“What do dads do on Tuesdays?” This wasn’t a rhetorical question when I posed it to my wife as our daughter’s birth approached. Before my daughter was born, I had seen my father just once in the past 27 years. That’s over 1,400 Tuesdays. In fact, as a kid I hardly saw fathering any day of the week, save for on TV sitcoms; absent dads were prevalent within my family and among my peers. My daughter was born on a Saturday. My first Tuesday as a father came and went in a blur of exhaustion. I’d always loved playing and working with kids. I felt generally competent in what to do with my newborn daughter. Yet as I held her, insecurity from my father’s absence kept me questioning: Will I be better than my absent father? Absence assumes different forms Years before my daughter’s birth, I was a first-year Ph.D. student intending to study Black men and how their memories of childhood affected them as adults. My pivot toward focusing on fatherhood began while I was conducting interviews for a larger study on men of all races and unemployment. After completing these interviews, I was surprised to see that 85%…