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This Father’s Day, I want to honor two men who shaped how I show up as a dad, even though they did it in completely different ways.
Tatay Alex… or Lolo Tatay as Lyle likes to call him
Father’s Day is always special for me. Long before I became one, my dad became my dad (well duh…) and then just as I was about to become more serious with my life, my younger brother showed me that I shouldn’t be afraid to take a leap.
Our youngest brother, Jappy, had already shown me that it takes a lot of courage to fall in love and marry the woman you love.
And that you should just go and take that leap.
I took it.
Earl took that further by becoming a da and showing me that this is something I can also do. I just needed a little more courage.
I’ve always written about my dad as my blueprint for being a good father. Here’s why.
4 kids.
All headstrong.
And he became a widower early.
Dad wasn’t always around growing up.
He was a salesman, which meant business trips, long stretches away, a presence felt more in what he provided than in daily proximity.
But what he provided was a life many would envy.
If my sister wanted books, she got a boatload of books. If we wanted toys, we worked for them, earned a little money, and bought them ourselves.
He believed in that.
Provision paired with lessons.
Never just handouts.
We were never wanting for clothes or food or shelter.
We could go where we wanted as long as we did things that made us deserve the vacation.
We always had people helping us because he was their employer.
He was strict when strictness was called for.
Stern when the moment demanded it.
But he was also, somehow, one of the most genuinely fun people to be around.
He has a seemingly endless supply of funny stories, the kind that get retold at every family gathering because they never stop being funny.
Everyone loves him.
Everyone, family and friends alike, calls him Tatay.
He’s not just our Tatay.
He is everyone’s Tatay.
He is every bit the father I aspire to be as I keep growing into this role myself.
But here’s something I didn’t expect. My dad wasn’t the one who taught me the hands-on parts of fatherhood, the actual mechanics of it. That came from someone I never saw coming.
Earl.
Earl as a Father
I never thought it would be Earl who’d become my blueprint as a new dad.
But watching him step into fatherhood, changing diapers, looking after Maddie with this easy, unbothered competence, something clicked in me.
I wanted to be half as good as he was.
When I became a father myself, my first real thoughts weren’t about big philosophical questions of what kind of man I wanted to raise.
They were painfully practical.
How do you actually change a diaper without it becoming a disaster?
How do you bathe a newborn without panicking the whole time?
Earl, without ever knowing it, had already shown me the answers.
He became the blueprint for a newer kind of fatherhood… the freelancer dad, the stay-at-home dad, the guy married to a hardworking, successful woman, figuring it out in real time because the traditional model didn’t quite fit anymore.
We are, in a lot of ways, alike.
Both of us learning fatherhood not from a manual but from showing up daily and getting better at it through repetition and love.
So this Father’s Day, I want to say thank you to both of them.
To my Tatay, for the version of fatherhood built on provision, structure, humor, and love that didn’t always say the words, up until recently, but never once made us doubt it.
For being Tatay to an entire community, not just to us.
And to Earl, for showing me, without ever trying to teach a lesson, what the hands-on, day-to-day, diaper-changing version of fatherhood actually looks like.
For being the first man I watched become a dad and thought, that’s what I want to look like doing this.
I’m still figuring out my own version.
Some days I lean more into my dad’s steady provision.
Other days I lean into Earl’s hands-on presence.
Most days it’s some imperfect mix of both, filtered through my own mistakes and my own attempts to do right by my son.
If you’re reading this, Dad, Earl… thank you.
You probably never knew you were teaching me anything.
That’s usually how the best lessons work.
… and Happy Father’s Day to every man quietly building the blueprint someone else will follow. And if you’re thinking of what to get your own father for Father’s Day… here’s a list of gifts Dads truly want.
