After becoming a father, it took me a while to adjust to seeing parenthood as more than just a lot of extra work. In truth, for a few months, I questioned whether I had made the right decision. I worried I’d signed up for something I might not be able to metaphorically survive — that I’d crack somewhere along the way and leave; that I just wouldn’t be able to hack it.

I was 40, I was tired, I’d just had the most challenging professional 3-years of my life and I was burnt out. I was so jealous of my friends who had kids at 20. Sure, we have less money and security in our twenties, but we’ve got stronger backs, can survive on less sleep, and have more vitality! I felt like an exhausted old dog.

I can remember the exact moment that changed.

We were 12-months into raising Prince Brekkie and I was taking him down the lift in our apartment complex to walk across the street and grab some food together. He had just learned to stumble-walk a few weeks before his birthday (I have a great video of his first steps and subsequent dancing), and I exited the lift but held the door open so he could take his time stumbling out.

He got to the threshold between the lift and the lobby and was nervous about the gap there — you know the one; where if you look down you can see the bottom of the elevator shaft? And he’s holding the frame of the lift and thinking about it.

Then he looks up at me watching him and says, for the first time, “help?”

And like some corny scene in a movie where the main character touches something and sees flashes of the past, present, or future, it hit me like a ton of bricks that fatherhood wasn’t work at all… it was the most important duty in service to the whole that there could possibly be.

Prince Brekkie is going to become a thinking, acting, choosing agent in the world, and without healthy guidance and mentorship, he’ll learn how to think poorly, act poorly, and choose poorly, and it could be the case that such an outcome would be an outcome I helped to reinforce if I didn’t take this role of father seriously… if I didn’t stop seeing it as exhausting work and start seeing it as his best chance at a eudaimonic life.

I have this mentoring client, right now actually, who is working through some issues relating to their expectations of others (and subsequent disappointment and anger) as it relates to adverse childhood experiences. And one of the things I told them was:

If our children aren’t taught, by us, what good is, what responsible and ethical relation to the whole is, if we don’t take raising them as one of (if not the) the most important things we will ever do, then we wind up not showing up, we wind up creating environments that handicap them in the future.

Our children, like anyone else, are responsible for their own choices, and have the agency to make the right choices at any given moment… but ability is quite useless if one is ignorant of the fact that they possess it. Likewise, our children will always have the ability to choose to behave virtuously… but that ability isn’t just useless, it’s dangerous, if they were never taught what virtuous behaviour and choosing looks like.

Imagine the worst person you know, and remember:

None of us want our kid to become “the worst person” someone else knows. And while the opinions of others should never colour our own choices, it is our responsibility as fathers (and as mothers, of course), to ensure that we give our son or daughter the best shot at never choosing to become the sort of person of whom such a miserable distinction could be true.

Keep doing your thing, dads. There’s a lot on the line, your kids need you, and I believe in you — I believe in us.