Lost and Found: What Fathers Teach Us About Separation, Systems, and the Search for Home

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

I’ve been thinking recently about what it means to lose something. Not in the abstract. Not in the poetic way we sometimes try to soften the blow of what hurts. I mean the real kind of loss. The sudden kind. The kind that makes your body tense up before your mind catches up. The kind that makes you retrace your steps, check your pockets, call your wife, pray under your breath, and wonder how something that was just with you could suddenly be gone.

I’d gone to Washington, D.C. to speak at a conference on fatherhood, shared parenting, policy, and the systems that shape whether parents remain connected to their children. This is familiar ground for me. I’ve spent decades in rooms where fathers, practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and service providers wrestle with the same urgent question: How do we help fathers become and remain the fathers their children need them to be?

But this room felt different. The language was different. The politics were different. The emotional temperature was different. Many of the people there were not primarily coming from the service-delivery world where I often stand. They were coming from a shared parenting space, shaped by personal stories of separation, court battles, custody disputes, and the belief that systems often stand between children and the parents who love them.

I walked in, in some ways, feeling lost.

But not lost in my knowledge of fatherhood or in my belief that children need the healthy, safe, consistent presence of both parents whenever possible. I was lost in the room itself and trying to understand where I fit. 

I was trying to understand how my experience serving fathers in Atlanta — primarily Black fathers navigating legitimation, child support, unemployment, incarceration, trauma, co-parenting conflict, and systems that often see them as obligations before seeing them as parents — would meet this room filled with people whose pain sounded familiar but whose pathways often looked different.

Then I did what I have learned the work always requires: I listened.

Before we listen to needs, we often have to listen to pain. Before we prescribe, we have to understand the wound. Before we argue policy, we have to sit with the human being in front of us long enough to know what they lost.

What I heard in that room of shared parenting advocates wasn’t just ideology, reform, or legislation. I heard mothers, fathers, and professionals — people whose lives had been marked by the grief of separation. Some wounds were fresh. Others had scarred over. Some reopened every time a court date came, every time a child’s birthday passed, every time a parent stood outside a system trying to prove what their heart already knew.

They wanted their children.

That was the simplest truth in the room.

We can complicate almost anything with politics, language, race, gender, class, and professional identity. We can stand on opposite sides of a room and convince ourselves that our pain is more righteous, our analysis more sophisticated, and our method more legitimate. But after three days, what I found was this: People in pain are people in pain. More specifically, people in pain because of separation from their children are carrying a grief that crosses many of the lines we assume will divide us.

That doesn’t mean every story is the same. Safety matters. Race matters. Systems produce different outcomes for different communities. I know too much, have lived too much, and have served too many fathers to pretend otherwise.

But it does mean that the main thing must remain the main thing: our children.

Children shouldn’t be lost in the fight between adults or the machinery of courts. Children shouldn’t be lost in child support systems that measure money but miss relationship. And children shouldn’t be lost in family-serving agencies that know the mother’s name, know the child’s need, but never fully ask, “What about dad?” 

After the conference, I headed home to Atlanta. We had recorded podcasts, gathered footage, moved quickly, packed equipment, boarded shuttles, and pushed through the fatigue that comes with meaningful work. When I finally reached home and went to retrieve my camera bag from the trunk, it wasn’t there.

In that bag were cameras, equipment, and pieces of work that mattered to me. Yes, things can be replaced. But anyone who has lost something personal knows replacement is not the first thing you want. You don’t want another version of what you lost. You want what is yours.

I called. My wife called. I got back in the car and drove to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the world, carrying that particular mix of frustration and hope that comes when you know the odds aren’t in your favor, but you can’t yet make peace with giving up.

At the airport’s Lost and Found, the man behind the counter was calm in a way that made me more frustrated. My urgency wasn’t his urgency. He wasn’t unkind, but he was clear. Fill out the form. Wait. Let the process work.

How many fathers know that feeling?

