By Randal Terrell

My Experience as a Father

I am not an expert on fatherhood. I am a father who has made mistakes, experienced difficult circumstances, and is still learning what it means to be the man and father I want to be. I am divorced and have three children with my ex-wife. My oldest daughter is 18, my younger daughter is 16, and my son is 10.

I had my first daughter before joining the Army, and my second daughter was born while I was stationed overseas. After her birth, much of my life became focused on recovering from injuries I experienced during my military service. That recovery included numerous surgeries and eventually struggles with pain medication and alcohol.

My son was the last of my children to be born. Not long after his birth, my life changed dramatically when I was jailed and eventually sent to a psychiatric facility for mental health issues. At the time, my children were only 11, 8, and 2 years old. While I was incarcerated, I also went through a divorce. Those circumstances took away years with my children that I can never get back.

My recovery has not been easy. Knowing that many of the problems I have struggled with are connected to my military service can sometimes be difficult for me to accept. At the same time, I have learned that I cannot change what has already happened. I can only decide what I am going to do with the life and opportunities I have in front of me.

I do not claim to have all the answers about raising children, and my experiences certainly have not followed an ideal path. What I do have is a clearer understanding today of the man and father I want to be. I want to be present, dependable, patient, responsible, and involved in my children’s lives. I want them to know that even when life goes terribly wrong, a person can take responsibility, seek help, continue growing, and work toward becoming better.

I cannot recover the years I lost with my children, but I can make the years ahead of us matter.

Fatherhood Is a Process of Growth

One of the things I have learned through recovery is that improving your life requires more than recognizing where you have gone wrong. You have to understand where your behaviors came from, decide what you want to change, and then put that knowledge into action. Becoming a better father works much the same way. It requires honesty, self-examination, accountability, patience, emotional growth, and goals.

My goal is to become an involved, responsible, and committed father. Being involved means spending meaningful time with my children. Being responsible means thinking about their physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual well-being when I make decisions. Being committed means keeping my word and recognizing that my responsibility to my children does not disappear when life becomes difficult.

Understanding Where I Came From

The family we grow up in has a powerful influence on the way we eventually raise our own children. We learn from what our parents and other family members did, what they said, and even what they failed to do or say.

Recovery has taught me the importance of looking backward without becoming trapped in the past. Understanding why I developed certain habits or behaviors does not mean I have to continue them. I can identify the positive lessons from my childhood that I want to carry forward while recognizing the patterns I do not want to repeat.

Part of growth is asking myself what good things I learned from my family that I should use more often and what negative things I learned that I should leave behind. I cannot change where I came from, but I can decide what I carry with me into the future.

Working on Myself Is Part of Being a Better Father

Becoming a better father also means becoming a better man. Character matters. Confidence, courage, dependability, leadership, self-reliance, and the willingness to keep growing all shape the kind of father a man becomes. Working on myself is not separate from fatherhood. It is part of fatherhood.

That idea connects directly with my understanding of recovery. I cannot separate my recovery from the other roles in my life. Improving my mental health, making healthier decisions, learning patience, becoming more dependable, controlling impulsive reactions, and taking responsibility for my actions can all affect the kind of father and person I become.

Children also learn from what we do, not simply from what we tell them. Values and morals become stronger when they are modeled through behavior. Telling children to be responsible is not nearly as powerful as showing responsibility. Telling them to control their emotions means less if I cannot control mine. Telling them to admit mistakes means little if I refuse to admit my own. Telling them to seek help when they need it becomes more meaningful if they have seen me willing to seek help myself.

Learning to Understand and Manage Emotions

A healthy father has to learn how to recognize emotions and express them in appropriate ways. Burying sadness, fear, frustration, or pain does not make those emotions disappear. Learning to identify them and respond to them in healthier ways makes it easier to model emotional strength for children.

This connects strongly with mental health recovery. Recovery is not about pretending difficult emotions no longer exist. For me, growth means becoming better at recognizing what I am feeling before that emotion controls what I do next.

Anger is a good example. When anger starts building, it can help to slow down, breathe, walk, exercise, or do something physical that is not violent. After calming down, it can also help to talk with someone trustworthy about what caused the anger before addressing the person involved.

I have learned that there is a major difference between having an emotion and acting on an emotion. I may not always control the first feeling that enters my mind, but I can continue working on controlling what I do next.

Pause Before You Respond

One of the most useful communication ideas I have learned is the process of preparing, pausing, thinking, and choosing a response. When possible, it helps to prepare for a difficult conversation ahead of time. When something happens unexpectedly, even a brief pause can create enough space to think before reacting.

That idea applies to much more than parenting. It can be used in relationships, recovery, stressful situations, financial decisions, disagreements, and moments of anger or frustration. Many mistakes happen in the short period between an emotion and a reaction. Creating even a few seconds between what happens and what I do next gives me an opportunity to make a decision instead of simply reacting.

