The plane lurched beneath my seat and her twin engines revved, thrusting it down the runway. We were up and away towards Philadelphia.
It was a big moment. My son JP, age 8, sat next to me, full of expectation. We were headed to his first major National Squash Tournament, a Junior Championship Tour event in Philadelphia. Just 8, he had recently qualified for this national-tier U11 event after a string of stellar regional performances. His national ranking now sat somewhere near the low 30s, just good enough to qualify for the event. It was a big deal.
Little did I suspect that a major drama was just opening for us. How many tournaments we would travel to over the years; how much hardship, tension, heartache, triumph and adventure endure?
And how I would come to miss it all when it was done.
It’s 13 years later now and I am headed back to Philly. I’m alone in a plane on a runway, a 60-seater not unlike the one that carried me and JP so many years back. JP is already in Philadelphia with his UVA team. As we zip down the rain-slicked runway, 2 hours late to take off, my mind soars back to that day. Up we rise above thunderstorm clouds and I am free to think and write.
I feel sadness. Sadness for the days that are no more. Sadness for the loss of a fatherhood that was once clearer, more urgent, easier to understand, easier to practice. I miss the days when I was needed. When I was like the guide of a rafting trip, the only one who knew the shape of the oncoming rapids. I was the one who steered the boat then. The one who picked the launching site, the destination, who guided the crew along the way.
I was JP’s coach from the age of 6 to 17. We trained so many years together, toward targets, past obstacles; we weaved past setbacks and sorrows; I used to set the strategy against mighty opponents, manage his emotional swings, steady the ship as we neared the goal, and then together we relished the victories.
Those were sweet days. Not enough did I realize, in the moment, how sweet.
Things are different now. JP is 21. He is a junior at UVA. At this moment, he is already in Philadelphia, with his team, ready to lock horns with 11 other top teams in the year-end Division 1 College Team Nationals. UVA is seeded a team-best #5. In a few weeks, JP will be named the captain of the team for his upcoming Senior Season. He sets his own goals now. Manages his own emotions. The coaching staff handles travel and meals and all needed logistics. I have no role beyond that of spectator and cheer-er and something else that I have not yet been able to define: the father of an adult. Lately, I have had to navigate my way to this new kind of fatherhood. I don’t know the road very well and can’t say that I have always liked it. I have had to weave my way through a swirl of emotions.
JP and I used to be so close. He was never a rebellious child. He always looked up to me, wanted to do the things I thought were noble, took direction extremely well, trusted me in the hard times, rejoiced with me in the good.
What was I to feel, as one college year rolled into the next and he ceased plotting the course ahead with me? Ceased asking me to set interim targets, to evaluate outcomes? I felt a bit lost as a father. A bit irritated, sometimes, when this or that outcome, amidst his many competing athletic, academic and social goals, fell short of what I perceived as the ideal (I am critiquing, not agreeing with myself here). Increasingly, I was consulted less: in the visioning, the planning, the training, the reaching, the outcomes, and the aftermath. On one level this hurt; but I masked my sadness behind irritation that this or that goal was not met (goals that were mine, not his). On one level, I was bewildered. What was happening? What was my role now? Had I done something wrong?
At other times, I would pull away. Why should I engage as much as I have in the past if my presence and input no longer mattered? I felt adrift. I felt like a lost a close friend and I didn’t know if I should let that friend know that the loss hurt or whether I should just put up a front of callous indifference.
“Keep loving him,” my wife kept telling me, “without conditions.”
“Don’t take it personally,” another close friend said. “It’s good that he is coming into his own self. You just need to discover a new way of loving him and supporting him. Keep praying for him. Entrust him and his path to God, again and again.”
I tried to practice these things at a distance but recently had a chance to do so more concretely. There was a weekend when I decided that it was time to click this new kind of fatherhood into clearer focus.
UVA was playing Princeton, the #2 team in the nation, as this season’s final regular season match. The match was held at Princeton in late February 2025. After keeping my emotional distance much of this season, afraid to be vulnerable, uncertain what my new fatherhood was supposed to look like, I decided (with some coaching from my wife) that this match would be a good time show up in a new way, a different way. To be there, in presence, even if his needs from me were radically different than in the past. To expect nothing. To be available. To be present.
