My daughter Lily is five, and she has always been incredibly attached to me.
\nWe play outside together, build pillow forts, and spend most weekends doing whatever adventure she invents.
\nSo when she suddenly said, \u201cI want to go with Daddy,\u201d I laughed.
\n\u201cI am Daddy,\u201d I told her.
\nShe shook her head seriously.
\n\u201cNo. My real daddy told me.\u201d
\nMy chest tightened.
\nI asked who she was talking about, but before she could answer, my wife walked into the room.
\nThe moment she heard the conversation, her face went pale.
\nThen Lily pointed toward a framed photo on the shelf.
\n\u201cThat\u2019s my real daddy.\u201d<\/p>\n
I turned and stared at the picture.
\nIt was my wife\u2019s late brother, Michael.
\nFor several seconds, I didn\u2019t understand.
\nThen my wife started laughing.
\nThe night before, Lily had been looking through old family photos with her grandmother. Grandma had told her that Michael had always been like a second father to my wife when they were young.
\nLily had taken it literally.
\nShe had somehow decided that meant he was her \u201creal dad.\u201d
\nI sat down and laughed from pure relief.
\nMy wife looked at me and said, \u201cYou really thought I had something to confess, didn\u2019t you?\u201d
\nI admitted that for about thirty seconds, my imagination had gone completely off the rails.
\nKids really do know how to turn one misunderstood sentence into a full family crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My daughter Lily is five, and she has always been incredibly attached to me. We play outside together, build pillow forts, and spend most weekends doing whatever adventure she invents. So when she suddenly said, \u201cI want to go with Daddy,\u201d I laughed. \u201cI am Daddy,\u201d I told her. She shook her head seriously. \u201cNo. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10287,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10288,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10286\/revisions\/10288"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}