The hardworking dads at Dad Magazine are back to wish you a very happy Valentine’s Day!

On Saturday, not for the first time, my dad offers to buy me a gun. I’m still in my running gear, sitting on my bed, certain I’m leaving sweaty ass-prints on my good quilt, but I’ve got no choice. I have to sit here, crammed against the wall’s one outlet because my phone can’t hold a charge, and I have to call him. He’s my dad, and I want him to make me feel better.

My pop used to run long distances, too. Both sides of my family are athletic and built for hard labor, and when my parents met and merged, they birthed a batch of strong, sinewy children. Unlike my brothers, I didn’t use my powers to win homecoming games. I never gave a shit about sports at all until one day in college, when I went through a terrible time and needed to run away—and so I did. Running gave me a way to run away, as well as a way to come back to who I was. It also gave me something to talk about with family members who had never understood my lack of interest in sports.

Sometimes, when I call my pop now and talk to him, we talk about running. These conversations feel like another, newer language we are practicing together. It feels good. It gives us a way to connect.

But today I call him because this particular run felt really bad. I’m teary and trying to tamp it down. Before I can finish describing the sexual harassment I just endured from eight separate men during the one hour, 14 minutes, and 20 seconds it took me to run ten miles, my dad interrupts.

“See, now this is why you need a .38,” he says. “Something nice and small you can carry with you at all times.”

When I was two my father committed suicide. This is why patriarchal religion was never going to work out, I once joked to my mother, because my family is incapable of telling the truth plainly.

Previously, from the same author.

When my employer called me into his office and granted me paternity leave on the birth of my first child, I had no idea what I was in for. Most of my male coworkers had already left the office at this point, having impregnated willing strangers in order to take twelve weeks’ paid time off in exchange for eighteen years of financial and personal responsibility.

“It’s twelve weeks’ time off,” Daniel shouted when he learned he’d successfully created a child with the head of the mechanics department. “I’m going to finally finish my heli-skiing novel!”

I simply wasn’t prepared for what all of this free time would do to me. I had planned, of course, to participate actively as a member of the household and as my wife’s partner — grease the dryer, dust the teakettle, rearrange the cat, and so on — but then, shortly after I walked in the door, I was tragically trapped under something heavy and have been unable to move from this spot in the living room. No one can move this burden from me, save the pure-hearted seventh son of a seventh son, and I do not believe that such a person exists.