Fly Away Princess

I sat down today to write about investment property. I have a post half finished, full of numbers and insight and the kind of thing I usually love to work through. I tried hard but could not get through it. My mind was somewhere else. My mind was on my daughter Thalia, who leaves for college in less than two months. As her move in date gets closer, my mind is always drifting towards this moment.

I have learned something over the years, through a lot of hard things. The only way I ever clear my head is to write. So here I am. This post is not about money. It is barely about anything other than a father who is not ready, and who knows he has to be anyway. Maybe it is just for me. Maybe it is for Thalia. But I have a feeling there are other parents out there feeling exactly what I am feeling right now, so maybe it is for them too.

I am in a Facebook group for the parents of the LSU class of 2030, and I can promise you I am not alone. I posted something about all of us meeting up in August after we drop our kids off, and the response was bigger than I expected. The theme kept coming back, over and over, joking but not joking at all….. we are all going to meet and cry in our beer together.

I will cry. I already know it. I am a sappy dude and a sappy Dad, and I have made my peace with that a long time ago. I have been through enough in this life that I really do not worry about the old idea that men are not supposed to cry. I will cry because I love her, and because something wonderful is ending so that something else wonderful can begin.

The one thing I know I did right

I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. More than I would care to list. But there is one thing I am certain I got right, and it is this. I savored every second of my life with my daughter. Every single stage. I did not rush a single one of them, even when I was tired, even when life was hard, even when I had every excuse to look away. I paid attention.

I am the kind of person who gets sad at every change of season. I remember being sad when her first tooth came in, because I loved her toothless little smile so much and I did not want to lose it. And then a funny thing happened. I fell in love with the next stage too. I watched each new tooth come in. Years later I was the one hiding the teeth that fell out, playing my part. I savored the soccer games and the trips to Disneyland. I taught her about baseball and softball and football, and I got the great gift of watching her cheer for the same teams I grew up loving.

Preschool graduation. Kindergarten. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. Every one of those was a door closing on a version of her I adored, and every one of those was a door opening on a version of her I had not met yet. I savored it all. The sadness at each door never once stopped me from loving what came next.

The sadness is the proof

Here is something I want to say to every parent reading this who feels like they are coming apart right now. The sadness you feel is not a problem. The sadness is the proof. It is a sign that what you have together is strong, that it is real, that it matters. Nobody grieves a relationship that did not mean anything. If your heart is breaking, it is because you built something worth breaking your heart over.

That is a blessing. Sit with that for a second, because it is easy to drown in the sadness and miss it. The ache is evidence of the love. Sad parents should let themselves feel both at once. The grief and the gratitude are both connected.

The biggest blessing

I have told Thalia this her whole life, and I write about it in my book I am working on. I have always spoken openly about the blessings that came out of the worst thing that ever happened to our family. It is where my whole way of seeing the world comes from. It is where my mantra comes from.

Blessings Come From the Worst of Times.

Crea and I were going to have two children together. I have an amazing stepdaughter, Tiana, who has been with me since the start and we planned on two more. Our first was our daughter Isabella, who would have been our number one. That would have made Jaden our number two, and we would have stopped there. But Isabella passed away. And in the aftermath of losing her, Crea and I made the decision to have another child after Jaden. That child is Thalia.

I believe God needed an angel, and He needed Isabella. But I also believe He gave us the most enormous blessing in return. Thalia is here because of a loss I would not wish on anyone, and she is the living, breathing proof of the only thing I have ever really believed. Blessings come from the worst of times. She is the biggest one I have ever been given. I miss Isabella every minute of every day but I would not undo what happened if it meant losing Thalia.

August 1st

I should tell you something about my summers. As spring begins to fade each year, my mind starts to drift toward August 1st, and I spend weeks quietly dreading its arrival. I have done this every single year since 2003. Nothing has ever been strong enough to distract me from the approach of that day. Not once since 2003. This summer, something finally has. My mind has been drifting somewhere else instead, toward Thalia and her leaving. The sadness that has always belonged to August 1st is sharing its space this year, for the first time, with the sadness of letting her go. I am not even sure what to make of that, except that it feels like one more thing Thalia has given me without knowing it.

