How do you replace everything? That, right there, is the question I’ve asked myself almost every day since my dad died. It’s an overwhelming and impossible thought. Of course, you can’t actually replace the people you’ve loved and lost. Not my dad, anyway. He was irreplaceable. When someone dies, they leave things behind, and at the start those little reminders are the ones that hurt the most. You miss their voice, their laugh, their smell, and their hugs. You miss their advice and the way they said your name. You miss the fun. You take months to finally clean up the puzzle in the basement on the folding card table that they never got to finish, and you leave their slippers by the front door right where they left them.
But after a while I realized that Dad’s stuff was just stuff, and that it wasn’t even his laugh, hugs, or unfinished stories that I missed the most. It was the space he occupied in the world. When someone dies the world keeps spinning, with all of us on it, and that empty space is what you feel the most. That’s what always hurts. It’s almost cruel. That was his spot. So was that. And my dad’s space in this world, the one he occupied with strength, pride, compassion, and fart jokes, was empty and that’s what killed me for years. The void. When he died, the world lost a great dad, but that night Katherine told me she was pregnant, everything finally made sense. I finally got my answer.
How do you replace everything? Well, you can’t. I knew I couldn’t replace my dad, but I could fill his space. This kid was the best decision I never made, and I was going to even everything out. The world lost a great father when my old man died. I was going to give it another one.
Mom was still living on the East Coast with my grandmother, both of them trying not to kill each other, and Katherine’s whole family, who I’d met once, were in Ottawa, about a four-hour drive away. Neither of us had a large group of friends, and none of the friends we did have had babies of their own. So there was very little outside influence, which suited us perfectly. Katherine was building our kid, and we were building a home, and we did it all our way.
We bought a few baby books, like everyone does, but I didn’t read a single page. The only people I wanted telling me about this pregnancy were our doctors and Katherine. Katherine became the teacher, and I became the student.
“Hey, did you know that I’ll be pregnant for forty weeks? That’s ten months. What kind of fuckery is that? Who started the nine months hoax?” she yelled to me when I was making her hundredth ham and cheese on a ciabatta one night early on. “Also, in three weeks I’m going to be growing hands and fingers down there, so I’ll be busy that day. Don’t book anything. That sounds like a shit ton of work. I’ll probably need like two naps that day.”
I’m not sure Katherine had ever even held a baby before she was pregnant with her own, but she became an expert, and I listened. I didn’t want to ever come at her with my own info from something I had read or try to explain what I thought was going on with her body. I wasn’t absent, or uninterested—the exact opposite actually—but we knew very early on that there were parts of this that we were going to go through together and others that she was going to handle on her own. Like the puking part.
If I can offer one piece of advice for first-time fathers-to-be it’s that you have to have the puke conversation with your girl. Have it early and establish the rules. Katherine is one of the greatest pukers I’ve ever met. The complete opposite of me. Whether it’s the flu, mild food poisoning, the rare times she’s been drunk, or pregnancy, Katherine pukes with such ferocious efficiency and speed that it’s actually impressive. Usually it takes her no longer than it would to walk into the bathroom to blow her nose. Then she’ll be back on the couch sipping a tea like nothing happened.
But the sound. My fucking god, that sound. I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s violent and aggressive, like she’s being run over while drowning, or having her hips broken with a cricket bat and throwing away old soup. It’s demonic. Katherine didn’t have morning sickness, she had all-day-maybe-we-shouldn’t-leave-the-house-today sickness. And it was So. Very. Loud.
“I need to know what you need from me when you’re in there,” I said after the first time it happened and I heard what I heard. I was paralyzed, in shock, and ready to call 911. “Do you need me to come in? Hold your hair and rub your back? What do you need me to do?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “I need you to pretend it’s not happening. You don’t hear anything.”
“Can I turn the volume up on the TV, or it that too rude? Do you want me to pause our show? Or keep watching? I can leave—do you want me to leave?” These rules were important.
“Do not pause anything. When you hear the toilet flush, just rewind to wherever it was before I went in.”
“I can do that,” I told her. And that’s what I did. I’d listen for the flush, then the sound of her electric toothbrush, and then I’d hit rewind and wait for her to walk out of the bathroom, always amazed she still had both her arms because it really sounded like someone just sawed them off in there. She’d flop on the couch and I’d hand her tea to her, kiss her shoulder, and tell her I loved her. Then I’d press Play and we’d pretend none of that just happened. We never talked about it.
Katherine and I were building our House of Love—one that we also shared with my brother, Rich, and his now fiancé, Leanna—but we loved them too. Katherine and I hadn’t ever lived together, and when she did move in, she was already pregnant, so it was game fucking on! We weren’t dating: we were a family. Rich and I were about two years into living in a big, hundred-year-old Victorian house that we’d bought with the money we made off the townhouse. The previous owner of the place had used the entire main floor as an art gallery and moved all the “home” stuff, like the kitchen, bedroom, and full bathroom, up to the top two floors.
It was perfect for us. Rich and Leanna took the upper floors, and I spent the first year after we moved in renovating the main floor for myself. It was a blank slate I turned into the perfect bachelor pad. One bedroom, huge living room, and a bar. This house was not built for a baby—hell, this house wasn’t built for Katherine. Glass-topped coffee tables, hard-as-hell limestone floors, poured concrete countertops with sharp edges, and everything was built up! I didn’t want the kitchen to take up too much space, so I stacked everything high, and because I’m so tall it was perfect. For me. The upper cabinets were doubled, two full rows on top of each other, all up the ten-foot ceilings. Katherine had to use a step stool just to get a coffee mug.
“I’m going to rip all this out,” I told her. “We need a second bedroom. Babies don’t shower so we’ll definitely need a tub. And how are you going to feed this kid when you can’t reach any of the food?”
I was still paying off the first reno, from two years ago, but was ready to do it all again.
“No. You’re not ripping anything out,” Katherine replied. “We’re fine. We need a changing table, a bassinette beside the bed, and the sink is more than big enough for a bath. We’re not buying things until we need them. I don’t want to have to sell a mini dresser or a mini anything else in six months just because we thought they were cute at the time. But the glass coffee table has got to go. That thing will kill a kid.” Katherine has always had a way of slowing me down. The only thing our house needed was love.…And a baby gate. She did let me buy a baby gate.
Katherine found two old pictures of my dad in a box in the basement and framed them and put them on a shelf in the living room one day when I was at work. Until then, there were no reminders or memories of my father in my house, except for his cardigan on the far left side of my closet. But these weren’t pictures of my father when he was my dad: they were of him when he was younger. Looking at those pictures every day was like looking into a mirror. In those little frames I saw someone who, despite having gone through hell, only wanted to do his best. He was flawed but determined, a man with secrets that would eventually become great stories, and one who was built for fatherhood but didn’t yet know it.
Those two pictures sit on that same shelf in those same frames even today. And they’re still the only two I have of him.