Dear Evan:

When you’re trying not to cry, your lips curl into a smile. Your face reddens. Your eyes, eyelids already heavy like mine, droop at the outer corners.

You and I were eating dinner last night, and you were asking me about why we hold our thumbs up to make guns out of fingers. I was trying to balance answering (especially confusing because Star Wars guns, the only ones you know, do not have hammers) and stressing why we don’t play guns in our house.

After a few minutes, I watched your face crumple. You were fighting tears, fighting them with everything you had.

I’m not always a good father. Sometimes I tell you to go play Legos so I can play some silly phone game and disconnect my brain. Sometimes I tell you I don’t care if you don’t like what I’m saying.

But sometimes I get it.

“Is everything okay?”

That’s all it took. The floodgates opened and you crawled into my lap and you bawled into my shirt and clutched the neckline in your little fist and I let you get it all out.

A little boy in your class, you told me, said “Stop talking” every time you spoke in preschool class. Every time. Even when it was your turn to talk. He told you that you talk too much.

When you’d gotten it all out, I told you he was wrong. That we love how much you talk, we love that you can express yourself so well. I told you that your teacher is the only one who can ask you to be quiet.

Cold comfort, I know. It helps that tomorrow is the last day of your preschool year, and that you’re headed to a new place for kindergarten. Not that you’ll always be safe there, because bullies live everywhere, but we’ll deal with that when it happens.

I love how much you talk. I love that we hold long conversations in the car or at the dinner table. I love that you still talk to yourself when you play, and that you narrate our backyard Star Wars adventures.

Never stop talking.

I love you,

Daddy