A single father’s moving Facebook post about parenting his daughter after her mother abandoned her has gone viral.
Richard Johnson, 21, claims he hasn’t wanted children for much of his life. “Everyone in my family is either divorced or a single parent,” she says. Johnson tells Yahoo Parenting, “My father wasn’t in the picture, and I never wanted that for my kids, so I was dead bent on not having any.” That changed, though, when he met the lady who would become the mother of his daughter. “We decided we wanted children, and I wanted to provide them with the life I lacked.”
Even yet, the Las Vegas father says the news that his fiancée was pregnant was the scariest moment of his life. “The more I considered it, the more terrified I became.” Except for what I saw on TV and in movies, I had no idea what it meant to be an involved father.”
Johnson tells how he ended up raising his daughter, Persephone, by himself in a letter to Life of Dad, an online forum for fathers. The statement was posted to Life of Dad’s Facebook page on Tuesday night, and it has received over 12,000 likes and 650 comments. “About a month after [my daughter’s] birth, her mother left.” “We don’t know why,” Johnson says, “but we assume postpartum depression played a role.” “I landed on your page by mistake during the first few weeks when it was just [Persephone] and me. I was terrified of becoming a father in general, but suddenly I was a single father with two responsibilities. I wasn’t sure I was up to the task. I’d studied every ‘new parent’ book I could find and watched over 1000 hours of YouTube videos on topics ranging from hair braiding to nail painting to theories on how to deal with typical parental concerns. I began to pay closer attention to your page and noticed that there were other fathers in similar situations to me. The website started to become a tremendous confidence booster for me, and it really helped me get through everything. … You certainly made a difference in my daughter’s and my lives during a difficult period. We’re both really happy now, and we’re still learning and growing together every day. She’s now ten months old, and I’m constantly being approached for parenting advice by my friends. My daughter and I have gone a long way, and we owe a lot of it to this page and the people on it. So, on behalf of both of us, we’d like to express our gratitude.”
