What Becoming A Father Taught Me About Grief

Becoming a father didn’t erase my grief, it reshaped it.

In this episode of Grieving Son, I share how stepping into fatherhood opened parts of my heart I didn’t even realize were still hurting. The joy of welcoming my daughter was real, but so was the ache of knowing my parents would never meet her. What I thought would heal me instead revealed the depth of my love, my loss, and the quiet weight I still carry.

This episode is about learning to hold joy and grief at the same time, understanding your parents in new ways once you become one yourself, and discovering that new life doesn’t replace loss. It simply teaches you how to live alongside it.

If you’re navigating parenthood and grief, or know someone who is, this one is for you.

What is Grieving Son: The Podcast?

A heartfelt journey through loss, love, and healing.

After losing both of his parents, host Stephen shares real stories about grief — the moments that broke him, and the ones that helped him keep going.

Grieving Son isn’t about answers. It’s about honesty, hope, and learning how to live again when life will never be the same.

Stephen: 00:00

Welcome to Grieving Son. I'm Steven, a son, a creator, and a new father still learning how to live with grief. This podcast has been a way to honor both my parents, their love, their lessons, and the impact their absence still has on my life. Today's episode is called what becoming a father taught me about grief. And honestly, this is one I've been holding on to since the day my daughter was born.

Stephen: 00:26

When I found out I was going to be a dad, it was joy, real joy. But right behind that joy was grief. My mom talked so much about being a grandmother. She couldn't wait. She used to just bring up what she would do as a grandmother and how much she would spoil her grandkids and and how she, you know, she said, I I I'm gonna be sitting in the back seat.

Stephen: 00:50

You're be driving, but I'm gonna sitting in the back seat. I'm always gonna be around. You know? And now, after having my daughter, the reality was settling in. I never get to see or hold my daughter.

Stephen: 01:05

I remember the moment my fiance told me we were expecting. I smiled, and happy. I I'd never felt anything like that before. Happiness, It and there was still in the background heartbreak. You know, after I had settled into the idea that, you know, after a few months, I would I would be a father, and I was going to be a father, and that dream had come true.

Stephen: 01:40

Just being able to experience that with my partner, how excited I was for that, I thought about just how a few months before, my mom was in LA for her birthday and we were riding around and she was talking about being a grandmother and talking about, you know, I know it's coming, and I can't wait to be a grandmother. And she would sometimes just pause. We could be doing something random, and my mom would just pause and say, I'm gonna be a grandmother, and just start laughing. It something that she had so much joy around. She would talk about, you know, wanting to really make sure she was feeling good and feeling good enough in her body to be able to move around with her grandkids.

Stephen: 02:30

She would say, you know, I wanna make sure I can walk around and I can be here. You know, I remember there was a my mom lived right across from elementary school. In fact, the elementary school that she went to, and they built this track out there, and she would say, you know, I'm a get out here, and I need to walk on this track and make sure I'm in shape, because I'm a be a grandma, and I gotta be able to run around the yard with my grandbabies. And it was something that inspired her to, know, she was dealing with different health issues and to really seek help. There was a moment in time when my mom had a big health scare, she was only shared with me, she was only able to go through with what the doctors were asking because she knew she wanted to be a grandmother, she wanted to be around.

Stephen: 03:26

So, you know, it was this excitement that I felt, and this joy that I felt around being a father, and then right next to it was this sadness that I wasn't quite prepared for. In therapy, I learned something before my daughter arrived, to give grief space. Don't force joy, don't force sadness, just let it be. That helped me so much in those first moments with my daughter. I didn't judge myself for feeling joy and sorrow in the same breath.

Stephen: 04:06

You know, there was this assumption that becoming a parent heals everything. That's what I thought. I thought, you know, I'll be a father and this is gonna kinda erase grief, but it just sits beside it, It doesn't erase it at all. When I held my daughter for the first time, I felt peace, and I also felt pain at the same time. I remember just holding my daughter, and I always felt like babies can see things, right?

Stephen: 04:40

Sometimes you catch them looking off in the space and you wonder, What are you looking at? What's in that corner? And I remember just thinking about before I even held my daughter for the first time, those first moments and thinking about, would my mom be around? Would she somehow could she somehow see my mom and could my mom somehow visit her? Maybe she saw my mom before she got here.

