Hiding My Tears, Because It’s What Men Do

Once upon a time, not long ago, there was a stretch of two years where I promised myself to keep a smile on my face.

Not a fake smile. A real one.

I asked my family about their day, helped my stepdaughters with the normal activities that come with helping to raise their kids (my grandkids) who live with us, made dinner conversation about nothing in particular.

My wife and I still laughed at the same dumb things we always laughed at. From the outside, nothing was wrong. From the inside, I was unemployed, watching our savings shrink, convinced I had broken a promise I never said out loud.

We had moved our family from New York to Florida for all the reasons people make that move — less stress, more room to breathe, a slower pace, a shot at a healthier life. Two years in, I lost my job.

The irony wasn't lost on me.

I had uprooted everyone I loved to give them something better, and now I was the one putting it all at risk. So I hid it. Not the job loss itself — my wife knew, obviously.

I hid the weight of it.

The 2 a.m. math. The feeling, every single morning, I was failing the people I'd promised a better life to. I told myself I was protecting them.

And I was.

But I was also doing something else, something I didn't have language for at the time: I was acting as if nothing was wrong, because that's what a father is supposed to do.

At least I thought so at the time.

The performance most of us don't know we're giving

Here's the strange thing about that period, looking back: my kids remember me as serious. Steady, maybe a little distant.

My closest friends, the ones I've known for twenty years, describe me as stoic, the guy who doesn't rattle, who handles things. None of them are wrong, exactly.

But none of them saw what stoic actually cost.

They didn't see the version of me sitting in the car after a rejection email, giving myself ninety seconds to feel it before carrying on with whatever random activities were going on within our home.

They didn't see the nights I lay awake recalculating how many more months we had before something had to give.

What they saw was a man who showed up, who still made the eggs on Saturday morning, who still asked how their day was. That's not stoicism. That's a man trying to absorb the shock so it doesn't reach the people behind him.

I think a lot of fathers do exactly this, and I think almost no one identifies it correctly.

We call it being strong. We call it handling it to relieve them of the burdens of life. What we rarely call it is what it actually is: grief, fear, or doubt, deliberately rerouted away from the family and absorbed alone, on purpose, because the alternative — letting it show — feels like one more thing your family has to carry as a burden.

So we smile.

We make the eggs. And somewhere along the way, the people who love us start to believe the smile is the whole story.

The cost of being the calm one

The job loss is eight years behind me now, and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, though it took a while to see it that way. Without it, I don't think I go back to writing after walking away from it for over a decade.

I don't rediscover that I had more to offer than any job title was measuring.

I don't start building something of my own on the side, the thing that eventually became its own small publishing venture.

The unemployment that terrified me was the door I needed and didn't know it. But none of that retroactively makes the hiding a good idea. It just means the story has a good ending, which isn't the same thing.

Because here's what I'd say to any father reading this who recognizes himself in it: the people who love you don't need you to have no fear. They need to know you're human enough to have it. A father who never shows a crack doesn't read as strong to a child forever, because eventually he just reads as unreachable.

And the friends who call you stoic aren't describing your strength. They're describing the distance you've put between yourself and being known.

I'm not arguing for falling apart in front of your kids over every hard week.

I'm arguing for something smaller and harder: letting the people closest to you see that the smile takes effort sometimes. That you're carrying something. That strength isn't the absence of fear, it's choosing to keep showing up while you have it, and that they're allowed to know that's what they're watching.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A kid who thinks dad is just naturally unshakable learns that struggling is something to hide. A kid who watches dad struggle and keep going learns what resilience actually looks like up close.

Celebrating fatherhood with intention

Whenever, wherever, and however you celebrate fatherhood that's easiest to put on a card — the steady hand, the dad jokes, the guy who always seems to have it figured out, keep doing it as your conscience allows. There's nothing wrong with celebrating that. Most of us earned a little of it.

But if you want to actually see the father in your life this year, look a little closer at the calm.

Ask what it's made of.

Ask what he's decided not to say at dinner so dinner could stay dinner.

The truth is that the majority of the serious ones, the stoic ones, the ones who never seem rattled aren't unbothered. They're just in the middle of the rat race, trying to handle life, smiling because that's what they believe the job requires.

I made it through those two years. We all did. But I made it through them as a man hiding his tears, because I thought that's what men do.

This Father's Day, I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for that guy. I'm asking you to see him in me, or in whatever father is sitting across your table this year, still smiling, still making the eggs, still carrying more than he's letting on. And not because he's stoic.

Because he loves you enough to try.