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I had spent so much of my life around women, getting to know the secret lives they keep from the other men, letting me see the silly and embarrassing, giving me the epic lows, the soaring highs.
Nothing had ever been more enlightening as being a part of Liv and Astrid's lives. They'd shown me sides of life I never could have known without them.
The same was true about spending my life with Annie.
So when we'd gotten the news that the twins we were expecting were girls, well, I was ecstatic. I figured that watching girls grow up would be even more enlightening, would be even more of a blessing.
I wasn't wrong either.
Despite attempting not to raise our children with any gender role norms, the girls had always been very different from Cameron.
Cameron was a stoic kid, prone to introspection, to being on the sidelines, letting things play out before he decided what to do. He'd never been big on make believe or strong emotions.
His sisters, though, they were innately social, deeply compassionate, very imaginative when they played with dolls or stuffed animals. They felt things deeply. I didn't love them so much that I was blind to how overwhelming their emotions could be at times. Maybe especially so to me because I had learned young and fast to conceal mine, never to let anyone know.
But the girls hid nothing.
The twins - Avery and Arabella - and our youngest, Rhea, they let you know what was going on in their hearts, in their souls.
When they cried, they did it in a puddle on the floor, bodies heaving, mouths gasping for air, noses sniffling.
When they raged, they shrieked, slammed fists into their pillows.
When they were frustrated, they rolled around on the floor, shaking in their inability to do what they wanted to do.
That said, when they loved, they loved with their whole soul.
They were expressive of it in both words and actions.
You are the best Daddy in the whole world.
Isn't Mommy the prettiest Mommy in the world?
They'd curl up next to you, reach for your hand, offer hugs when you seemed upset.
I'd never seen something as pure. And it became my life's mission never to let anyone dim that, to take it away from them.
I had seen so much of that in my time, too much of it. Women brought low by a world bent on destroying all the goodness they were born with, or by men who wanted to destroy it, or were simply too fucking blind to see it in the first place.
I was not going to let that happen to my girls.
And when it came to Cameron, I saw wounds of my childhood finally healing over watching him grow up surrounded by the love and acceptance and warmth that had been ripped from me.
I saw the mother-son dynamic my own absent mother had denied me.
I got to break the cycle of deadbeat fatherhood with him.
I won't lie. I was more scared of having a son than girls. I knew I had what it took to raise the girls, feeling in a way that I had helped raise Astrid, that I had always taken care of Liv - even if she didn't want to think of our dynamic that way. I felt comfortable being a father to girls.
But a father to a son?
That was what terrified me.
I had some memories of what a good father was like thanks to my early years with my grandfather. But outside of that, I felt like I would be scrambling.
"You need to just take a deep breath and be in the moment," Annie had suggested when she caught me staring at our newborn son. "Don't get lost in your past or the possible future. All we have right now with him is now. And now he needs a diaper change. And it is totally your turn."
Those were words I chose to live by.
Take it day by day.
Moment by moment.
There was always going to be some uncertainty, some insecurity.
Every little boy wanted a superhero dad. I knew that while I succeeded in some ways - what little boy didn't want a dad who rode a motorcycle and had a bunch of biker friends? - But in others, I felt like I let him down.
I often struggled showing my emotions. And I feared he would pick up on that as an example of optimal male behavior instead of learning a healthy way to express those feelings when they came up.
I found actual communication hard at times. The more important something was to me, the worse my words would tumble over themselves.
The stutter didn't go away.
I wasn't sure it ever would.
Not fully.
It was better at times.
Annie had never rushed me, had always given my words the space they needed, the time they needed to come out without tension surrounded them. Over the years, I found that while the beginning of sentences were often still afflicted, that the more I talked, the easier it got.
