When I was 23 and doing my best to escape any sense of real-world responsibility, I caught the sunrise while on a ferry from France to Ireland. As the rays caught the edges of the swells of salty water, the world felt so beautiful, new, bright and hopeful?it was the first moment that I can remember where I was fully and emotionally present. I couldn?t imagine a more perfect moment?one that I would crave so deeply. I thought I?d never trade it for another.
I was so wrong.

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Why I hate Father's Day I?d trade that moment for even the smallest one with my son and my wife, for even the tiniest time with all three of us together on an uneventful Sunday evening, for a walk around the neighbourhood on a search for potato bugs or for the moment when I wake him before school, leaning over his bed to bring him out of sleep. And yet all these wonderful, happy, beautiful moments are beginning to weigh on me. I think I?m having a weird kind of midlife crisis. Just the other night, I had another seemingly pedestrian moment that eclipsed that ferry ride. In his favourite red sweatpants, my six-year-old son waited for me on the front porch to return home from a run. When I got closer, he ran to me. I picked him up. He felt the sweat on my clothes and neck, but he ...