I cannot control everything that happens around me, but I can continue working on controlling my response.

Healthy Co-Parenting Requires Listening and Self-Control

Healthy co-parenting requires listening, patience, respect, and the willingness to compromise. It also requires accepting that I can control my own words and actions, but I cannot control what another person says or does. Listening first, asking questions, looking for common ground, and trying to create solutions that work for both parents can reduce conflict and keep the focus on the children.

This is another principle that fits naturally with recovery. A great deal of emotional energy can be wasted trying to control people, circumstances, or outcomes that are outside our control. Growth sometimes means asking, “What part of this situation actually belongs to me?”

Sometimes progress does not mean completely solving a problem. Sometimes it means reducing the problem, preventing unnecessary conflict, or making the situation a little healthier than it was before.

Being Present Matters

Being a father is about more than providing financially. Children also need attention, consistency, encouragement, conversation, guidance, affection, and time. Meaningful involvement can come through simple things such as eating together, walking together, talking, attending important events, helping with school, or simply being available.

I also want to think about how I can be more involved physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually in my children’s lives. That means paying attention not only to whether I am physically present, but also to whether I am emotionally available and actively interested in what is happening in their lives.

Recovery can help create the opportunity to become more present. If I am consumed by unhealthy behavior, untreated problems, anger, depression, anxiety, or chaos, it becomes harder to be fully present for the people I care about. Working on myself therefore has a purpose that reaches beyond myself.

Discipline Begins With Self-Discipline

Discipline should be about teaching and guiding children, not simply punishing them. The goal is to help children learn emotional control, good judgment, respect, values, and responsibility. Just as important, a father has to model the behavior he expects from his children.

This may be one of the strongest connections between fatherhood and recovery. Before I can expect discipline from someone else, I have to practice discipline in my own life. Recovery requires routines, boundaries, accountability, healthier coping strategies, and the ability to delay immediate gratification in pursuit of something more important.

A child watching a father work on himself may learn something more valuable than perfection. They can learn that people can recognize weaknesses, seek help, change behavior, recover from setbacks, and keep growing.

Goals Should Guide Growth, Not Create Shame

Goals are important, but they also need to be realistic. Setting unrealistic expectations can damage confidence and self-worth, especially when someone is made to feel like a failure for not reaching them fast enough.

I believe the same principle applies to adults in recovery. Goals should challenge us, but they should not become weapons we use against ourselves when progress takes longer than expected. Recovery rarely moves in a perfectly straight line. There can be progress, setbacks, adjustments, and new beginnings.

The important thing is to keep moving toward the person we want to become.

Turning Good Intentions Into Real Goals

Large goals become more useful when they are broken into specific actions. A goal such as “become a better father” is meaningful, but it is too broad by itself. It needs to be turned into actions that can actually be practiced, reviewed, and improved over time.

One useful approach is to choose one or two actions, write them down, decide how and when they will be completed, and then review the results regularly. If something works, continue building on it. If it does not work, adjust it and try something different.

For me, those goals can include spending more meaningful time with my children, listening before responding, keeping promises, managing difficult emotions before acting, communicating respectfully during disagreements, continuing to care for my mental health, remaining open to professional help, and becoming more involved in my children’s lives.

I do not have to accomplish everything at once. I can choose a few areas, work on them consistently, measure my progress, and then move forward from there.

Recovery Can Change What We Pass to the Next Generation

Every family has strengths worth preserving and weaknesses worth confronting. Recovery gives us an opportunity to examine both. I can appreciate the good things I received from the people who came before me without believing I must repeat everything they did. I can also recognize mistakes from my own past without believing those mistakes have to control the rest of my life.

My past can explain parts of me without defining my future.

That is one of the reasons recovery matters so much to me. Recovery is not simply about stopping harmful behavior or managing mental health symptoms. It is about becoming healthier in every role I occupy. It is about learning from what happened, accepting responsibility for what I can change, repairing what can be repaired, setting realistic goals, and continuing to grow.

The Father I Want to Become

My goal is not to become a perfect father. I do not believe such a person exists. My goal is to become a father who continues learning.

I want to be involved rather than distant, responsible rather than careless, committed rather than inconsistent, emotionally aware rather than controlled by emotion, and willing to listen rather than believing I always have the answer. I want my actions to reinforce the values I communicate. I want to recognize when I need help and be willing to seek it. Most importantly, I want my children to know through both my words and my actions that they matter to me.

Recovery has taught me that change becomes possible when we stop treating our past as a permanent identity and start treating our future as something we can actively build.

I cannot change every chapter that has already been written in my life, but through recovery, responsibility, patience, and purposeful goals, I can continue working toward becoming a better man, a better father, and a better example for the next generation.