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My name is Brad. I became a father at seventeen, learning how to raise my daughter Ainsley without much guidance. Her mother left for college when Ainsley was still an infant and did not return. I chose to stay where I was, finish school, and work at a hardware store to cover what we needed. It wasn’t a plan I had prepared for, but it was the one in front of me. Over time, I learned the practical things—how to cook, how to manage what little we had, how to braid her hair so she wouldn’t feel different from other kids. I called her “Bubbles” when she was four, just to see her smile. Small things, repeated daily, became the structure of our life.