Stephen: 05:06

I don't know. It so many different emotions that I felt. But I do credit my therapist with giving me the freedom to allow myself to not put all sorts of expectations on it, you know? You see movies, and you see the first encounter with your daughter, and you think it's gonna be like, it's gonna be music playing in the background, and you're gonna have all these, that very well may be the case. But I was someone who understood that I was coming from so many different heavy emotions with my grieving process, and those feelings may be a little bit intertwined with a whole bunch of other ones, you know?

Stephen: 05:50

So there were times, though, even still, I felt guilty for the fact that I wasn't, you know, a 100% happy or giddy, that I was sometimes sad just from simple fact that, or the complicated fact that my mom wasn't there, that my dad wasn't there. It even brought up things I didn't think I would think about in terms of my father not being present from my child's birth. So I want to go back to this point that I really thought that having my daughter would fix everything, that she would fill the hole my mom left. But the truth is the hole didn't close, it just became more visible. It was like she peeled back a layer of me I'd been protecting.

Stephen: 06:42

I had to face the fact that I was placing expectations on someone who couldn't even hold her head up. That wasn't my daughter's job. My daughter did not Her job was not to fix it, and I was putting so much pressure on her to somehow, I guess, the joy to overtake the grief, and for it to erase it. But instead, we understand that children have their own intentions, and they're gonna do what they wanna do, right? So, I could be having a tough night.

Stephen: 07:17

Remember one night, I'd just been I cried. I was really upset, was having a rough night with the loss of my mom, just making sense of everything. And it was also a really rough night for my daughter, where she really didn't want to go to sleep. I was trying to get her to go to sleep, and as I saw her, basically screaming in frustration, she was overstimulated, I was not doing a great job of calming her down, and I was, you know, I kinda took a beat for a second and really had to take a step back and say, is my daughter is being who she is meant to be right now at this moment, and I am dealing with a lot of pain that is okay for me to feel at this moment, and both of these things have nothing to do with one another. And if I allow them to layer on, it's going to create a situation that feels uncontrollable, so I had to separate the two, you know?

Stephen: 08:21

And that a tough night, you know? Babies crying nonstop, grief hitting me like a wave, but it really helped me start to do the work of trying to detangle the two, you know? And I think that was a huge turning point for me. I think that was the moment that I really realized that my daughter couldn't heal what I was carrying, nor should she. And it was an unfair expectation for me to ever put on either one of us, right?

Stephen: 08:59

That I would somehow be cured from having a daughter, that my daughter would somehow cure all of my hurt and pain. And that moment, watching my daughter cry, and trying to rock her to sleep, and her being almost inconsolable at the moment, helped me to realize that she couldn't heal this, and this was not her work to do. And freeing her of that, and freeing myself of that would only serve me, serve us, and help us moving forward. You know, there are moments when I wanna reach for my phone without thinking, because I just wanna tell my mom something. Something small, something silly, something about the baby, and then I remember, and the remembering really hurts.

Stephen: 09:54

I don't feel like I was prepared or could prepare for this. There have been times where I have just thought about what my mom could have went through with me as her being her first born child, and just wanting to share and ask her, Was I like this? Was I fussy like this? Or, you know, did I laugh like this? Or some of those good moments where I I my body reaches for the phone.

Stephen: 10:27

My mind reaches or or or or puts in order, get the get the phone, send mom a text, shoot her a text, give her a quick call. And that pain over and over again, the realization that I I could call her, but she's not gonna pick that phone up, is something that is really tough, and something that I continue to try to work through. There are so many things about my daughter that I see that remind me of my mother, whether it be sometimes her stubbornness, her smile, even the shape of her head is the same. It's her joy when she laughs. I think about my mom, and there's so many things that I just really wanna share.

Stephen: 11:24

And, you know, sometimes I think about when we have people here, we take it for granted, right? That text that you can send your mom, text you can send your dad, it's not as important until when you can't send it anymore. So I think that's one thing that is so tough about this. There's so many things I really There's not a price tag you can put on being able to share these moments with my mom, or being able to share these moments with my dad. Children don't heal you, they reveal you.

Stephen: 12:05

They reveal the grief you've neatly tucked away. They reveal the exhaustion, the fear, the heartbreak you forget you are holding. With sleepless nights, full dependency, supporting my partner, grief doesn't get priority. It doesn't get scheduled time, but it doesn't disappear. So I've had to learn how to create space for it.

