By Beth P. Siller, LMFT

I’ve always been a daddy’s girl through and through.

Left-handed like my dad. No braces needed, just like my dad. Artistic like my dad. Really, really funny (still am) like my dad… was. I inherited his charisma when it came to storytelling, presenting, and taking the stage to speak from the heart. That part of him has always lived on through me.

My dad was six foot four and a half, bright white smile, big blue eyes, and very, very tan skin. He would just sit in a lawn chair (in the front or back of the house) and soak up the sun like an iguana. Obviously not a dermatologist, but an ophthalmologist who never had to study (legend has it, but who am I to challenge it), but aced everything. An athlete who could pick up any sport and knock it out of the park, except for football or hockey because my grandmother didn’t want anything to happen to his braces-free pearly whites of course. Everywhere they went, whether it was the neighborhood breakfast spot Bagel & More, the bank or Publix, everyone greeted him like a local celebrity. “Dr. Siller!” He was the kind of man who’d be waiting for a table at Olive Garden and wind up with a circle of kids around him watching him play his Game Boy, and they’d cry when their parents dragged them away to be seated. That was him. That was always who he was, magnetic.

He also drew freehand sacred geometrical designs and mandalas. He loved Mel Brooks, Rodney Dangerfield, and Al Bundy. He took us everywhere. He’d take me (and my friends at times) to Disney, Marlins games, cruises, Israel, and Carvel ice cream after getting haircuts at SuperCuts. He said being a dad to his three girls was the greatest thing in life that he ever did. Out of all his accomplishments, that was the one that means everything.

He would cry talking about stories from when we were little (and then blame it on a medication he was taking). How much he just loved it.

When I lost him at 21 to CLL leukemia, I felt like half of me died that day too.

Father’s Day has never been simple since then. Some years, people remember to check in. Other years, I keep myself distracted and busy. Sometimes I just let myself be alone, isolated, and in my feelings. You really can’t escape it between commercials, stores, and specials going on for the holiday. I’d eat a black and white cookie (his favorite) the way I do every year on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death. I’d hold the grief and try to let it move through me.

And then I became a mother.

My son is named after my dad. My dad’s name was Mark. His Hebrew name was Yisrael Moshe, though he really thought of himself as, “Moshe, King of Israel!” (which is a whole other story).

When I was choosing a name, I wanted an M name that carried real meaning. I landed on Mayer: bringer of light, brilliant one in Hebrew. His Hebrew name is Moshe, after my dad. His middle name is Finch, after my Nana Fay, whose Hebrew name Faiga means little bird. Finches are considered divine messengers of happiness and peace. Every part of his name is someone I love dearly and carry with me everyday.

There’s a layer of symbolism I didn’t plan but also didn’t fight: my dad died on Hanukkah of 2003. The Festival of Lights. So Mayer, bringer of light, felt like more than a name. It felt like something my dad would have appreciated, would have maybe even taken credit for orchestrating from wherever he is.

It’s bittersweet in the way that a lot of things are when you’re grieving and parenting at the same time. I’m so grateful to honor him. And I wish I wasn’t in the position of needing to do it this way.

His one regret, by the way, was not the things left unsaid, it was that he would never get to be a grandpa. He really, really wanted to be a grandpa. That’s the thing that always made me sad when I thought about it. How much nachas he would have gotten as being “Papa Mark” to my 3 nephews, my niece, and my son. He would have loved Mayer in a way that would’ve been everything just to watch.

I grew up not knowing my dad’s mother. She died nine months before I was born, and I’m named after her. Yet, I always felt like I knew my Nana Barbara. My dad made sure of it. He’d tell me I had her hands, her sassy personality, her creativity with hair and fashion and makeup, and her total refusal to put up with nonsense. He kept her alive for me through story, through the specific and the particular, through the kind of detail that makes a person real even when they’re gone and long after.

That’s what I’m trying to do for Mayer.

I tell him where his name comes from. I tell him Papa Mark would have loved him so much. I tell him, “This is something Papa Mark would do,” when I see something that reminds me of my dad. I’m building a relationship between two people who will never meet, and I am the only one who can do it. Some days that feels like an honor. Some days it feels like the loneliest job in the world.

Mayer already has his grandpa’s eyes. He already has the charisma which you can see when he walks into a room and owns it before he even knows he’s doing it. I notice these things and I tuck them away to tell him someday. Your Papa Mark was like that too. You have so many of his gifts, like Mama.

Last Father’s Day, I was still very early postpartum. There was the postpartum fog everywhere, like the hot-boxed cars you’d see in my high school parking lot. I put most of my focus on celebrating my stepdad Jon, my son’s Papa, which felt right. I tell Mayer he has an earth Papa and a heaven Papa that’s with Hashem. I did show Mayer a picture of my dad during tummy time. He smiled at it. He was maybe two and a half months old. I filed that moment away somewhere sacred and moved on.

This year is different.

