Scott Frost shares his insights from our newsletter:
As a kid, you assume your dad knows how to fix everything.
Loose cabinet door? Fixed.
Garage shelf leaning at a questionable angle? Fixed.
A lawn mower somehow being held together by duct tape, zip ties, and pure determination? Also fixed.
At the time, you just assume dads naturally know how to handle things.
Then you get older and realize half of parenting was probably held together by improvisation and stubbornness.
They didn’t always know exactly what they were doing.
But they kept showing up anyway.
I see all of that differently now.
Back then, work was just “Dad going to work.”
We didn’t think much about what those jobs were doing to his body over time.
We didn’t know about the exposure risks.
A lot of workers and families trusted those jobs were safe, even when companies had known about the dangers for years.
Then we ultimately lost him to an asbestos-related illness.
And I think part of getting older is realizing a lot of people were doing the best they could with the information they had at the time.
That applied to parenting.
And unfortunately, it applied to a lot of jobs too.
People trusted the work was safe.
They trusted the materials they worked around every day.
And they kept showing up every day trying to provide for their families.
In a strange way, it’s not all that different from those improvised garage repairs.
You work with what you have in front of you.
You solve problems the best way you know how.
And sometimes you don’t realize until much later that something underneath it all was never actually fixed.
— Scott Frost
(866) FROST-WINS
P.S. Every dad has at least one repair that absolutely should not have worked…but somehow did anyway. What’s the one you still remember?
From Exposure to Closure
