Father’s Day has me reflecting on the parenting skills I’ve picked up: patience, empathy, negotiation under pressure, and how they help in my role as a leader at work. This is not news, it’s something I read a lot about in the industry.
But I quickly realised that writing about that would be missing a far more important point that I don’t hear about as much.
The change is real. In the years since my children were born, I have changed. Most of the time I don’t even notice it until I stop and reflect.
I’ve personally become more energised by social interaction. More craving social connection, less wishing I could be by myself. More engaged in my local communities. I feel it at work, in how I show up. These are not small shifts and they are the kind of changes I would have sworn were impossible for me ten years ago.
For the fathers out there: the change is real. Our brains transform as we become parents. It’s a biological change.
It can feel like failing
Sometimes that change is jarring.
Things you used to do without thinking now come to you differently. Interests fade, what used to give you energy might drain you and what used to drain you might supercharge you. Your priorities reorder themselves. Maybe what was important to you before is no longer important to you now, and more importantly maybe you see that others don’t share your priorities and where you used to try and align, you can’t now.
When that happens, it can feel like failure, as if something is wrong with you.
You’re not failing. You’re simply changing.
There’s a difference. Failing means you’re falling behind where you should be. Changing means you’re moving somewhere new. Both can feel the same from the inside.
You’re actually doing remarkably well
This is what I wish others could tell me more often: Fatherhood is a second and a third full-time job on top of the one you already have and you are probably doing a remarkable job at all of them.
Once children enter the picture, there’s more to carry: laundry, school runs, homework, sleep, keeping another human being (or two) alive. The endless scheduling of a small person’s existence. You are juggling all of that on top of the physiological change happening in your body and mind (and by the way, your career too)
So when you’re having a bad day, maybe a work deadline looming, kids refusing to cooperate, a dinner plan that still hasn’t been made, don’t forget what you actually did today. You read that book. You helped build that Lego castle. You got your kids to school on time. Maybe you managed one or two of the many other things that only you can do.
Bad days don’t count against you, nobody is keeping score but you. The best thing you can do for yourself and others is to give yourselves a little bit of latitude. You’re killing it.
For fun, here’s a short poem, brought to you by BigPickle:
The Father’s Oath
Three jobs stacked on the one you knew,
no one clocks in but you.
Laundry, school runs, homework, sleep,
the load you carry deep.
You read the book, you built the towers,
you got them through the hours.
Bad days come, but they don’t count —
the work is real, mount up.