| View in browser Dear Friend,I make myself laugh. Two weeks ago, for my Sunday email, I told myself, “In two weeks, you can really sit down and give a lot of thought to your email because by then, life will be mostly back to normal.” Ha Ha Ha. What a joke. Here we are, two weeks later, and I am not any closer to feeling like I am back in the regular world. I always knew things would be different, but in my naïve mind, I thought it would be different in the sense that I had my pre-birth life, and then I was just adding a baby to the equation. As I’m sure you already know, I was completely wrong. That reality no longer exists. Thanks a lot for the heads up 🙄😅 That all being said, this new reality is one I couldn’t have imagined, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Earlier today, my wife and I were looking through photos and videos together for the first time—the ones the nurse took right after the birth. Even though I considered myself a dad from the moment we found out we were pregnant, in that moment, when my wife did a magic trick at 8:42 a.m. and made our baby appear, everything changed. It got me thinking—how many times am I going to feel like everything has changed, and how will I ever adapt to that? Then I reminded myself that while this is the first time my new reality involves adding a kid into the mix, I have been navigating changing realities my entire life. Of course, this doesn’t always mean things are physically changing. The sky is still blue, we still have our fingers and toes, beans still taste bad. But our emotions and perceptions? Those will shift constantly. I think about the times my mom’s reality changed—me laughing for the first time, riding my bike, failing a test, quitting a team, yelling at her, traveling after high school, getting married, and now having a kid. I assume each of those changes came with a mixed bag of highs and lows. Ultimately, our realities changing is one of the few certainties of being alive. Whether my sweet little boy stays the innocent, cutest thing in the world as he is now, or one day beats me in a race (yeah right), or is yelling at me because he thinks I should let him drop out to become a video game streamer, I want to stay committed—not to forcing my reality to be what I want it to be, but to accepting that uncertainty is part of what I signed up for as a parent and as a human. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything in our power to impact our kids and take care of ourselves. But it does mean we should focus on learning from every version of our reality and soaking up each iteration of it. There is always something to be learned. My baby’s poopy diapers at 2 a.m. are teaching me patience, and I get to laugh at the fact that I’m rubbing diaper cream on his butt. And when my mom thought we might never have a relationship because I hated her at 16, she didn’t shy away – she showed up. I don’t think I, or anyone else, will ever regret showing up and working to make the most of their reality. |
They didn’t tell me it’s about the little things
In today’s email, I want to share a realization I’ve had about what truly matters in parenting. I wish they
