When my first son, Tom, was born I joked (bitterly) that all I had to do to be a better father than my father had been was to survive for more than four years.<\/p>\n
My father died when I was 4-years-old, after losing a short battle with Hodgkin\u2019s disease. I grew up without a father and with barely any memories of having one. Father\u2019s day was not a holiday I celebrated. I knew I\u2019d had a father and I knew many facts about him but still I\u2019ve always felt that I didn\u2019t really know him.<\/p>\n
I grew up wishing I had a father, just like everyone else. I knew many kids with divorced parents but I was the only one who didn\u2019t have a father at all.<\/p>\n
Early on I had decided that I wanted to have children and that I would be an active and involved father.<\/p>\n
When Tom was born I immediately felt I wanted him to have what I never had. At the time I was a healthy 31- year-old and although I\u2019d always feared cancer I did not think I had any reason to worry about my health.\u00a0 But when Tom was just over a year old, something began to go wrong.\u00a0 It took months for me to realize it was something serious.\u00a0 I was losing weight and waking up throughout the night to drink and then urinate.\u00a0 I thought I was waking up because of Tom\u2019s crying.\u00a0 Little did I know\u2026<\/p>\n
When Tom was 18-months-old I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.\u00a0 At that point, after losing 20-some pounds, the feeling in my feet, and with my vision so blurred I couldn\u2019t see the TV, death did not seem all that far away. It didn\u2019t take me very long to understand that if I wanted to stay around and be able to be the active father I\u2019d always wanted to be I would have to take very good care of myself. \u00a0\u00a0So here I am trying\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":53098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1501],"tags":[844],"yoast_head":"\n