[Re]Rooting
A father’s call to return home or choose better soil
Dads, we really do not have to feel trapped where we are. Not in the house we happened to rent or buy, not in the town that slowly stopped feeling like home, not in the zip code our younger selves drifted into because a job popped up or an apartment was cheap. If your family is already alone, or you can feel the ashes of modern civilization’s collapse falling around your little branch of the family tree, then the old pioneering instinct is not just a TV series (1883, anyone?), it is a real option. You are allowed to reclaim your right to move. To reclaim your right to choose your soil. To reclaim your right to look around, tell the truth, and say, “This place is killing us,” and go build something better somewhere else.
We act like our address was carved into stone tablets and handed down to us by fate. In reality, most of us ended up where we are almost by accident. It almost feels like the school-to-university pipeline is designed to do exactly that: push you out of your hometown into a city or region you’re not from, saddle you with debt, fill your head with “big life” aspirations, and then strand you there. You’re not just tricked into not returning home; half the time you financially can’t, and that’s if you even have anything to go back to in that old hometown of yours. So you chase the job that pays a little more. You stay in the college town you never meant to stay in. You pick a suburb that looked “safe” on Zillow and had a decent commute. Then years pass, kids show up, and one day you zoom out and realize there are no grandparents nearby. No cousins for your kids. No shared table with people who actually know your story. No parish or church that calls you higher instead of entertaining you. No neighbors who share anything deeper than conspiracy theories (fun, sure), small talk, and whatever you’re doing to keep your lawn so perfect. And right on cue the lie kicks in: this is just how it is now. This is modern life. This is normal. No, it is not. This is how the machine wants it. Isolated, exhausted, rootless families are easy to manage and easy to sell things to. But we are not condemned to stay rootless.
Some men are called to stay and fight where they are, to hold a little line in a place that is collapsing around them. God bless those men; the Church and the country need them. But some of us are being called to pack the wagon. To look at our wives and kids and say, “We are going to find better ground. We are going to plant our line where it can actually grow.” That might be a brand-new small town that’s beginning to revive, or it might be the very hometown we left behind. Either way, it is not escapism. It is strategy. It is stewardship. It is part of fatherhood. If your kids are growing up with no real community, no healthy peers, no elders nearby, no culture but screens and strip malls, then you have every right, and I would argue a responsibility, to ask whether this is a place where your roots can thicken or the place where your line quietly fades out.
You do not have to know the perfect town yet. You do not need a ten-year master plan with color-coded spreadsheets. You just have to be honest enough to say, “This is not working. We need to move toward something better.” That is what I mean by [Re]Rooting. Not some fantasy you saw on Instagram or a midlife crisis homestead cosplay with “trad” labels slapped on it. A sober, fatherly decision to choose your ground on purpose. [Re]Rooting does not start with Zillow. It starts with order. Before you pick a town, you pick what you are rooted in. Rooted in God: a parish, a church, a way of worship that can shape your family over decades. Rooted in your wife and children: daily meals together, real conversation, shared work, shared prayer. Rooted in land: maybe at first it is just a rental with a tiny yard, but there is dirt under your boots, seasons you can name, work your kids can see with their own eyes. Rooted in people: other families walking a similar road, not clones of you, but aligned enough that your kids can grow up together in something like sanity.
Once those non-negotiables are clear, then you go looking. Not for the hottest market or the “best schools” as ranked by the same system you are trying to get away from. You look for a place where those roots can go deep. And yes, sometimes that means actually going back to your hometown, if you were displaced the way so many of us were. That’s the question I wrestle with constantly: am I supposed to help revive the place that raised me, like in the Prodigal Son returning home, or join a small-town revival somewhere new. There is a kind of repentance in going home and rebuilding what was lost there. There is also a kind of faith in taking your family to a fresh little town that still has a pulse and saying, “We’ll help make this place strong.” Either way, the criteria are the same. A church that is not outsourcing the faith to youth pastors who treat it like political commentary, but is actually handing on the traditional teaching of the Church. A town where you recognize faces at the grocery store. Land, or at least the real possibility of land. A local culture where big families are not treated like a disease. That is a very different search than “3 bed, 2 bath, good district.”
And yes, there is a cost to moving. You give up jobs, familiarity, friends, short-term stability. I know that; I am wrestling with that myself. But there is also a cost to staying put in dead soil, and we rarely name it. The cost is watching your kids grow up in a place you would never choose if you were starting from scratch. The cost is watching your wife slowly suffocate in isolation. The cost is knowing that your grandchildren, if you are blessed to meet them, may be scattered and thin-rooted because you did not have the courage to uproot when you still could. Sometimes the bravest thing a dad can do is admit, “I chose badly back then. But I am not going to double down on it for the next forty years.”
You do not have to be perfect. You just have to be willing to be the first in your line to say, “We are breaking this pattern. We are going somewhere we can put down real roots.” That is what Kinward is at its core for me. It is not just a pile of projects. It is a direction of travel: kin-ward. Back toward God. Back toward family. Back toward land. Back toward a way of life our great-grandchildren might actually bless us for when they say our names. [Re]Rooting is how that direction stops being a slogan and becomes real in your life.
Maybe for you it looks like moving closer to your parents or in-laws so your kids grow up with grandparents as part of their daily world instead of as holiday visitors. Maybe it is leaving a blue-glowing, concrete suburb for a small town where your kids can ride bikes and catch frogs and know the names of the people on their street. Maybe it is trading a big salary and a soul-sucking schedule for a saner job that lets you be home for dinner and actually shepherd your kids instead of outsourcing their formation to screens and institutions. Maybe it is finding three other families and saying, “Let us all get within twenty minutes of each other and build something here.” None of that will be neat or easy. It will come with sacrifice, risk, second-guessing. The pioneers had that too; the wolves and the wagons just look different now. We face mortgages and the god-forsaken HR portals instead of river crossings and blizzards, but it is still a kind of frontier.
If you feel that tug in your chest when you think about all this, if you already catch yourself scrolling land listings or staring at maps after the kids are in bed, pay attention. That may not be escapism. It may be your marching orders. No one is coming to re-root your family for you. No policy, no election, no program is going to hand you a thick, local, God-honoring culture on a platter. It will be built, or rebuilt, by dads and moms who decide to move out of the machine and back toward a life that can actually carry a family for generations. So from one dad to another, here is the invitation: take stock of your soil. Name the costs of staying. Name the costs of going. Then ask the only question that really matters: where can my children, and their children, and their children after them, most faithfully grow into what God is calling them to be.
If the honest answer is “not here,” then it is time to [Re]Root. Or maybe, [re]turn..home. Not someday. Not “after things calm down.” Now, while you still have kids under your roof, while you still have strength in your hands, while the story can still be changed by your decisions instead of your regrets. The machine wants drifting, deracinated families. We are going the other way. Kinward. Homeward. Back into the ground where our roots can hold.
Have a great weekend and God Bless,
-Greg @ The Dissident Dad