There is nothing __________________ than fatherhood.
All of the following when installed in the blank are true:
more rewarding
scarier
more expensive
more fun
with more cheap thrills
that makes you sell the sports car faster
that changes your life more
The realization that your life it totally different is only intellectual until the moment of birth. It becomes visceral at that instant. This will mean nothing to you until that instant, as it must be experienced directly.
Almost 31 years ago, I was sitting in a delivery waiting room (back then you had to have taken the special c-section classes to be in the delivery room, and ours was a 5:00pm Friday "emergency" c-section) when the nurse came in and told me we had a boy, and I was in the middle of stepping across a 42" square glass topped coffee table when it hit me that I now had the opportunity to screw up a whole new human being.
Accept that you will make mistakes. Most are not fatal, as kids are much more resiliant and forgiving than you would expect. Some of the success here is just random luck. Scary, huh?
You can not insulate kids from all danger. It's like the original 7 astronauts training, a graded series of exposures that accustoms them to dealing with danger in little bites. You can not treat them like the Bubbble Boy, either. It takes exposure to evil to build up the soul's immunity to evil. Any one of these can be a serious mistake. Scarier and scarier, huh?
And it can all go sour in an instant, too. My daughter was the perfect child until age 16, when she stole her grandmother's car and ran away to first Roanoke (sorry Rich, but I will always have a sour taste about your town) and then to Ohio, then back to Atlanta. It took me almost a month to find her. I managed to chase her as far as Roanoke, with my wife in Atlanta browbeating tech customer service depts of cell companies into telling her what/where the cell towers were when she used the cell phone she had stolen from my wife. I only got her home by spotting the car stashed in back of one of her "friend's" houses and kicking in a window and crawling through and dragging her out. This was runaway number 1. There were at least 5 more, one of which lasted over 3 months without us knowing where she was, and ended with her moving back into the house with a boyfriend, who I ended up fighting with in the front yard a few months later and kicking out after he hit her. In this process, she totally screwed up her junior year of high school with an A average and failed due to excessive absences. She ended up finishing high school in an accredited on line program thru the U of Nebraska, and was accepted with a full ride scholarship at a good private liberal arts U in Montgomery, which turned out to be way too close to the social life at Auburn. She ended up graduating from Georgia State with honors and with one hell of a good job, married to a great guy, and about a year ago we find out she has MS. And in December, we find out she's pregnant, due in August as well.
Grasp every instant with them, Scott. They are jewels beyond price. They can make you weep and laugh within an eyeblink...