Let me explain what the day is, for anyone who does not know. Isabella’s Day is August 1st. It is the day she came into this world and left it, both at once, at birth. Since we lost her in 2003 I have spent that day with Crea, and every year I try my best to hide my sadness and hold it together for the people around me. And every year, at least once, I fail. At some point in the day it catches up with me and I lose it completely. I have made my peace with that too and made peace I will never be whole again as Isabella took a piece of me with her. Time does heal but time will never get me to 100%. It is just part of carrying her with me.

On August 1st, 2025, I was not home. Thalia and I were on a college trip, just the two of us. And the day caught up with me the way it always does. But this time it was not Crea beside me. It was Thalia. She saw her father come apart, and she came to the rescue, and she hugged me out of the worst of it. And something happened in that hug that I am still trying to understand. I felt the torch pass. The day stopped being only about what we lost, and became, somehow, about the joy of the one we were given. The daughter we have because of the daughter we lost was the one holding me up on the hardest day of the year. Blessings come from the worst of times. I have never felt it more completely than I did right then.

It was not always perfect

I do not want anyone to read this and think I am describing some flawless storybook. We had our seasons. Thalia went through the teenage stretch where the attitude could peel paint off the walls, and we bumped heads like every parent and teenager who ever lived. None of it, not for one second, ever changed how much I loved her. If anything it just reminded me she was becoming her own person, which is exactly what she was supposed to be doing.

I also watched our time together get smaller as the years went on. That is just what happens. She grew up. She built a big circle of friends and a life of her own, and the hours she used to spend with me got spent out in the world instead. And that was okay. More than okay. I loved watching her grow into someone people wanted to be around. It made me savor the time we did get even more, because I understood it for what it was.

Why I always left early

I have worked early my entire life. It has served me well in my career. There was a stretch where I worked both early and late, gone before anyone woke up and home after dark. For stretches of my career I put in 80 even 100 hours per week.

But when Thalia started playing softball and I got the chance to help coach, something shifted. I started going in even earlier so I could leave by three or four in the afternoon. If she wanted to practice, I was there. If there was a game, I was there. I rearranged years of my mornings so that the back half of my days could belong to her. Even when I was in the middle of training for an Ironman race, I made the time. I would get on my bike trainer at 11pm and ride for six hours in front of an iPad so I wouldn’t miss her events due to a required long training ride.

A few years ago I stopped coaching her travel team, because she moved to a new one that did not have a spot for me. I never changed my hours. I still wanted to be there, on the chance that the late afternoon might give us a little time together. Even after she got injured and could not play anymore, I kept those same hours. The softball was never really the point. The point was being available. The point was being there, just in case there was a window for us, and I did not want to miss it.

Driving her toward the door

There is one more thing I cherished that I almost did not write down, because it is the hardest one to say out loud. I got to travel with her to so many college visits. We saw new places together, we experienced new things together, just the two of us on the road. It was some of the best time we have ever spent.

What she does not know is how hard that was for me. Because every single one of those trips, I knew I was driving her toward a place that was going to take her away from me. I was personally delivering her to her own future, one campus tour at a time. And I did it anyway. I did it gladly. Because that is what being a parent is. We do everything we can to give them a real shot at a life of their own, even when that life leads them straight out our front door. I worked so hard to do this right.

Now go, all of you

So I will close with what I most want to say, to my daughter and to every kid out there standing at the edge of something new.

Go live your life. Say yes to the clubs and the opportunities and the things that scare you a little. Do not let fear sit in the driver’s seat, ever. Anything is possible, and I mean that. Do not be afraid to be exactly who you are, because the world actually needs you to be exactly who you are. We cannot all be the same. The world would be unbearably boring if everyone looked alike and thought alike and wanted the same things. The only way you will ever find your people is to be authentically, unapologetically yourself, and to be proud of it.

Thalia, the world is waiting for you. Go show them what you’ve got.

And to you, Louisiana State University, take care of my kid and all the incoming freshman. We, the parents, are passing you the torch. It is a huge responsibility. Treat it as such and with great care.

Christopher