I was afraid to say I love you to my newborn daughter. I stood over her in the NICU, just the two of us. My wife was barely out of labor, checked up and checked on by doctors. We didn’t want our daughter alone in her first moments of life. But I stood over her, the two of us isolated but not alone — and I had no clue what to do.
In a way, this is one of those stories of how a dog saved someone. Yet, at the same time, it isn’t — not really.
In the NICU, I panicked. And in that panic, I sunk into depression. Nurses bustled around us. But I felt heavy — alone — a world away from my daughter. I yearned to connect with her, but the words wouldn’t come out. What I didn’t know then was that 1 in 10 new fathers experience postpartum depression and anxiety.
In the months that followed, I imagined I had figured out the work-life balance. I fed her between meetings, typed with her in my lap, completed research as we both did tummy time, and made Facetime calls to my wife at lunch. But “I love you” still felt forced. When the pandemic hit, I realized the balance I had thought I created was really just self-isolation before a mandated isolation took effect.
I strove to model my fatherhood after a nurturing and caring environment, an encouraging environment, and one that showed our daughter from the moment she came home that she could become anything she wanted. I had grown up in a typical traditional Jewish household in the 21st century. We celebrated holidays with family but didn’t always attend synagogue. My siblings and I had B’nai Mitzvahs to establish us as adults but we didn’t attend community events. We were spiritual but not religious, traditional but not rigid. But with tradition, came a model I hadn’t wanted to emulate.
Slowly, but all-at-once, I sunk deeper into the wet sand and hid away from my friends who didn’t have kids. And I never sought advice from those who did, because their kids were years older than my own, so as parents, they wouldn’t remember what it was like when their kids were first born — so I had told myself. I developed nighttime anxiety. The more my daughter woke in the evening, the more I read about issues that develop when young children don’t get enough sleep, the more I complained to my wife about the sleeping issue, or worse, would yell and get into an argument. Every one of my outbursts proved that I was a failure. Every time I couldn’t soothe my daughter only further proved I wasn’t good enough. Every cry for attention while I was on my computer only spoke to my inability to give her the attention she needed. The longer I stayed with my toes dug into the wet sand, the further I sunk away from help, the harder it was to tell someone I didn’t know what I was doing, the harder I struggled to stay above the sand and breathe.
My wife seemed so sure, and even when she questioned, I still felt that my voice would never have the same certainty — the same authority hers had as the mother.
The doubt pulled me deeper into the quicksand. Did my daughter need a bedtime routine? Was I engaging with her enough? Was I stimulating her brain at an appropriate level? Then there was the time she got hand, foot, and mouth — but isn’t that a cow disease? How did she get a cow’s disease? Am I that inept of a father that I somehow gave my daughter a cow’s disease?
It nearly swallowed me whole. Every action and reaction were a reflection of what I couldn’t do correctly. By the end of a long day, when I had managed to work four remote jobs while never moving from my chair at my dining room table, I’d put on the television and hope to find a show educational enough, entertaining enough, and yet mundane enough. I was stranded on my lonely island drifting further away from those I cared about — because I swore I was alone.
Until I found a blue heeler named Bandit.
Bluey is a popular Australian cartoon that begins by following a six-year-old dog named Bluey and her sister, mother, and father. The show is really about Bluey and her sister playing elaborate games and using their imaginations with each other, their friends, their parents, and their friends’ parents. But the first episode I ever watched showed Bandit, Bluey’s father and the truest of try-hards, commit with sheer ferocity to the idea that his hand was, in fact, a pet emu named Shaun (“Shaun” season 1, episode 50). I watched in awe — as my daughter watched in uncertain delight — as his fingers picked and pecked and poked like a beak teaching Bluey the responsibility of having a pet.
As I watched more and more, hoping my daughter would be excited for another so I could sit, unwind, and even learn a new lesson before she got tired of the program and wanted another new story arc about kittens in the Old West, I was always struck by the commitment every fictional parent made to the game, no matter the game, or how long it lasted, whether they had started as part of the game or came into an untenable situation; they immersed themselves fully into the world Bluey created.
The show’s popularity with kids and adults has exploded since I found it in 2020, with live shows, an interactive playhouse, and several articles in major publications. Screenrant focused on 13 reasons the show is popular with adults. Collider wrote on the reasons the show resonates with children and their parents. The Washington Post addressed the growing fandom of child-free adults who resonate with the show’s message. I eventually found an article in the Guardian dissecting Bluey as a guide for modern parenting. But I never would have guessed other parents — other fathers — were struggling to figure out fatherhood, too.
But Bandit became my superhero, a dog I aspire to be like. He is imperfect. He attempts moral lessons with disastrous consequences, and he endlessly tries harder and harder to be the father his kids want, as well as the father his kids need. Whether it’s acting as a claw machine or dancing around his mailbox to rid the house of fairies, Bandit finds new ways to demonstrate his love for his daughters.
Every time I sat down to watch one seven-minute episode, I felt lighter. I started talking for the trash cans, and my daughter giggled. I started acting like an octopus, and my daughter wanted to learn more about octopi. I started playing keepy-uppy — a simple challenge of keeping the balloon from touching the floor — and it became my daughter’s favorite game.
The more she laughed and learned, the less the mistakes I made felt catastrophic. Even if they did feel catastrophic, it was the best I could do at the time.
That’s what being a good father is really about — doing my best. If I did my best, then, I wasn’t afraid to dive headfirst into imagination. I wasn’t afraid of the diseases my daughter brought home from preschool. I wasn’t afraid that I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t afraid to tell my daughter I loved her.
And fatherhood didn’t feel so lonely.
