Friday Thoughts by the Fire: #76

The innocent faith

Photo by Alvin Mahmudov on Unsplash

“Daddy! Nice catch!”

My daughter yells this as I reel in another stellar one-handed catch of a football in the living room.

It feels good to impress them. My kids sometimes look at me like I can do anything. At times, this broken world tries to take us down with it. I often think about the way children resolve complex problems with the simplest solutions.

Kids seem to be above things like pride, prejudice, and comparative nature. Of course children can sometimes be mean to each other, it’s in us all. But they have this impressionable psyche that seems so innocent and fun.

I’m not the best at anything I do. But there’s something so special about loving their little souls with everything in me, and having them look right at me, raise their eyebrows, and say “Wooowww!” when I do something rather routine.

They make the mundane somehow extraordinary.

They think I can do anything. They trust that I can solve any one of their little problems. There’s a level of invincibility I feel when I help them with something they can’t do themselves. I don’t feel special, but the feeling they give me is.

As parents, we set up for ourselves an impossible quest — to be everything our children need us to be, when they need us to be it. We can never deliver every time. But for every time we do, they are right there knowing we could do it all along.

This parental endeavor can make us feel exhausted and overwhelmed. It can have us shouldering an insurmountable responsibility. The idea that we can shatter our child’s confidence in us if we can’t pull something off can have us feeling a lot of pressure.

But it’s also a bit of a fallacy. My kids have seen me fail while trying to accomplish various tasks. They’ve seen me struggle to put a thousand toys together on Christmas.

And I’ve never seen someone shrug off a failure as well as a kid who has better things to do than sulk. I was in my daughter’s room one day and I apparently answered one of her questions wrong. She was quick to correct me and followed with, “Oh well, sometimes you’re wrong, sometimes you’re right”.

Story of my life.

I know over the years the impressions on my kids will lessen. I know one day they’ll be able to do all the things better than I can. Life has a way of keeping us humble like that.

One day I’ll be the impressed one, needing their help.

But I don’t know if there’s a more powerful feeling in this world than having your child believe that you can do anything.

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