Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you

with your most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy,

by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Let them drum.

In Margarita Engel's beautiful poem, Drum Dream Girl, a must read for every parent, a little girl wants to be a drummer.

But time and time again, she is deterred by archaic gender rules, by her teachers, by her own parents.

But miraculously, she keeps going. She does not allow the fire in her heart to be extinguished. Finally, she convinces her

skeptical father to take her to a music teacher, to see if she is talented enough to make an exception for,

to see she should be allowed to follow her dreams. And it turns out she is. As the poem goes,

the drum dream girl's teacher was amazed. The girl knew so much,

but he taught her more and more and more. And she practiced and she practiced and she practiced until the

teacher agreed that she was ready to play her small bongo drums outdoors at a starlet cafe that

looked like a garden, where everyone who heard her dream

bright music sang and danced and decided that girls should always be allowed to play drums,

and both girls and boys should feel free to dream. We've talked before about being a fan.

We've talked about letting kids be who they are. In a way,

that's one of the most redemptive parts of the poem. Her father, like Brendan Bullware for a time,

who struggles with his transgender daughter, we've talked about recently, didn't believe in her.

He tried to change her. There was a small crack in the door that he closed.

And that's all his determined daughter needed. She wedged her proverbial foot in there to create

enough space to change his mind. That opening was enough to open his mind. And that was enough

...