Choosing Kindness: A Quiet Lesson in Love
This is my dad.
Out there, in faded jeans and a sweat-stained ball cap, carefully pushing the mower across my mom’s lawn on a hot afternoon.
They’ve been divorced for 28 years.
Time — nearly three decades of it — has done its usual work: carving lines on their faces, sending us kids off to build our own lives, and rearranging the shape of our family in ways none of us could have pictured when I was little. My mom remarried years ago. Her husband, my stepdad, is a good man — but his job takes him out of town for long stretches. Meanwhile, my mom’s knees aren’t what they used to be; even climbing porch steps can be painful.
So when the grass grew shaggy and thick this week, my dad showed up with his old push mower. He didn’t ask for thanks. He didn’t make a big speech. He just pulled the cord, and the engine roared to life.
When my younger siblings spotted him through the window, confusion clouded their faces.
“Why is Dad mowing Mom’s lawn?”
I smiled and shrugged.
“Because she needed help, and he knew she couldn’t get out here to do it, so he did.”
It was that simple. And also, somehow, not simple at all.
This is co-parenting — or maybe it’s just plain parenting. Loving your kids enough to keep showing them, year after year, that families aren’t perfect and don’t stay in neat boxes. That love — the real kind — is less about grand gestures and more about quiet moments of choosing to be kind.
Even to someone who used to be your spouse.
Even when life has moved on.
Even when it’s been nearly three decades.
I am 32 years old now. Long past the days when scraped knees were my biggest worry. But here is my dad, still teaching me how to treat people, how to show up, how to love your family no matter how it all came together.
Later that evening, I showed him the picture I’d snapped of him pushing that mower — a photo that somehow traveled across the internet, making thousands of strangers smile.
My dad just laughed, shaking his head.
“I’m no saint,” he insisted, still chuckling. “Tell everyone they don’t have to act like some angelic pastor on Lent. Just choose kindness when you can. That’s all.”
And really, isn’t that enough?
Isn’t that everything?
Because one day, we’ll all look back, and it won’t be the birthday parties or report cards or big vacations that shine the brightest. It’ll be moments like this: when love looked like freshly cut grass, and a man quietly choosing to do right by someone simply because he could.
