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My Son Couldn't Breathe and I Couldn't Fix It. What Fear Actually Feels Like as a Dad.
Description
His youngest got sick the night of the Fourth of July. Croupy cough turned into a real respiratory issue — urgent care, breathing treatments, oxygen monitoring. Holding his son in his arms and feeling that labored breathing going in and out of him, Robbie couldn't control it. Couldn't fix it. Could just be there. For someone who is wired to be the protector — the one who handles things — that feeling is its own kind of terrifying.
This is one of the more vulnerable episodes in the TUF catalog. Less advice, more honest processing of what parental fear actually looks like when you're the kind of dad who expresses it as anger because fear doesn't come as naturally.
Topics covered: the specific incident that sparked this episode and what the days of sleep deprivation that followed felt like, why anger is the easiest emotion for Robbie to reach and what's usually driving it underneath, the difference between accepting what you can't control and having a laissez-faire attitude about your kids' safety, why you can acknowledge your fear without dropping your emotional baggage on your kids, and Robbie's definitive ranking of Fourth of July movies with a strong case for The Sandlot.
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