Lord Jesus, Father’s Day is here again.
Today fathers are celebrated everywhere.
Children make cards.
Little hands reach for Daddy.
Families gather for cookouts and photographs.
Churches offer blessings for fathers.
Social media fills with pictures of men holding newborn babies, coaching teams, teaching children to fish, walking daughters down aisles, and standing beside sons who have grown into men themselves.
And I look at those pictures and think:
I want that too.
Lord, I want to be a father.
Perhaps I thought I would be one by now.
I imagined hearing my wife tell me she was pregnant.
I imagined staring at a positive pregnancy test together and wondering whether this could really be happening.
I imagined seeing our baby on an ultrasound.
Hearing a heartbeat.
Putting my hand on my wife’s belly and feeling our child kick.
I imagined standing beside her when our baby was born.
I imagined holding that tiny person for the first time and thinking:
This is my son.
Or:
This is my daughter.
I imagined someone calling me:
Daddy.
Instead, another Father’s Day has come, and I am still waiting.
Lord, men do not always know how to talk about this kind of grief.
People may ask how my wife is doing.
They should.
But sometimes no one asks how I am doing.
Maybe I do not even know how to answer.
I may have learned to be the strong one.
The practical one.
The one who understands the insurance, schedules appointments, gives injections if needed, drives home afterward, holds my wife when she cries, and says:
“We’ll figure this out.”
But sometimes I do not know how we will figure it out.
Sometimes I am scared too.
Sometimes I am angry.
Sometimes I am exhausted.
Sometimes I go somewhere private because I do not want my wife to see me cry when she is already hurting.
Jesus, remind me that strength is not the absence of tears.
You wept.
A man can grieve and still be strong.
Lord, protect me from shame.
If infertility involves my body, I may feel as though something fundamental about me has failed.
A number on a laboratory report can begin to feel like a verdict on my manhood.
Do not let me believe that lie.
My masculinity is not measured by sperm count, hormone level, diagnosis, or whether I can biologically father a child.
You created me male in body and soul.
My dignity does not disappear because part of my body is wounded.
Teach me that fatherhood is deeply connected to generativity, responsibility, protection, sacrifice, and self-gift—but biological fertility is not the measure of a man’s worth.
And if infertility involves my wife’s body, protect me from allowing her to carry guilt.
She may secretly wonder whether I regret marrying her.
She may look at me and think:
“He would be a father if he had married someone else.”
Help me tell her the truth:
I chose you.
I did not marry a reproductive possibility.
I married you.
Do not let our longing for a child turn us against one another.
When treatments, appointments, calendars, and disappointment begin consuming our marriage, bring us back to each other.
Let me hold my wife without trying to fix her.
Let me ask what she needs rather than assuming.
Let me tell her what I need too.
Let infertility make our marriage more tender rather than more lonely.
Lord, Father’s Day may contain awkward moments.
Someone may ask whether we have children.
Someone may joke:
“When are you two going to get started?”
Someone may tell me that fatherhood will happen when I stop worrying about it.
Someone may say:
“Just adopt.”
Give me patience when people mean well but do not understand.
And if I need to leave the room for a minute, give me permission.
If I need to skip something this year, give me wisdom.
If I enjoy the day, let me enjoy it without guilt.
If I cry in the car afterward, meet me there.
Lord, I may see fathers who neglect their children.
Men who disappear.
Men who refuse responsibility.
Men who hurt the very children they were meant to protect.
And something inside me may shout:
Why did he get to be a father when I would give anything for the chance?
Jesus, receive that question.
Protect me from bitterness, but do not make me pretend the injustice does not hurt.
Fertility is not a reward for good men.
Infertility is not punishment for bad ones.
Children are not prizes distributed according to merit.
I know that.
But knowing it does not always make the ache disappear.
So take the ache and turn it toward love.
Make me the kind of man who protects children wherever I encounter them.
Make me attentive to the vulnerable.
Make me generous with nieces and nephews, godchildren, students, neighbors, or any child You place in my path—not as substitutes for the child I want, but as persons worthy of love in their own right.