How many have stood at a counter, in a courtroom, at an agency window, or on a phone call trying to explain that what they lost was not a thing but time? Not a bag but bedtime. Not a key but access. Not equipment but a child’s trust. How many have been told, directly or indirectly, to wait while the most sacred part of their life sits somewhere in a system that doesn’t share their urgency?

I filled out the form and started to leave. Then something in me said, “Go back to where you last had it.” So I went to the shuttle area, asked questions, and described the driver. A woman there listened to me and knew who I was talking about. She knew the rhythm of the buses. She knew one had been reported with something left behind. She told me to wait.

Then the bus came around, and through the window, I saw my bag sitting in the same place I had left it.

There are moments when relief feels almost holy. I thanked her over and over. I’d found what I thought was gone.

Then I walked back to my car and reached for the door. No beep. No unlock. No key. I had found my bag and lost my key.

At that point, I almost had to laugh because the day had become too clear to ignore. I had been at a conference trying to find common ground. I had lost my camera bag and found it. Now I had lost the key that would get me home. So I started backtracking again.

I went back to the shuttle area. I studied the ground. I went back through the pathway. I returned to Lost and Found. This time a young woman asked me to describe my key, went to the back, and held it up from the other side of the glass. 

There it was. My key. Found.

By then, my phone was dying. My body was tired. The day was heavy. I bought a charger, sat down, and began asking God the question I often ask when life starts speaking louder than circumstance: “What am I supposed to learn from this?”

The answer came as a whisper: “You’re going to lose some things in life.”

Some losses will be small. Some will be expensive. Some will be inconvenient. Some will break your heart. You may lose keys and cameras. You may lose time. You may lose your footing in a room where you thought you knew the language. You may lose connection with someone you love. You may even, through conflict, systems, mistakes, silence, or pain, lose your child.

But lost doesn’t always mean gone forever. The only thing that makes some losses permanent is when we stop looking. That’s the lesson I brought home with me. 

It’s also a lesson our systems need to learn. We need a fatherhood movement humble enough to admit when we’ve been lost from one another:

• The policy world can’t afford to dismiss the service world as soft. 
• The service world can’t afford to dismiss the policy world as rigid. 
• Researchers can’t sit so far above pain that they miss the person. 
• Advocates can’t be so consumed by pain that they lose sight of the child. 
• Courts can’t treat parents as case numbers. 
• Programs can’t treat fathers as problems to be managed. 
• Mothers and fathers can’t allow hurt to be the only language their children hear.

Somewhere between the conference room and the airport shuttle, I was reminded that lost things are often found by people willing to slow down, ask better questions, retrace steps, and refuse to accept the first dead end as the final answer.

That’s what we owe children. We owe them 

• Systems that keep looking for safe pathways to connection
• Policies that presume the value of both parents without ignoring harm
• Services that listen to pain before judging behavior
• Courts that understand urgency when childhood is at stake
• Communities that help mothers and fathers move from opposition to responsibility wherever that is possible.

There’s a reason airports have Lost and Found departments. They exist because everyone understands that in the rush of travel, transition, pressure, and fatigue, people misplace things that matter. 

Families need this same kind of place.

A place where fathers can come back and say, “I lost my way, but I am looking.” A place where mothers can say, “I am tired, but I want peace for my child.” A place where children aren’t asked to carry adult conflict in their small hands. A place where systems do more than process the loss and actually help people find what’s still possible.

I went to Washington thinking I was there to speak, but I came home remembering I was also there to listen.

I lost my bag. I found it. I lost my key. I found it. I walked into a room feeling unsure of where I belonged and found people whose pain, though wrapped in different language, was reaching toward the same hope I’ve been tending for decades.

Maybe that’s the work now. To keep looking. To keep listening. To keep asking where fathers have been lost in our policies, where children have been lost in our conflicts, where mothers have been lost in the exhaustion of carrying too much alone, and where families might still be found if we refuse to walk away too soon.