Dad Moments

By Guest Blogger Adam Witten

I’m a terrible storyteller. That’s a difficult admission for someone that spends a decent amount of his professional life speaking into a microphone. It’s not that I can’t properly convey a sequence of events to someone. It’s just that my short term memory betrays me and the yarns I spin often leave out details or key moments.

Moments may escape my mind at times, but it’s where my head arrived as I started reflecting on my definition of Fathers’ Day. Two of my closest friends, who are also dads, and I started a podcast (who didn’t, right?) and one of the consistent themes of the show is our “dad moment of the month.” We reveal our most quintessentially dad things, have some laughs and reflect on some of the memories we’ll share about our kids for years to come. And for someone like me whose memory is already on the decline, it saves those moments in audio perpetuity.

Some of mine from the past year include:

• Sitting in the line for the Charlotte Motor Speedway Christmas lights, firing up a movie in our minivan for my then-pregnant wife and two kids in the back seat while watching the season two finale of The Mandalorian on my phone from the driver’s seat
• My two sons and I purchased a storm trooper helmet from a rummage sale. I’m proud to say that I wore it on a couple work video calls on May the 4th.
• Building bunk beds because the aforementioned sons were moving into the same room with a new baby on the way

Those moments are fun, but then I started thinking about the ones my kids will share about me one day as their dad. As we mature, and whether we can still share this day with our own father figures, we think more and more about the moments we had with that person. For me, I remember sitting in the front seat of my dad’s truck as we drove to my Little League game. He was my coach and let me make the lineup on our way to the field (apologies to all the kids who didn’t pitch and bat first).  When I was a little older, he had our concrete driveway enlarged so it was big enough to play half-court basketball.  And right after the pour, he and I wrote names of some all-time great NBA stars — Pistol Pete, Michael Jordan and, of course Spud Webb. That’s an important one for two people that were always the smallest player on their team.  It was our version of retired jerseys hanging in the rafters of an arena.  We had some epic games of one-on-one in that driveway.

And now, I will continue to be intentional about my own dad moments with my three kids. I hope one day my oldest son will talk about me coaching his team, but also running late to his baseball game and always making sure we swerved into the CVS to buy a huge bag of Dubble Bubble for the dugout. That kid may not win any batting titles, but he’ll consistently lead the team in most pieces of gum shoved into his mouth when he enters the batter’s box.

I hope my younger son will remember playing “The Statue Game” where one of us poses as a statue with a certain emotion on our face while the other enters a store to shop for a statue with that exact emotion (scared, happy, mad). Then after bringing it home, the statue comes to life and chases the new owner around the house.

And finally, I hope my brand new daughter will talk about some of the wonderful moments we’ll enjoy down the road.

I can’t wait to find out what those “girl dad” moments will be.

You can listen to our aforementioned podcast, Triad Dads with a Drink, on the Triad Podcast Network. Just click HERE to access our library of episodes or search Triad Podcast Network wherever you enjoy your podcasts.

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