Worthless would be an aggressive way to describe how I was feeling. But whatever word sits directly next door, that’s probably a decent summation.

It was June 2024, about 10 months into fatherhood. Over the past year we had uprooted our previous life and I had dramatically shifted my identity. Gone were the days of seriously pursuing standup comedy. We traded the city for the suburbs and swapped the serenity and autonomy of the DINK life for sleep deprivation and dirty diapers.

Deep down I knew this was clearly the right direction. It just didn’t fully feel that way.

My wife was making the money and doing most of the childcare. Through better career decisions, she became the de facto breadwinner. And through a generous maternity leave (compared to other leave policies in America, not the world) + strategically leveraging a sizable bonus, she was able to take 9 full months off to care for our daughter.

All mothers and newborns develop a bond that a father can’t fully understand. But my wife and daughter felt like a unit unto themselves. With relative frequency, our infant daughter vocally declared she didn’t want much to do with me. Fair or not, I often sensed that I was on the outside looking in.

On the career front, my focus was building a home inspection business whilst seeing where the cards landed at my marketing and communications job. But I felt stuck at both.

The day job, long a placeholder for other pursuits, became dependent on the slothful motion of bureaucracy and the nascent long-term strategy of a recently hired department head, whose goals would take another few months to materialize. Home inspection—which my wife and I had reasoned was an ideally flexible and entrepreneurial yang to her relative stable W-2 yin—began to feel like an out of place building block. One that did not smoothly fit into our childcare and career Tetris game, despite pre-engineering it to do exactly that.

So even if this wasn’t empirically the case, I felt I was flailing at being an involved father and useful man. And this wasn’t just financial. The lawn, which I insisted on maintaining, looked like it just fell victim to a once-in-a-generation mudslide (I’d later learn the culprit was a grub infestation). Minor household repairs and tasks that I’d otherwise be on top of were falling by the wayside. Long a measured and stable support system for my wife, I was beginning to get irritated and moody.

Everywhere I turned, it felt like I wasn’t quite measuring up.

During this time, one area which I was in charge of was the procurement of baby formula. Older daughter was a bottle refuser, so it wasn’t until after 6 months that we started to transition her off breast milk. Initially I was on top of it, embracing an essential task that made me feel like a contributing member of our family. But then her formula intake began to increase, and I slipped up. We were running low and there was a shortage. Doing the math, I realized that we may run out before we got the next batch.

I realized this during a Monday night pickup basketball game that I had joined and promptly left. I considered driving 3 towns over to Target, but they were about to close. I instead just looped around the neighborhood for a bit until I calmed down.

I couldn’t help think of that “you had one job!” meme.

**

That weekend, my wife, sensing that I was increasingly adrift but not entirely sure what to do about the ever more grumpy man she had married, assigned me a task.

Our daughter had outgrown her infant baby carrier. We wanted the next iteration, but it also felt a bit silly to spend $200+ on something that we didn’t know our mercurial little one would approve.

So my wife, who also handled the research and vetting of baby accessories, found what she was looking for on Facebook Marketplace. Up until this point, we were not Facebook Marketplace people. Not so much because we thought we were above it, but because neither of us had an active Facebook account and were hesitant to dive back into the toxic landfill that is an over-monetized social media site. When we lived in the city, saving $100 on a piece of furniture of unclear quality did seem worth the hassle and potential cost of figuring out how to obtain it.

But this new baby carrier, barely used and at a steep discount, was clearly a good value proposition. The one minor catch was that we had to drive 25 minutes at a specific time to go get it.

While not always the case, driving a medium-sized distance to conduct a transaction at an unknown location with unknown variables is more commonly a man’s domain. I was grasping at straws, but I welcomed the assignment with a zeal of an entry level employee who finally is called upon to do something other than stare at the screen all day.

The drive was to a train station I had never been to, but I mostly knew how to get there. For the first time in what felt like weeks, I was able to let my mind stray. I listened to The Ramsey Show, which at that time gave me a sense of comfort and control.

Here were all these people whose lives were typically way more chaotic than mine, often self-induced. I also found consolation in the plans that Dave and his co-hosts would develop. They were technically simple and easy to follow, but psychologically incredibly demanding. It was this sort of discipline and calling that I longed for. And somewhat unrelated, inhabiting the disparate lives of this varied slice of Americana also kept me grounded as to how absurd living in the tri-state area really is. Perspective is always a good thing to attempt to have.

At one point, a woman who was probably in her 50s or 60s called in. She wanted to know how to arrange her finances after the death of her son, who passed in sudden and heartbreaking fashion. Dave exhibited a combination of empathy and no-nonsense advice that I can only describe as supremely skilled. I often prefer listening to the other hosts over this cantankerous, arguably out of touch man from a previous time, but it was clear that the skill set that Dave had honed over the course of the past few decades was second to none.

I felt a pang of regret over my decision to leave the comedy world, where I spent a decade aspiring to a similar level of competence. But I simultaneously understood that compared to the grieving woman who had just called in—and compared to the vast majority of people in the world—my problem was…well, not a problem.

