A Christmas Reflection on Fathers and Sons

My boys and I were at a recent mass for my Father-in-law's funeral. As our parents age, I find myself trying to view seasons through their eyes.

“As you grow older, you begin to understand: your father was just a man trying his best with what he knew. Forgive him. He was living life for the first time, too.”

That quote crossed my social media feed sometime last week. It stopped me in my tracks. The kind of line you screenshot, not to repost, but to sit with. To let its meaning simmer as you move through the days that follow.

Several days later, as I come back to it, I’m still in a cycle of understanding.

December has a way of doing that. The year slows just enough to invite reflection. The calendar fills with traditions, memories, and expectations, while the quieter moments — the moments in between meetings, the early mornings, the late nights — seem to ask more complicated questions.

The past year has been filled with excitement and heartbreak. Triumphs and defeats. It’s been as humbling as it has been gratifying. And I say that because somewhere in the challenge, I’ve found a part of myself that had been trapped beneath the surface for far too long.

I’ve grown.

I don’t know that it’s accurate to say my creativity has “come back.” I’m not sure it ever had the chance to breathe in the first place.

What has changed is my willingness to explore things I’ve always been curious about —

It was just yesterday that we embarked on this parenthood journey. There are so many things I wish I could tell this younger version of myself.

without needing them to make sense or pay off immediately.

Over the past year, I’ve stopped treating curiosity as a distraction and started treating it as something worth staying with and learning new tools for. Building things that don’t yet work the way I hoped. Starting projects without knowing exactly where they’ll lead.

Not because I had a master plan — but because I was willing to stay with the learning.

And somewhere in that process, I found something familiar.

I remember being younger, sitting in my room for hours, taking apart old electronics, and experimenting with motors. Speakers. Wires. I wasn’t building anything impressive. I was trying to understand how things worked.

I’ve always had that curiosity. What I didn’t have was the courage to see it through — or the belief that it was worth anything beyond a private interest.

This year's Christmas tree hunt. I hope our adventures remain the prevalent memories of their childhoods.

As I’ve leaned into learning and exploration, I’ve found myself thinking more about my father—with greater perspective.

He modeled resilience. Resourcefulness. Grit. He was driven. He survived. He provided.

Those things mattered. They still do.

However, those qualities came with a cost.

Failure wasn’t a neutral experience in our house. If something could be measured, it carried expectations. And when it fell short, there were consequences.

A lost wrestling match came with a lecture about giving up. A bad soccer game was met with my effort being marginalized. A “C” in a class meant grounding. The message was clear: performance mattered above all else.

I tried to argue. I plead my case. I explained myself. But no matter what I said or how hard I worked, I never seemed to reach an acceptable standard.

Eventually, I stopped trying to defend myself. I shut down. I floundered. Not because I didn’t care, but because I felt success was unattainable.

As I look back, I know that his approach didn't come from a cruel place. It came from fear — fear that anything less than excellence would weaken our stability.

My father was wired to survive. That wiring didn’t come from nowhere. It was shaped long before I entered the picture, forged in circumstances far harsher than anything I’ve ever known.

And survival is efficient. It tightens standards. It demands results. It leaves little room for uncertainty, exploration, or visible failure.

That wiring kept him safe. It also made emotional closeness harder to access.

Giovanni, giving his GP some famous ear time, was an affectionate gesture so sweet it was impossible to turn down.

For a kid wired for curiosity, that environment made exploration feel dangerous. Trying something new meant risking approval. Failure didn’t feel instructional — it felt personal.

Understanding that difference has been part of my own growing up.

I can hold gratitude for what my father gave me, while still being honest about what I’m learning to give myself now.

Becoming a father myself has added another layer of understanding.

I don’t have this figured out. Not even close. There are reactions I wish I could take back. Moments where I didn’t show up the way my boys needed me to. Times when pressure spoke louder than patience, or frustration crowded out curiosity.

I see those moments more clearly now. And while I can’t undo them, I can acknowledge them — out loud, and in front of my kids.

Rather than staying stuck in regret, I choose to reflect, learn, and keep responding with a little more awareness than I had before. My hope isn’t that my sons see me as perfect, but that they see me as a work in progress.

Part of that work is owning my mistakes and treating them as catalysts for growth — modeling failure not as an endpoint, but as a path toward understanding.

We're all going through this life for the first time. I am beyond lucky that I get to share some of it with these two.

And in all of this, I find a gift to carry through the season.

A reminder that none of us gets a rehearsal. Not our fathers, or theirs. Not us, nor our own children.

We’re shaped by what we were given, learning—sometimes late, sometimes clumsily—how to carry it forward with greater awareness.

As Christmas approaches, I’m less focused on looking backward and more committed to staying open — to curiosity, to growth, and to compassion, for myself and for those around me.

And if I can meet that truth with a little more understanding — for my father, and for myself — that feels like something worth carrying into the year ahead.