“Everything worked out. It might not have happened the way we wanted, but it worked out.”
As a father and husband, I worry about the next day—a lot. I worry about failing my family, making the wrong decisions, and whether I’m doing enough. But I’m learning to turn those fears and failures into lessons.
More than anything, I want to be an example of something good for my daughters. While studying for my CCNA, I make sure they see me studying and working through math problems. I don’t want their memories of me to be only of their father sitting in front of a screen or lying around the house.
With my oldest starting second grade, I don’t want her to believe that failing means giving up. Sometimes, you have to step back, rework the problem, and try again. At first, she didn’t want to practice math with me. Now, when she’s home, she asks me to give her problems to solve. I love using ChatGPT to create fun worksheets for her, but what I love even more is watching her become excited about learning.
My wife has also fallen in love with chess—or maybe she has just fallen in love with the idea of beating me. Lol. I hope she understands that winning the game is about knowing your options and thinking about your next move while never expecting life—or your opponent—to move exactly the way you predicted.
So far, she has only beaten me on time, but I’ll admit that lately she has forced me to pay closer attention and start brushing up on my own skills.
I think that’s what I love most about my family: watching them want to become better. In the process, they make me want to become better too.
God has blessed me with mobility, time, and the opportunity to be alive and present in their lives. I want my little tribe to learn everything they can, experience life, and build memories they’ll carry with them long after they leave our home.
They’ve seen their mother and me argue and fuss, but they’ve also seen us love, laugh, play, and continue choosing one another. They were our flower girls and ring girls at our wedding. They’ve witnessed the imperfect reality of love—not something without conflict, but something that keeps finding its way back home.
From the chaos of life came order—not perfect order, but something honest, loving, and ours.
So, yes, I hope my future self tells me that everything worked out—not perfectly and perhaps not according to plan, but that my family was okay, my daughters knew they were loved, and all that worrying didn’t stop me from being present for the life happening right in front of me.
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