Stephen: 12:33

Sometimes that means going on a short walk. And, you know, that little short walk can be the difference between I'm okay and I'm unraveling. You know, I like to jog, sometimes just getting sweating a little bit, getting tired, and being able to put my mind on staying alive through an intense cardio session is something that helps calm me. This podcast is something that has really helped me when it comes to being able to create space for my grief. I also really appreciate my partner for giving me the space to step away and do this while she watches our daughter.

Stephen: 13:22

Being a parent has really started to stretch my emotional capacity, where I really thought that I could only tolerate so much, I've realized that I can actually tolerate much more. And it's been a scary experience, it's been a revealing experience, but it's also been a really rewarding one. I know that the loss of my mom and the way that I lost her is something I will wrestle with for my entire life, and I know that I'll be a father for the rest of my life as well. These things must coexist. I'm learning how to allow them to, and I understand that it won't always be neat, it won't always look good, And that's okay too.

Stephen: 14:19

One of the hardest realizations since becoming a father is that I understand my mom in a way I never could before. When my parents divorced and my dad got custody, I never understood the pain she must have felt. But now, watching my partner with our daughter, I can only imagine how devastating that must have been. To see the sacrifice that women go through to, one, bring a child into this world, and then, two, to keep them here, whether it be breastfeeding, whether it be just the innate responsibility that a woman feels to protect that child, to care for the child, the way the child's cry is attached to the mom's physiological being, that she can't sleep well if the child is not asleep. Gonna be transparent.

Stephen: 15:14

I can go to sleep now. I could be knocked out, and just cry from my daughter will awake my partner in a way that may not do the same for me. And that is something that has really hit me deep as I've started to understand what my mom may have went through in a custody battle that resulted in me living with my father. You know, if my mom were here, I'd tell her, I understand now, and I'm sorry you went through that, and I love you more deeply because I see what you carried. She never let that pain get in the way of loving me.

Stephen: 16:04

She never let that pain get in the way of loving me. In a world where people sometimes have children and because of whatever, they decide they don't wanna be parents. And this is not a podcast to you know, dump dirt on those people that make that decision. But it is the space where I just want to acknowledge how amazing of a mother I had, because she never stopped trying to be a mother. Even when I lived with my father, I would come visit my mom for holidays, and my mom always tried to make those times special.

Stephen: 16:55

And I just can't imagine how much hurt she experienced every time I would come for a holiday and then go back to live with my dad. And, you know, everybody was doing the best they could at that time. And I know everybody wanted what was best for me. But I'm just learning now, through this experience, that I know just a lot for my mom to experience, and it's unfortunate that I just really wish I had the opportunity to see it and tell my mom some of these things while she was still here. Know, holding my daughter, I thought, you know, how do you lose this, and how do you keep going after losing this?

Stephen: 17:42

And that's something that my mom went through, and she experienced. And, you know, I just learned so much about how strong of a woman my mom was through some of the things I'm not able to do as a dad, watching my partner do what she does as a mother, I'm just realizing the strength that my mom carried in everything that she went through. Being present and grieving at the same time is a balancing act. You know, some days I'm here, fully here, and other days I'm split between memories and the moment. Presence doesn't mean perfection, it just means showing up with the parts of you still healing.

Stephen: 18:31

I've had to let go of perfection and hallmark movies in all of this. Grief is ugly. It's messy. And if you're a parent and you know those newborn stages, it's messy. Children are do, once again, they're gonna do what they wanna do.

Stephen: 18:53

They are not on your schedule. They do not care about your itinerary that you have neatly typed in a Word document. They don't care. They're going to respond to the world as they see fit, and they're trying to learn. They've only been here for a few days.

Stephen: 19:11

Meanwhile, grief is the same way. I've had my mom for thirty six years. I just had the first year of her not being here. I've only known a life with my mom here. So I'm learning a brand new life, I'm learning a brand new reality that I wasn't prepared for and nobody truly can prepare you for.

Stephen: 19:40

So this moment, these moments are about losing this idea of perfection. You know, just recently, my family came to visit from Maryland, and they came to LA, and we had that itinerary all typed out and figured out. And on day one, day one, my daughter has been struggling with some stomach issues, as newborns do, and she actually had a blowout. And people always tell you, you know, when you're prepared to be a parent, Hey, one day, know, it's gonna be a blowout. It's probably what happened at the worst possible moment.

