Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week, Dame Wilburn.

So much about Valentine's Day is focused on puppy love, the gifts, the dinners, the

guy giving the flower to the girl, and to be clear, there's nothing wrong with all

of that. But this week, our stories are about a deeper kind of love, when that

persists beyond February 14th, and finds its way to us when we least expect it.

Our first storyteller is Kemp Powers. Kemp told this story at a grand slam in Los Angeles

almost 10 years ago. The theme of the night was Point of No Return. Here's Kemp, live

at the Moth.

I'm 37 years old, and I wasn't really very good at much of anything in my 20s. At least

of all marriage. But the decision to get a divorce wasn't an easy one. It's interesting because

for a lot of people, the legal tangle is what stops them from getting a divorce. But in

my world, that wasn't really a big decision maker. It was because we had a daughter. And

going through with that meant that on some level, I was going to be losing her, if not literally,

then figuratively. So when people have a really bad breakup, it's not uncommon for one

parent to be left feeling like basically their kid is better off without them. And in my

case, it wasn't very hard to convince me. To put it very simply, I really, really,

sucked at being a dad. When my daughter was a small infant, I swore that she was going

to break some kind of record for falling out of bass and nets, falling out of cribs, falling

out of beds. And it always seemed to happen when I was the one that was watching her. And

I was hardly ever around. I traveled so much for work. And in the rare occasions that

I was there, any effort that I made to try to bond with, I always seemed to backfire.

I bought her this when she was three months old. I bought her this gangly little puppet

...