My Dad Didn't Gatekeep Anything. He Was Deployed.

Originally published on The Strategic Ampersand Substack · 5/13/26 · Read on Substack

Lately I’ve been deep in home DIY project research. The kind that leads you down a video-based rabbit hole at 10pm, watching someone strip a floor or rewire a light fixture, while thinking “I can totally do that.”

What I didn’t expect was to keep running into the same hook. Over and over it was a version of: “In case your dad didn’t show you...”

The first few times, I laughed along with it. It’s a good hook. It creates instant connection. It implies a shared childhood experience with a wink from the creator. I get it. It works.

But the more I watched different videos, the more I found myself thinking, “Wait a sec... I didn’t get this DIY memo from him. What else did my dad gatekeep from me? Was my mom in on it too?”

But here’s the reality: I was raised in a military family. My dad was deployed a lot when I was kid and well into my teen years. And while he was away, my mom took on the role of a single-parent, raising my sisters and me, chasing after the dogs we grew up with, overseeing relocation moves as they occurred, and running the house. She also checked in on the wives and families of my dad’s colleagues and offered our home as a community hang-out during deployments.

During much of that time, we lived in military housing. In short, military housing are rentals. You don’t paint the walls, skip any modifications you cannot replace or undo easily, and wait on Public Works if something needed attention. It’s not to say we didn’t take care of these houses; doing small projects like planting flower beds or fencing a yard for the dog (per the SOP), but everything we did was done with a transient mindset: “We’ll only be here for two’ish years or so.”

By the time my dad retired and dove into house projects, I was well into adulthood. So, it’s not that my dad withheld some sacred knowledge of caulking baseboards and switching out bathroom fixtures. Our circumstances simply didn’t call for it.

And I suspect this story - or some version of it - belongs to a lot more people than the “in case your dad didn’t show you this” hook accounts for.

Single-parent households. Families in apartments. Folks whose parents worked two jobs and had no space for weekend projects. Kids who grew up caring for a sick family member. Parents who had the means to hire contractors. Families with so many kid- or family-related weekend commitments, there was no time for DIY show-and-tell. And yes, people like me, with a deployed - or often traveling - parent.

LET’S TALK STRATEGY WITH A DASH OF DIGITAL EMPATHY

I want to be clear: I’m not calling out individual creators. The phrase is a trope, not a manifesto. And I’m a genuine believer every piece of content is not for everyone who comes across it - nor has to be perfectly crafted with some overly neutral, sterile phrasing. Building a community starts with having an actual point of view. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea either.

But there’s a difference between having a specific audience and accidentally signaling to a broader one that they don’t belong here. (Let’s be real for a moment: a very small handful exclude on purpose. That’s a different conversation… and one worth having separately.)

When a hook assumes a shared experience - like a dad who was literally present, handy with tools, and a home that could be modified - it draws a circle. Most of the time this circle is unintentional. The creator isn’t trying to exclude anyone. They’re just reaching for a frame that feels relatable and gets clicks.

The question worth asking is: relatable to whom?

The alternative isn’t some sanitized content. It’s just offering a slightly wider invite. “In case nobody showed you this” lands the same - the same gap, the same useful reveal - without drawing the circle quite so tight.

And that’s digital empathy in action.

It includes the people whose parents were great but not handy with house projects. The people who didn’t have a dad - or family member, neighbor, etc - to show them these things. The people who, like me, grew up where these kind of projects didn’t happen thus the Cliff Noted version of home DIY hacks weren’t a part of life.

I’ve learned plenty of things on my own from trial and error, from YouTube, or from asking questions that the answers probably seemed obvious to those who grew up with an active workbench in the garage, basement, or shed. And I’m here for all of it - the tutorials, the tips, the deeply satisfying videos of someone doing a thing I didn’t know I needed to know how to do or could make a project 10x easier to complete (and don’t get me started with the rug cleaning videos).

As I’ve gotten older, over years of visits with my parents, my dad has shared a vast wealth of home - and car! - project tips and insights.

For some, it’s simply a matter of time.

THE TAKEAWAY

The best communities aren’t built by accident. They’re built by people who are intentional about who they’re talking to - and curious enough to ask who they might be leaving out.