A single father has written a moving letter to fellow dads like him, who helped him get to grips with his new role.
Richard Johnson, 21, was left devastated when the mother of his new baby took her out of state without his knowledge.
A month later however, he received a call to say his daughter Persephone would be put up for adoption if he didn’t immediately come and retrieve her.
Jumping on a plane, Richard brought his new daughter back home, before reality hit – he was the single dad of a little girl.
He scoured the internet for help, and stumbled across Life of Dad, a Facebook page designed to help fathers with all their parenting needs.
And now he’s written a thank you note to the men that helped him. It goes a little something like this:
“Life of Dad,
My name is Richard Johnson, and I’m a single father to a beautiful little girl named Persephone. Her mother left about a month after she was born. We still don’t know exactly why, but we suspect postpartum depression played a part. In the first few weeks of it being just her and me, I stumbled upon your page by accident. I was so nervous and scared about being a father in general, but now I was a single father and had to fulfill two roles. I wasn’t sure I could do it.
I had read every ‘new parent’ book I could find and clocked in over 1,000 hours in YouTube videos from everything to braiding hair and painting nails to theories on how to deal with common parental issues. I then started to watch your page more closely and saw that there were other fathers out there who were in similar predicaments as me.
The page started to turn into a major confidence booster and really helped me through all of this.
We’re both very happy now and continue to grow together every day. She’s now 10 months, and I now get asked by my friends for parenting advice constantly. We’ve come a long way, my daughter and me, and we definitely owe part of that to this page and the people within it. So, from both of us, we wanted to thank you.
Sincerely,
Persephone & Richard Johnson.”
How wonderful is that?
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