone cuts your nap short and you come back into the world furious about it.

Inside the house, things took a bit before they settled. Then I heard a scream from the living room. Then the stomping began. Then the full negotiation collapse over who gets which toy and who gets to play with baby cousin.

Me, sitting comfortably on the sofa, asked her to reset. We do up-and-downs on the stairs. Sometimes three, five, up to nine. Usually it works.

Not this time.

My wife was sitting beside me on the sofa. She leaned over and said quietly, “Let her know her feelings are okay. But her actions aren’t.”

Right. I got this. I know this.

So I waited for her to come downstairs and I started talking. From the sofa. Under the really warm blanket.

Very comfortable. Very wise. Very much wrong.

Whatever I said, it landed like a spark on dry paper. She went from whining to fully ballistic. She stood at the top of the stairs and the ritual started.

“You’re so rude.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“I hate you.”

Then she came down and parked herself on the back side of the sofa, just out of sight, visibly muttering it all over again to herself.

She was way past the point where anything I was saying could reach her.

I knew what was happening. Her amygdala was hijacked. That’s the part of the brain that processes logic, and it had basically gone offline. You can’t reason someone back from that place, especially a four-year-old. And you definitely cannot lecture them calm from a sofa.

I knew all of this.

And I was still sitting there. Because that blanket was really, genuinely comfortable.

I got up.

I picked her up. She didn’t even register it. Still screaming, blood-curdling. I asked if she wanted to go upstairs or downstairs to talk. She didn’t answer. So I carried her down the hallway into the washroom, her still going the entire way.

My sister-in-law’s washroom is not a normal washroom. It’s painted all black with gold fixtures. There’s a giraffe on the toilet reading a newspaper. A Mona Lisa with a clothespin on her nose. And on the wall, a chalkboard keeping score.

Two columns, labeled Poop and Pee.

The favorite words of any four-year-old.

I pointed at the giraffe first. She kept screaming.

I pointed at the Mona Lisa. She slowed down, looking around.

Then I pointed at the chalkboard.

“Jaani can you count how many people peed?”

She stopped.

Looked at the board.

“One... two... three... four... five... six.”

“And how many times did somebody poop?”

“One... two... three... four.”

Her voice had gone from a scream to a whisper. She was still sniffling. But she was back.

“Baby, are you having big feelings?”

A small whimper. “Yes.”

“That’s okay, love. Big feelings are allowed. The stomping and the screaming, we’ve got to work on that. But the feelings? Those are okay.”

She nodded.

“Do you need a hug?”

“Yes.”

We stood in that strange black bathroom with the giraffe watching us and we hugged for a full minute. Then I carried her back down the hallway.

The living room was exactly as we’d left it. The kids were on the carpet in the middle of the room playing with baby cousin. My sister-in-law was nearby. My wife was still by the sofa, watching us come back.

Nobody made a thing of it.

My youngest climbed in beside me under the blanket, tucked herself in, and stayed there for five quiet minutes while the room carried on around her.

Then she was ready to go.

I’ve thought about that a lot since. Not the bathroom. Not the counting. What I keep coming back to is how long I stayed on that sofa, comfortable, and very certain I could handle it from where I was sitting, and how completely wrong I was about that.

She needed me to move. To come to her. To change the environment before trying to change her state. She needed a grown-up to help her regulate what was running wild.

I knew that. And I stayed put anyway.

There’s probably a version of this where I give you the steps. But honestly, I’m more interested in the sofa. In how easy it is to know the right thing and still choose the warm, comfortable, slightly lazy version of it. To manage from a distance instead of showing up in the room.

She kissed my bruise a few days ago. Just because it was there and it hurt.

I’m still learning how to do what comes naturally to her.

Have you ever had to deal with a full blown meltdown? What was your way of dealing with it? I’d love to hear more

You know, it’s like when people say things like, damn it, like, shit, I spilled my coffee. You’re like, oh, come on, man, really? When someone cuts them off in traffic.

For me, it was a Jamaican word called bumbaclut. And over the last few months I was using it A LOT.

I picked it up at work back when I worked at a car rental company, and I never looked it up. To me it sounded kind of funny and you could say it in a way like oomph - kind of like “the F***” but not the same amount of horror from others.

Then someone told me it was bad.

So I googled it.

Oh.

But by that point, my eight-year-old had already downloaded, installed, and had it on her hard drive.

Kids are like sponges, man.

They literally will take in everything.

And us as parents, especially as dads, they really pay attention to that.

So, Ramadan dinner at my family friend’s house. Food was great. The conversation was fantastic. It was like the kind of night where you reminisce with old buddies, and we’re just chilling talking about games.

Now, all the guys were in the basement, and because I’m the only one with kids, they came to the basement with me.

My oldest comes downstairs with this stuffed octopus, and she was told that they can play downstairs.

So you have the four of us friends and you’ve got my kids running around, yelling, doing what kids do, you know.

Then they decided to play a game with the octopus.

They chose monkey in the middle.

Now this octopus is flying here and there.

My oldest reaches it and grabs it just a second before my son does.

My son, unfortunately, clearly didn’t win, goes back to the middle, begrudgingly.

My oldest stands over him, and she’s full on beaming and her lungs are full, and all you hear is…

“BUMBACLUT!”

And the room goes silent.

And all the guys are wearing the exact same expression, you know, that like quiet, polite, like, oh shit, it’s about to be real.

And they’re all looking at me like, how are you gonna do this? And waiting for me to respond.

And I sat there for about a half a second.

I thought to myself, oh shit.

“Baby, we’re not gonna use that word, okay? It’s not a good word”.

Now she looked at me and said, she’s calm, but she’s half smiling.

“But Baba, you use that word all the time”.

