Sometimes love shows up in the silence, not so much the words.

It’s Father’s Day weekend as I write this. The online and brick and mortar stores are full of “World’s Greatest Dad” mugs and ties that will hang unworn in closets. Social media will fill with perfectly curated photos of beaming families around barbecue grills and nostalgic black-and-white photos of their dad.

But I also know that many of you are sitting with something more complicated today that might not fit inside a Hallmark card or a cheerful Instagram post.

Not every father is a storybook one. And not every memory feels safe to revisit. The reality is that not every man who helped shape us knew how to hold us with the tenderness we needed.

And yet, here we are, shaped anyway, by what they gave us and what they couldn’t. By their presence and their absence. And especially by the love they offered and the love they withheld.

The fathers who lived in silence

I’m thinking about my own father today. He was deeply silent and deeply sorrowed. A man who lost his only son (my younger brother who died the day he was born), and never recovered from it. He carried that grief like a stone in his chest for the rest of his life.

My father barely spoke. Conversation just wasn’t his language. But his silence said everything I needed to hear.

I learned from him that some pain is too big for words. That men, especially men of his generation, usually carry their breaking in the quiet spaces between what they can say and what they feel. I learned that love doesn’t always come wrapped in verbal affirmations or physical affection.

His love lived in other places like the way he worked at jobs he hated to keep us stable. How he never missed milking the cow so we had milk on the table, even when he was exhausted. The way he’d sit with me at dawn at the breakfast table before his morning shift.

I used to wish he would talk more. Maybe ask me about my day or tell me he was proud. It took me years to understand that he was showing me love in the only language he knew how to speak.

The fathers we become

Then there’s my son Connor, who made me understand fatherhood from the inside out. The fierce protectiveness, the overwhelming love, the way a child can reorganize your entire universe just by existing. He celebrated me on mother’s day AND father’s day. Because he knew.

Connor, who now, from somewhere beyond this physical world, still holds me in ways I’m only beginning to understand. Who taught me that the relationship between parent and child doesn’t end with death. It just changes form.

Sometimes I feel him guiding me, especially when I’m working with parents who’ve lost children. There’s a particular quality of presence I can offer them that I never could before, a depth of understanding that only comes from walking that impossible path yourself.

He fathered something in me too. A capacity for holding the unbearable, for finding meaning in the meaningless, and for loving beyond the boundaries of life and death.

The complicated love stories

Father’s Day isn’t always barbecues and greeting cards. I think sometimes it’s a reckoning. And sometimes it’s a remembering. At the very least, it’s an invitation to meet the masculine inside and around us, with curiosity instead of blame.

I think of the clients I’ve worked with over the years:

The woman whose father was an alcoholic, whose chaos taught her self-reliance but also a hypervigilance she’s still learning to soften.

The man whose father left when he was seven, whose absence became a template for expecting abandonment that he’s now recognizing in his own relationships.

The daughter whose father was everything she needed. He was present, loving, and supportive, but whose death when she was twenty-five left her feeling like the world would never be safe again.

The son whose father was emotionally abusive, whose criticism still echoes in his head decades later, but who also taught him resilience and the fierce determination to be different.

All of these stories are true, and all of them are sacred. They contain both wounding and wisdom in the same moment.

What this day might stir in you

Who fathered you? And I don’t just mean biologically. Who were the masculine figures who shaped you? Stepfathers, grandfathers, uncles, mentors, coaches, teachers? Who showed up when your biological father couldn’t or wouldn’t?

Who failed you? And how did that failure teach you something essential about yourself, about what you needed, and how you wanted to be different?

Who showed you what not to be? I think the most powerful fathering comes through negative example, through witnessing what happens when someone can’t access their own tenderness or wisdom.

Who taught you something important, even from a distance? The fathers who couldn’t be present emotionally still managed to transmit important truths about work ethic, about integrity, about surviving difficult circumstances.

Whatever this day stirs in you, whether that’s grief, gratitude, anger, longing, or something you can’t quite name, you’re not alone in feeling it. But feel it. For a few moments. Let it move through you.

The sacred in the imperfect

Today is for the seen and unseen fathers. It’s for the complicated love stories that don’t reduce to simple categories of good or bad. And it’s definitely for the soul-sized truths that can’t be contained inside a greeting card.

I’m thinking of the fathers who were everything we needed, and the ones who weren’t. The lessons learned in presence, and the ones learned in absence. And then there’s the love that was spoken, and the love that lived in silence. The men who knew how to hold us, and the ones who were too broken to try.

All of it sacred and all of it is part of the story that made you who you are.

What I’ve learned through my own complicated father story and through witnessing thousands of others is that we’re shaped not just by what we received, but by what we didn’t receive. We’re shaped not just by the love that was offered, but by the love that was missing.

And when we recognize what was absent, we develop the capacity to give it to ourselves, to our own children, and to the world that needs what we’ve learned to cultivate in the empty spaces.

Your real father’s day story

So what’s your Father’s Day story? The real one, not the greeting card version that smooths over the complicated edges and makes everything neat and tidy.

The one that includes the gratitude and the grief. The appreciation and the anger. The ways you’ve been blessed and the ways you’ve been wounded. The masculine wisdom you’ve inherited and the patterns you’ve chosen to break. All. Of. It.

Whatever that story is, it belongs to you because it shaped you, and contains medicine that only you can offer the world.

Whether you’re celebrating or grieving or something in between, I’m holding space for the fathers who gave us what we needed and the ones who couldn’t. And for the children who felt perfectly loved and the ones who are still learning how to feel worthy of it.

I know that all of it is sacred and all of it is part of the great, complicated, beautiful mess of being human.

With love for all the father stories,

Jonni

And if this day brings up difficult feelings, remember you don’t have to carry those alone. The most healing thing isn’t always forgiveness or gratitude (although people will always say it is). It’s simply having someone witness the truth of what you experienced. That witnessing is part of the sacred work I do, if you ever need it.