While every day matters as a father, the particularly complex ones when you are there matter more. That, and for reasons that will become obvious, you really don’t miss the meetings you might have been in.
Paul Weigel, our Lead Dad of the Week from Tempe, Arizona, said focus on those two things and you just might be rewarded with his third takeaway: your daughter teaching you things you didn’t know.
Weigel, a cancer survivor and the author of “Iron Dad,” about his battle with cancer as a father and a divorced dad, made his now 14-year-old daughter his north star during his cancer fight.
A long-time Seattle resident, he had a job in internal communications at a high-flying tech company and was living the tech dream. Then he got his cancer diagnosis, some 11 years ago.
“It was the part that I wasn’t going to see her do so many things growing up – her first day of school, her prom, college, when she had her own kids, all those things I wasn’t going to see,” he said. “It was absolutely petrifying.”
He underwent nine months of extensive treatment with the thought that if he made it, he would do an Iron Man, the swim, bike, run endurance test. “I wanted to show her that I wasn’t a quitter,” he said. “I wanted to have a moment with her that I had done something absolutely tremendous and wonderful. I wanted to push through it.”
Weigel did it. But his focus was really on being a dad. He got divorced shortly after finishing his cancer treatment. When his ex-wife said she was moving with their daughter to Tempe, he didn’t hesitate to go along.
“I made sure I would see her every single day, even when I didn’t have her,” he said. “I changed my career so I could be on every single field trip. I was the one dad who did all those activities for eight years that you don’t normally see dads doing.”
He has his own internal communications consulting business now, while teaching, too, at Mesa Community College and Park College.
“I have so many memories now that I wouldn’t have had if I was not being such a devoted dad all the time,” he said. As for the career change: “I have not missed the work I haven’t done.”
Welcome, Paul, to The Company of Dads. You are a Lead Dad!