The venue of this match was significant because, 11 years earlier, at this site, I had coached JP to his first National Championship. When he struck his last winner, a top-spin forehand re-drop on match ball, he shook his opponent’s hand and sped out of the court and leapt into my arms. I still remember what I felt like to hold that little boy in my arms – his skinny arms wrapped around my neck, his knobby knees squeezing tight against my rib cage. It was unforgettable.
One of the family legends of that weekend was that our flight out of Cincinnati, on Thursday night, turned around after take-off and was canceled for mechanical reasons. By the time they gave us the final news, it was too late to get re-routed, so I drove him to Princeton, through the night. We arrived at 4am to our room at the ESS Sonesta Hotel, along Route 1 from Philly to Princeton. He had an 8am match. He went on to win that one and that whole tournament.
I had forgotten the name of this hotel, forgotten where it was, but it just so happened that the hotel I picked this year (2025), was right next to it. My room window looked out upon the walking path that led to the room where we stayed at the Sonesta that year. I knew it immediately, by sight. It was surreal. It was as though the chapter of fatherhood I had trod in the night 11 years ago led to this new chapter in 2025.
And then it occurred to me: maybe what I feel is my dying fatherhood is really just a parallel to that cancelled flight in 2014 – a route closed that would soon be replaced by another.
Maybe I am now on a long journey of love and hope, kind of like that drive through the night across Pennsylvania, along Route 76.
Maybe I’m on a similar road now and I just don’t see it.
Maybe there is a new way. One that takes time to navigate.
In any event, at some point during this most recent weekend in Princeton, I stumbled upon an insight. It kind of bubbled up in prayer on Saturday or Sunday morning. It went like this. “I want to burn with the fire of the Father’s fatherhood.” Which is to say: to burn unconditionally. Burn with a fire that flames in the night as surely as in the day, in the waning hours of night as well as at dawn.
This insight hit me a little like a shooting star flashing across the nighttime sky: it was an unusual light; a fading, lovely light. It bade me pay attention.
In the context of this journey I am on, I take it to mean something like this: I must decrease and he must increase. It is no longer my role to lead JP, in strength, forward in his life. I need to learn a different kind of fatherly presence. One perhaps more feminine. More gentle. More about listening, observing, waiting, receiving.
It seems silly to say, but it may nonetheless help me to say it: I am no longer the captain of my son’s life. Not even the 2nd in command of the ship. I am out of the chain of command altogether. It’s not my ship anymore. Instead, I visit the deck of this ship as one who listens, observes, serves and celebrates the beautiful things that happen here, as he makes his way across the sea. In some ways, I am a member of the deck-crew – here to help – I just happen to be family.
I didn’t come to all of these insights that weekend in Princeton. I am now, two weeks later, reading back into the basic understanding that was born that weekend and that ripened in the weeks that followed. Now I am leaving for Nationals; it’s the final tournament of JP’s season and my next chance to give expression to this new understanding of fatherhood.
As I readied for the weekend, I asked myself the question; I asked God the question: is it important that I go to this tournament? If so, why?
This was the response I got:
It’s important.
But it’s not about going to watch and assess how he performs. I’m going to seal this new phase of our relationship. I’m going as his friend: to watch him use the freedom God has given him to be an athlete, a student, a soon to be professional man in the world. I’m not going to give comments or advice; I’m going to show support. This is his enterprise and it is his role – not mine – to lead it. He is a soul on earth where the Holy Trinity dwells and where God will dwell ever more deeply over time. He is the priest of his life and it is his to live. He has time to make and correct mistakes. I need not run out ahead of him anymore. I ought not run out ahead of him anymore.
It is time for my fatherhood to fade into a graceful streak across his night time sky, like that shooting star: to give way in its light so that my son’s own light can shine. It is time for me to step back and watch as his star rises.
Nonetheless, I have been asking myself today – as I took him to lunch, dropped him at the courts, shuttled him back to the hotel after his team’s first round victory (parents are given little chunks of family time at Nationals) – what is my role now? How can I describe it?
I would feel better, clearer if I could give it a name, define it. What do you call the role of a father of a man?
All I can come up with is light-bearer. The bearer of a light that shines when the first fires of fatherhood shine no longer; or not as they used to. One who shows forth the fire of the Father’s love, letting it warm unconditionally – in the subtle, embering ways of kindness and giving – upon the child-become-a-man.
That’s more than enough for me to work on for a while.