Stephen: 20:22

And that was that Family just in town, we're about to go out, and my daughter decides, Yep, right now, this is where we're gonna do it. This is the time. But it snapped me back into the reality as I walked into a room that smelled like Lord Jesus. It snapped me back into the present, and further underlined how messy this all is. I guess, Steven, it's not gonna be perfect, man.

Stephen: 20:55

You're gonna want and desire for sometimes your grief to take a nice little seat in this corner so you can really enjoy this moment, but sometimes grief is gonna say, No, I'm right here. I'm showing up. And you're gonna feel it right now. And it's so tough to let go, but I'm learning that that's the only path forward. When my mom died, one of the toughest things I had to do was pick up her death certificate.

Stephen: 21:20

I remember driving around Downtown Detroit, it was really hard to find parking. And I finally find the building, and I walk inside, and one thing that was just so crazy to me was that on the same floor, it was a Vital Records floor, I believe, and on the same floor, one room was where you went to go get death certificates, and the other room was where you went to go get birth certificates. And I just never forget that moment of going up to the glass, asking for my mom's death certificate, getting it, sitting down, and reading it, and like, the it felt like all the air being removed from my body, because it felt like this is is this is real now. Like, I'm reading What? I was just talking to my mom a few days ago, and I'm reading her death certificate now.

Stephen: 22:10

It just didn't seem real, but that moment was trying to stamp it that, No, this is real. Meanwhile, in a room adjacent, there's a father going to get his son's birth certificate and walking out that room smiling, so much joy. And it was the perfect picture, and of this juxtaposition, this warring that I've described in this episode of the joy, and then the sadness, the pain that can all happen at the same exact time, which makes grief so messy. And I was reminded of that moment when I went to go get my daughter's birth certificate when she was born. I remember being excited, going downtown Los Angeles, excited to walk into the building this time, right?

Stephen: 23:17

And now, the records were retrieved in the same exact room. So, you would go to the right if you wanted to go get a birth certificate, to the left if you were getting a death certificate. So you had people, literally, side by side with two different, totally different experiences and realities. I remember even feeling guilty for being excited, because I'm standing next to somebody who's getting a birth certificate, a death certificate. And that, again, is just a really real illustration.

Stephen: 23:55

You know, that day reminded me that I'm walking in both directions now. So, yes, today, I'm excited, I'm getting this birth certificate, I'm so happy, but sometimes I might be on the other side of the aisle, right? I might be sad. And once again, giving myself permission to be able to feel both, and to honor both, because both are really two really real emotions that deserve space. One of the toughest things about all of this is, you know, my mom made celebrations big.

Stephen: 24:34

She made life feel important. When I got the promotion, first person I called was my mom. When I got the raise, when I won the game, mom was the first one I called, and now I'm learning how to celebrate my daughter in the spirit of how my mom celebrated me, trying to, or doing my best to. And I think that that is one of the ways in which I will continue to allow my mom's memory to live on through me, to make the small things big. And I'm no expert in it yet, and it's just something that I'm really thinking through and wanting to make special, but I think that's one of the ways in which I will continue to remember my mom by making sure those moments for my daughter are big, are huge.

Stephen: 25:35

Those moments for my partner, my fiance are big, are huge, and are exciting. And my mom, one year, gave me two surprise birthday parties. Two in the same year. She gave me two probably about a few days apart from each other. And I just thought, man, this this woman is something is something else.

Stephen: 25:57

But that was my mom. She's gonna make you feel special and make you feel important. Right? And and that's something that I believe that I will definitely try to pass down. Becoming a father didn't erase my grief.

Stephen: 26:12

It reshaped it. My daughter didn't fill the void. She gave me permission to face it. She reminds me every day that love doesn't die. It just changes forms.

Stephen: 26:25

This episode is for my mom and for every parent trying to balance new life with old pain. Thank you for listening to episode five of Grieving Son. If this episode helped you, share it with someone who might need it. If you are someone who's grieving, be kind to yourself. If you know someone who's grieving, be kind to them.

Stephen: 26:44

I know they need it. I'm Steven, and this is Grieving Son.