And still, Lord, I ask You plainly:
Please let me become a father.
If healing is possible, bring healing.
If my wife and I can conceive, please let new life begin.
Let me see the positive test.
Let me hear the heartbeat.
Let me feel the kick.
Let me hold my wife’s hand through labor.
Let me hold our child.
Let me carry a sleepy baby through the hallway at two in the morning.
Let me change diapers badly at first.
Let me buckle car seats.
Let me teach prayers.
Let me answer impossible questions.
Let me say:
“Ask your mother.”
Let me kneel beside a child’s bed and make the Sign of the Cross on a little forehead.
Let me bring my family to Mass.
Let me teach my child about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Let me apologize when I am wrong.
Let me protect without controlling.
Let me provide without believing money is the only thing a father gives.
Let me become the kind of father whose children know, without question:
Dad loves me.
And if adoption is the road to fatherhood, prepare my heart for that vocation too.
St. Joseph, you know something extraordinary about fatherhood that does not depend upon biological generation.
Jesus was not your biological son, yet God truly entrusted Him to your paternal care.
You named Him.
Protected Him.
Worked for Him.
Taught Him.
Led your family.
Loved Him.
Help me understand that adoptive fatherhood is not imitation fatherhood.
If a child is entrusted to my wife and me through adoption, help me receive that child completely while honoring the child’s first family and full story.
Protect me from thinking another man’s loss or failure is required for me to become a father.
Bless the child’s birth father.
Call him to responsibility, truth, and love.
If he can safely parent and desires to do so, give him the grace and support to fulfill that responsibility.
If adoption is freely and rightly chosen, help everyone involved act with integrity.
Lord, if we are waiting for an adoption match, help me survive the helplessness.
I cannot make someone choose us.
I cannot force the phone to ring.
I cannot manufacture the right circumstances.
Give me the courage to act where I can and surrender what I cannot control.
And Jesus, if fatherhood does not come in the way I have hoped, do not abandon me in that grief.
I do not want a quick explanation about other ways of being fruitful while the wound is still open.
Let me grieve honestly.
Then, over time, show me how the father’s heart You have been forming in me can still become a gift.
But I am not finished asking yet.
Lord, please let me be a dad.
St. Joseph, stay particularly close to me today.
You are the man standing quietly in so many Nativity scenes while everyone looks at Mary and Jesus.
You understand hidden fatherhood.
You understand protecting a family when the future is uncertain.
You understand getting up in the night because your child needs you.
You understand working with your hands for people you love.
Teach me your courage.
Teach me your chastity.
Teach me your tenderness.
Teach me your obedience.
Teach me that the strongest man in the room does not always need to be the loudest.
Blessed Fulton Sheen, intercede for me before Jesus in the Eucharist.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for my wife and for the child for whom we hope.
Mary, help me love my wife as the woman she is now, not merely as the mother I hope she will become.
And Jesus, Son of the Father, teach me fatherhood by revealing the Father to me.
Before I ever hear someone call me Daddy, remind me that I am already someone’s son.
I am a son of God.
Let that identity anchor me.
Then form in me a father’s heart now.
Make me faithful now.
Patient now.
Protective now.
Gentle now.
Self-sacrificing now.
Prayerful now.
So that if one day You place a child in my arms, fatherhood will not begin from nothing.
You will have been preparing me all along.
And perhaps one Father’s Day I will wake to little footsteps.
Perhaps there will be a handmade card.
Perhaps someone will climb into my lap.
Perhaps I will hear the word I have imagined so many times:
“Daddy.”
If that day comes, let me remember this Father’s Day.
Let me remember the men still waiting.
Let me notice them.
Let me pray for them.
And let me never take the extraordinary gift hidden inside that ordinary little word for granted.
Until then, Jesus, stay with me in the waiting.
St. Joseph, foster father of Jesus, pray for me.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
Blessed Fulton Sheen, pray for us.
Always remember Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Holy Family! Help us to be a holy family and pray for us!
Amen.