Growing Up.

Moving through this life while watching Sky grow up has been one of its great gifts. She’s six now, a talkative ball of energy. I have never been talked to this much in my life.

Today, she told me she has a bully. I can’t remember his name, but the kid sounds annoying, and she agrees that he is.

I can’t teach her to deal with bullies the way I was taught. The world has changed. You can’t just fight fire with fire anymore. Sometimes I feel like an old relic, waiting to be thrown into a dumpster or painted over. It’s interesting, really, realizing that some of the tools you were given might not be the ones your child needs.

I look at Sky and wonder if I’m equipped to teach her all the things she’ll need to know.

Shedia is. She has the right words, the right thoughts, the right way of understanding feelings and helping someone move through them.

Me? I’m a creative hammer. I’ll never hammer you the same way twice, but hammering is definitely my preferred method of squashing beef.

But fatherhood keeps asking me to become more than a hammer.

I can already see the young woman inside Sky fighting to emerge. She is reaching, growing, and demanding to be heard in a world that often finds it difficult to listen. I understand only a fraction of what she may face, but that fraction is enough to fill me with fear and worry.

I know, I know. Worrying ain’t never helped or prevented nothing.

Yet here I am, doing it anyway.

Sky is going to be herself. She is going to do her own thing. Maybe my job isn’t to have all the answers or clear every obstacle from her path. Maybe it is simply to walk beside her, listen when she speaks, and stay close enough that she can reach for my hand when she needs it.

She is becoming who she is meant to be.

I’m just grateful to be a witness.