Mayer is almost 15 months old. The fog has started to lift in certain places where I can see and think more clearly now. I’m a different kind of sensitive at this phase of postpartum. I’m noticing things coming back online in ways I didn’t realize had gone offline. As certain milestones come into focus and as I become more present to what this life actually looks like, this Father’s Day is hitting different in a way I didn’t fully anticipate.

My son has an incredible grandpa in his life (my stepdad) who has Mayer’s heart and vice versa. Papa will be out of town this year, so the “Papa’s Day” we did last year won’t be possible. He has some good male role models that I wish we got to see more often so that probably won’t be an option for us. He is loved. None of that is lost on me AND he doesn’t have my dad. I am very much aware of that this year in a way I wasn’t ready to be last year.

I think about how much my dad would have loved him. Playing with him, doing art with him, making him belly laugh. Giving him high fives and then immediately bragging about it and taking credit for teaching it to him. Telling him stories about when Mama was little from his experiences with me. My dad had a way of making everyone feel like the most important person in the room. He would have done that for my son and I really think my son would’ve done that for him, unintentionally.

So much of what I do now feels like being a conduit. Like I’m the only thread connecting Mayer to this whole person who would have adored him. That’s a weight I didn’t expect. It’s also, on some days, a strange kind of gift. With my dad having 3 daughters, Mayer also gets to carry on the Siller name from my immediate family, which is pretty amazing.

I’m also a single mom by choice to a son, which adds its own grief and a particular kind of complexity to a day like Father’s Day.

I want to be clear: it was a fully intentional, whole-hearted choice to become an SMBC. I’d rather build our family on intention and clarity than wait for a circumstance that wasn’t right for us. There are absolutely zero regrets about taking this path and still, there’s grief in that too. Not for the choice itself, but for the losses that pile on top of each other in ways you don’t always see coming.

For those of us who built our families outside the traditional structure, through fertility treatment, through donor conception, through sheer stubborn love, Father’s Day can be a strange space to sit in. You’re holding gratitude and grief in the same hand. You’re honoring a choice you’d make again and again while also sitting with everything that choice couldn’t give you. That’s not a contradiction, that’s just the full picture of it.

Mayer’s name carries a 4th generation Holocaust survivor. It carries my Nana Fay’s little bird. It carries my father’s festival of lights. It carries the losses that came before him. He doesn’t know any of that yet. Someday he will and I will be the one to tell him. As a conscious parent, I’ll also tell him that it’s not something he needs to carry if it feels too heavy, because sometimes it is. He is very much his own person outside of his namesakes and my fertility journey. I want him to know that too. Mayer is special, amazing, magical, and breath-taking all on his own AND his backstory is meaningful. I want him to know that two things can be true at the same time. Just like he can love his Papa here and miss the one he’ll never get to meet can both be true. I can be immensely grateful for my stepdad’s love, care and support AND wish my father was still here to also be Mayer’s grandpa.

I can’t help it, but my therapist part needs to chime in here for a minute. What I’m sharing is actually something Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) talks about.

ACT doesn’t ask you to feel better. It asks you to make room. To expand around the hard feelings instead of spending all your energy trying to push them out. Grief doesn’t go away, especially during the postpartum period, when loss can surface in ways that feel new even if the loss itself is old. An old loss, finding new shape. A grief you thought you knew, showing you a room you hadn’t been in yet.

What ACT offers is this: you don’t have to resolve the feeling to take meaningful action. You can go to Carvel in honor of your dad and get vanilla soft serve in a cake cone with chocolate sprinkles like he used to order, you can eat a black and white cookie at the table with your son and tell him about the man and grandfather he’s named after. You can be the conduit and let yourself cry in the car and still call it a great day. Values-based action doesn’t wait for the pain to clear. It moves through it and creates the space around it. It leans into it with acceptance and willingness.

Postpartum, in my clinical opinion, doesn’t end at six weeks or six months. Physically and hormonally, it can take two years for a woman’s body to regulate. And emotionally? There are aspects of who you were before your fertility journey, before pregnancy, before loss, before birth, that don’t fully ever come back. That’s not a deficit, it’s transformation.

Father’s Day is one of those moments that shows you exactly where you are in that transformation.

Father’s Day could look uniquely different for us both as the years go by. This year, I’m going to take my son to Carvel and I’m going to get a black and white cookie. I’m going to tell him, again, about the man whose name he carries. The tall, funny, charismatic doctor who drew mandalas and took his kids everywhere and said being a dad was the greatest thing he ever did. The man who wanted more than anything to be a grandpa and never got the chance to on earth.

I’m going to tell Mayer: you have his blue eyes, his star quality, and you even show signs of having his humor at almost 15 months old! I have a feeling he will understand.

Then I’m going to let myself feel whatever comes up, because that’s the work. It’s not something to be resolved, outrun, or scared of. Just being present with my son on a complicated day, in honor of a man neither of us will ever get enough of.

Bringer of light. Brilliant one.

Papa Mark would have loved that.

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Beth Siller is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in perinatal mental health. She is the founder of All That Matters Therapy and a single mother by choice.