There it is.

“Like, you know when someone’s being silly or when you’re upset”.

Now, to be fair, she wasn’t being defiant and she wasn’t testing me. She was just reporting what happened, like a small little news reporter who spent the last three months looking at how I act and feel and how I dealt with my emotions.

And now she did it all in front of my friends.

“Yes, I know. And baby, now I’m saying that we’re not gonna use that word, okay? It’s not a nice thing to say”.

And then came the question, the one that every parent has to eventually face.

You know, the one that you can actually sidestep or you meet.

“Well Baba, what does it mean?”

Now the easy answer is because I said so.

You see, I grew up with that answer and I get it. Sometimes it’s the right call, but like, I also remember what it did to my curiosity as a kid. And to be frank, it didn’t kill it.

If anything, it just sent me underground and I’d go Google it anyways. I’d find out whether it’s through other kids or the internet. I’d piece it together and I’d find out a less careful way than should have been.

And I didn’t wanna give her that.

“Baby, Baba just found out recently that it’s not a nice word to call anyone. And you know what? We’re gonna stop saying it, both of us”.

“In fact, all of us. Going forward, it’s gonna be one of those words where if you say it, there are gonna be consequences”.

And I paused.

“Including for Baba”.

And she looked at me.

“So Baba, if you say the word, you’re gonna do the up and down like 10 times, 20 times?”.

She’s talking about the stairs. See, we have this thing at home, when someone gets super overwhelmed, losing it, spinning out of control, we walk up and down the stairs.

Sometimes it’s 10, sometimes it’s 20, but it’s physical movement to interrupt the emotional spiral that is happening. And it honestly started as a reset for the kids, but somewhere along the way, I started doing it too, and they noticed.

“Yes, Jaani. If anybody in this family says that word, they will do the stairs. 10 times, 20 times. Okay?”

Now she looks at me at the moment. And not the type where she’s looking like, oh, well, maybe I should get out of this.

It’s the other one. That’s when she’s trying to figure out if she needs to decide if she’s gonna trust it or not.

“Okay, Baba”.

“Thank you, Meri Jaan (my love)”.

And that’s the moment.

It wasn’t the yelling. There was no confrontation. No clever parenting move or hack you know?

Just two words spoken quietly by an eight-year-old who decided to take me at my word. Just like the words she took before.

Okay, Baba.

And honestly, I didn’t handle this perfectly, but I’ve been using this word for months without thinking. Like, this whole thing was my fault, but something shifted in that exchange, you know?

And one of those friends named it right after that conversation. And he said

“You know what I respect? That you said you’d have the consequence too. Because growing up it was always like one-sided, like, you took the time to explain at a level for her to understand, and then you held yourself to that same rule”.

And that’s it. That’s exactly it. You see, she accepted the boundary not because I pulled rank on her, because I was older than her or because I said so.

She accepted it because the rule applied to me too. And the consequence I’d be held to was one she already knew, the one we built together, and the one that already existed in our house before that night. So it wasn’t invented to control her, it was just extended to include her and me.

Kids feel it immediately.

Now, I’m not writing this as someone who’s figured out parenting, I really don’t. I still catch myself mid-pattern making repairs in public and hoping my kids remember the repair more than the mess, right?

Sometimes that steady hand of gentle parenting, it feels, hella shaky, but for now, here’s what I keep coming back to.

Rules that only go one way, they feel like control. But if the rule flows both ways, then it feels like a family thing.

Baba doesn’t have to always be right, okay? She needs to see me when I’m wrong. And then she needs to see me do something about it, not some sort of speech, not a lesson, just the thing itself.

You gotta be accountable in front of your kid. You gotta model it loudly in front of everybody.

So the moment I said, “you know, including for Baba”, I stopped being the authority in the room, and I became the same level as her and that rule applied to me. And then it settled.

OK, Baba.

And that’s the win.

Small, loud, and it was completely mine.

Y’all ever have a moment like this when your kid mirrored exactly what you do and the reflection wasn’t the best thing?

Drop it in the comments. I’d genuinely love to hear how you navigated it.

— Shahmeran

I was sitting on the bed and and my kids were playing around.

My oldest decided to go to her room and get a stuffy.

Then I heard a thump against the laundry door.

“OUCH!!”

I could hear my eldest complain about the door and how her arm was throbbing.

Me, being a smartass decided to say something sarcastic.

“Baby, the door was always there. You have to be careful when you walk love”

Fast forward 4 days and we are getting ready to go to an dinner.

Its 5pm and I’m ironing everyone’s clothes.

We are late.

I hear my wife asking me to give the kids clothes in our room.

So i left the iron on the ironing platform, steaming away and grabbed, atleast by my standards, a nicely ironed shalwar kameez (tradition garment).

Once I laid the clothes on our bed, I walked back towards the, now steaming iron.

BANG -

“OUCH —-Bumbaclute!!”

I controlled my self from dropping anything super profane ( Atleast that was until i learned what Bumbaclute really meant - ya’ll can google it yourself 😅).

“Baba, are you okay“ - my eldest asked me from the room.

Me still nursing my bruised arm, replied “ Yes meri Jaan “ ( yes my love).

“ I just hurt myself on the door handle“.

“Well baba you know .. the door was always there“.

And i just started laughing - She remembered exactly what I had told her when she hurt her arm.

But then i saw my youngest walk out of our room.

“ Baba where did you get hurt?“.

I showed her my arm.

And then next thing i see is my youngest caressing my now red arm.

and she gently kissed it.

“Its okay baba. it’ll get better soon”.

Kids are amazing.

Have you ever had your kid throw your own words back at you in a way that made you stop and think? What happened? I’d love to hear about it.