I arrived at the train station early and messaged the woman I was supposed to be meeting. After describing what I was wearing (not in that way), she materialized from across the street with a Stop and Shop tote in hand. I gave her the cash, but felt exposed in the blazing June sun. I half expected the cops to swarm us. She thanked me for taking the carrier off of her hands and relayed that after three attempts of forcing her reluctant son in the device, gave up.

I hope you have better luck than me, she joked as she headed back across the street, returning back to wherever she came from. I did the same, and my mental fog returned.

**

That summer, I passively observed my wife and daughter continue their buddy comedy partnership, now with the new baby carrier. I think I may have put it on once, maybe twice. While I was externally able to play the part of a functioning person, I spent much of the summer wallowing. I’m not pre-inclined to depression, but I was beginning to understand what it feels like and how it envelops your entire sense of being. For the first time in my life, I considered therapy.

There is a picture of my wife and daughter together on a vacation we took in Newport, Rhode Island, with our daughter in the baby carrier. They both have the sort of smile that makes you thankful for the invention of photography. Wind slightly blowing with the New England ocean in the background, it is the perfect capturing of a specific feeling elicited by a specific moment. They aren’t so much worry free, but they both seem to understand that what they were experiencing was divinely special, and that it would be a moment worth holding on to. One that would transcend the smartphone camera roll and maybe even make it to an expensive frame in the hallway.

It wasn’t until the end of that summer when a combination of two significant events in quick succession—first, the letting go of home inspection and a certain need to center my identity around an individualistic entrepreneurial pursuit; and second, about two weeks later, the news that we were expecting a second child—that I almost instantly snapped out of it. It had taken some time, but I had psychologically caught up to the new assignment that life had for me, and embraced it head on.

Now, going on walks with my wife and daughter in the baby carrier, I was genuinely able to share their smile.

Fast-forward about a year, to October 2025. The past six months had brought about a vortex of insanity.

In April 2025, our second daughter had been born. Over the next few months we’d discover her emerging gastrointestinal issues, requiring us to navigate our 2 under 2 period on extra hard mode. Partly spurred by this development and partly spurred by continued conversations on how we wanted to raise our children, I left my job in October to stay home with our two girls.

That decision, somewhat abrupt given that it evolved from a recurring joke to giving notice in the span of two weeks, marked the culmination of something I didn’t realize I was building toward for the past several years; really since the COVID lockdowns, when I slowly accepted that the time horizon of my standup comedy pursuit and its required lifestyle directly competed with our long-term desire of building a family. It was a decision confirmed a certain death of special snowflake millennial self, of my aims as an individual taking a backseat to the shared aims of something larger. It is still something I struggle with, hence why I write this blog.

Speaking of something larger, October 2025 was when younger daughter outgrew the infant baby carrier and required the next level up. Given her gastrointestinal issues and the fact that she still needed to be held upright for a good portion of the night, the baby carrier wasn’t just our best friend. It was some sort of divine technological intervention that literally kept us still standing.

Now, it was my turn.

***

Over the past six months, I’ve worn the baby carrier previously acquired via Facebook Marketplace for hundreds of hours, at least. She’s taken dozens of naps, walked over 100 miles, and spent an unquantifiable amount of time sitting in the carrier for reasons of comfort (she seems to prefer the carrier over every single location on earth, other than her mother’s breast) or practicality, as it’s far and the way the best way to transport her anywhere while also managing older daughter, who I typically simultaneously push in the stroller.

While suspended in the carrier, younger daughter has helped me put laundry away, go food shopping, prepare meals, take out the garbage, jam out to Electric Avenue and Gangnam Style (her fave jams), and everything else in between. The handful of Millennial Dad Journal subscribers who see me on a somewhat regular basis will know that I have essentially become synonymous with this baby carrier.

If its material were of a different variety, it would likely be tattooed on my body by now.

As younger daughter becomes a toddler, she is on the verge of outgrowing the carrier. We’ve been experimenting with different double stroller combinations, but none have really stuck so far. So I’m still using the carrier, and probably will until the last possible moment.

All of these words, really just to say: you never really know when you will be needed. When I drove to that train station nearly two years ago, I thought I was just getting another accessory for my wife and daughter. I had no idea what the long-term arc of this item was. That we’d have another baby. That this baby would have health issues that required her to be held upright at all hours. That constantly holding a baby upright, as she grew from a newborn to an infant to almost a toddler, is incredibly physically demanding.

That, as a man who is able to carry more weight than my wife, this challenge was one that I was uniquely suited for. That I was in good enough health and shape to do all this.

I live in a town where pretty often, you see men and women in their 40s and 50s rucking around the residential streets. I know that eventually, there is a decent probability that I’ll buy a rucksack and join this informal army of weight carriers.

But when I do this, it’ll be like a former high school football star tossing around the pigskin in middle age. Part of me will always be longing for the real thing.

Most men don't think about their skin until eye bags, dark spots, and wrinkles seem to appear all at once. Particle Face Cream was engineered for exactly this. Premium anti-aging ingredients, one formula, trusted by over a million men. No complicated routine. Get 20% off now with the code BH20.

Get 20% Off Today