A Father’s Reflection on the Paradoxes and Profound Purpose of Parenting
AS PARENTS, we spend much of our lives teaching people we don’t want to live without – how to live without us. Parenting is the only job where success means getting fired—slowly, and with hugs. We spend years tying shoelaces and wiping noses, only to one day hear your teenager announce, “I can do it myself.” Which is both the dream and the beginning of the end. We’re like emotional boot camp instructors: barking life skills at tiny humans who scream during bath time and eat crayons if unsupervised. We teach them everything—from how to cross the street safely to how to stay under the speed limit — so that, eventually, they won’t need us standing there with emotional Twinkies and a bail bondsman.
No one tells you that parenthood is a long, graceful act of planned obsolescence. From the moment they place that tiny, squirming bundle in your arms, you start a process that feels backward: you teach the person you love more than life itself how to live without you. Enabling them to stand eventually enables them to walk away. You teach them how to talk, so they can say goodbye. You give them everything you’ve got—your time, your energy, your stories, your patience, your last bite of dessert—and then you spend the rest of your life quietly preparing for the day when they won’t need any of it.
That’s the paradox no one really prepares you for. When they’re little, the days are long and chaotic. You say things like “No, we don’t lick the shopping cart,” and “Because I said so,” and “please just eat one green thing.”
But slowly, the job shifts. They stop reaching for your hand. They close their bedroom doors. They want advice less often and space more often. And when they do come back—because they still do—it’s not because they need you. It’s because they choose to. You understand you’re no longer the center of their world, but you’ve become part of the foundation beneath it.
I used to think the hardest part of parenting would be the early years: the sleepless nights, the scraped knees, the questions you never felt smart enough to answer. But the truth is, the hardest part is now. It’s watching them become everything you hoped for and realizing they’re doing it without holding your hand.
And I wouldn’t trade it for anything, especially when their mother left us to be the family’s designated angel. It was a time when I hurt in places I didn’t know could ache. I had three co-mourners who came in and took over all the mundane necessary details when officialdom makes dying more complicated than living. Suddenly they made sure I got something to eat, and safely crossed all the emotional streets without being run down.
Sometimes I see a photo from years ago and feel winded by the rush of memory. Sometimes I hear their laughter and think, I helped create that sound. And sometimes—quietly—I mourn the days when their whole world fit between our four walls. Let’s be real, watching your kids grow up is like watching your favorite TV show end. You’re so proud of how far they’ve come, but you’re also like, ‘Wait, what do you mean you’re moving out?’ It’s a weird mix of wanting to throw a party and needing a psychotherapist on speed dial.
You pour your heart and soul into raising your kids, and then eventually, you have to let them go out into the world on their own. It’s a tough but necessary part of the journey. We taught them how to fall and get back up. How to ask questions and look for their own answers. How to laugh, forgive, survive disappointment, and keep going. From the very beginning, the job of a parent is to make ourselves increasingly unnecessary. We teach them to tie their shoes so they can run ahead of us. We teach them to read so they can form their own opinions. We teach them empathy, discipline, and resilience so they can face challenges that, one day, we won’t be there to guide them through. And we do this knowing full well the outcome: that if we succeed, they will build lives that extend beyond our reach. They will have stories we aren’t part of. Conversations we don’t hear. That’s not failure. It’s proof we’ve done it right.
In the end, we are not raising children—we are raising future adults. We are slowly building the person who will stand beside our hospital bed someday, or deliver our eulogy, or carry our quirks into the next generation like old family recipes. We taught them how to live without us. And that kind of legacy outlives any monument.
Contact Jerry at jerrygervase@yahoo.com
