This Father's Day, one book your husband will actually read
Gretchen wrote the foreword to my parenting book.
We have been divorced for over ten years. We raised three kids together across different cities, different schools, different seasons of life that neither of us planned for.
(Photo: Gretchen and I at our youngest son Tyler’s high school graduation)
She’s an amazing mom and co-parent.
When I finally finished writing Puddle Jumpers she was the first person I asked to write the opening pages.
She said yes.
Her foreword opens like this: “As we stood there watching the second tower fall on TV, Brandon looked at me and said, I have to go. I was seven months pregnant with our first child, unsure of when I would ever see my husband again.”
My oldest son was born while I was deployed. I came home to a baby boy who had been alive for months without me. Gretchen had done the whole thing alone. She’s a hero. That is where our parenting story starts. Not in a hospital room with both parents present. At a naval base in San Diego, California, where I stepped off a cargo plane and walked into a house with a tiny redheaded baby who had absolutely no idea who I was.
What followed was twenty years of figuring it out. A divorce. Losing a best friend in Libya. A business failure. Three kids moving through childhood in circumstances that were often far from ideal. And somewhere in all of that, using a mental management system I learned, and brought home from the Navy SEAL sniper program, then applied to parenting almost by accident, but it worked.
My daughter Madison came to visit me in Lisbon last year. We had dinner at my favorite French restaurant, “Grenache”. She looked across the table and said, “Dad, I just want you to know I am exactly where I want to be in my life, and I appreciate you allowing me to be myself.”
My son Jackson graduated from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and found me in the crowd afterward and said, “I kinda won the dad lottery.”
That is the return on twenty years of showing up. Not perfectly. God knows I’m not perfect but I was a consistent and present father.
Consistency.
Puddle Jumpers is the book I wish I had at the beginning. The mental tools that actually work, written by a father who learned them the hard way and used them every single day. It is practical, honest, and grounded in real stories from a real family that went through real things and came out the other side intact.
If you want to climb Everest, find another climber who’s done it successfully.
The dads who read it will recognize themselves in it immediately. The love, the uncertainty, the specific fear of getting it wrong with the people who matter most.
They will finish it with something they did not have before. Not a list of rules. A framework for the moments they do not know what to do with.
Father’s Day is Sunday. If you are looking for a gift and for something that will actually get read, underlined, and talked about at dinner, this is it.
Puddle Jumpers is linked below. Grab it today.
