Father's Day reflections 2022

On my fourth time celebrating the holiday, I find myself focusing on one simple thing done right. I also spoke to host and sometime FeedbackDef collaborator James Brown about parenthood.

I was interviewed on USA Today’s 5 Things podcast to talk about fatherhood:

Some additional thoughts:

To my great surprise, when my daughter was born four and a half years ago, achievement didn’t become any less important to me than it had been. Anything I could accomplish — even anything I managed to do well — suddenly became a means to serve my child’s existence. It’s hard to explain, but once I became a parent it felt like any good I did was now threaded through this larger sense of purpose.

That all sounds great, but the truth is that it’s been nothing if not messy — a clumsy fumbling into a moderate state of competence. Oddly, I still have a hard time even seeing myself as a parent. I mean, I know I am one, but when I think of how I viewed grownups when I was a child, I just don’t feel like I’ve become that. At the same time, I finally feel like my sense of self is catching up to the reality of the situation.

There are many, many ways I could expound on how I feel I haven’t properly grown into the role. It’s strange because acquaintances will frequently say “You’re a great father” to me. At first, hearing that used to actually stress me out. “If this person only knew how much I’m falling short, how many aspects of the job I don’t have a handle on,” I would think to myself, “would they still think that?”

On the other hand, I’ve always known why people say that: they’ve recognized that I’m invested, which does seem apparent to me when I step outside myself and try to look at my situation through their eyes. There’s never been any question about my investment, but in my case being invested in something actually entails a ton of paralysis and non-action.

Needless to say, paralysis does not serve you in a role that pushes on all of your most urgent primal buttons. But then we often don’t notice what we’re doing well, especially if it draws on a capability that comes naturally to us. One of my most gratifying moments as a parent so far came when my daughter turned to me and said, in a very heartfelt and approving way: “You make me laugh, Daddy.”

It had never occurred to me that just making her laugh could be an accomplishment in and of itself, much less an act of fulfilling my parental duties. But there it was. I would urge all parents to find some way to maintain perspective, and to seek outside input so that the things you actually are managing to pull-off don’t stay invisible to you.

Parenting is, to borrow a phrase I once read in a magazine article about being a touring musician, the epitome of a mistake-driven endeavor. I could go on and on about all the things I’m not doing adequately. But today I’ll focus elsewhere — and encourage you to do the same.

<3 SRK