There is no tougher job than parenting. It’s hard work and you never know how well you did it until it’s too late to do anything about it.
There are moments of indescribable joy, terror, anguish and anger, sometimes all mixed up in the same sixty seconds. It’s has consequences that most of us never thing about before we initiate the whole process and too many parents give up, abandon their families or pass the job off to day care and school teachers.
I recently discovered a blog, written by a stay-at-home dad. His adventures in parenthood are recorded in post-it-notes he leaves around the house to remind his “Permanent Roommate” and himself of the lessons he has learned. It brought back a flood of memories of Colleen and my experiences as parents and I’m glad to see it getting the viral exposure it should.
It’s an often thankless task, but I can’t think of a more noble pursuit. As we back over those years, we realize the sacrifices both of us made. She put off chasing her career dreams and I worked harder and longer than I should have to fund the operation.
But if we had it to do all over again, we would still take on the challenge. Reading these notes reminded me, again, of the incredible job Colleen did with Shelby and Brandon and of how lucky we feel that things turned out as well as they did. From the perspective of hindsight, we had no idea what the hell we were doing.
(Thanks to MoreClaremore for turning us onto this way cool collection of wisdom.)
