All for our kids

I’ve just put our kids to sleep. My wife is at a meeting tonight so it was my chance to read them a bedtime story about a rhino and its compulsion to run everywhere before putting our daughter to bed first.

I had a realisation while I listened to her breathing deeply that I’ve felt coming for a while now: I think parents must go through a phase of their lives where everything is about their kids. It’s not like this is a radical epiphany. People have been commenting on this for, well, a long time but these sorts of things don’t seem real until you finally click.

Sure, we focus on careers, ambitions and personal interests but when it comes down to it, it’s all about them, really. The rest of our lives are mostly a support system for our kids’ young lives and doing the best we can to give them a better life than the life we had growing up.

That doesn’t mean we necessarily had a bad childhood, I think I had a pretty good one and I have lots if good memories. I’d just like our kids to have an even better life so, one day, they can give their children an even better life. That is a pretty good legacy to leave behind.