Monthly Archives: June 2011

Reflections on fatherhood

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This type of blog post isn’t really my style, so bear with me.

Our son, Jaan, is now two months old, and I have to say he’s changed my life (in fact, both our lives) in more ways in the course of those months than I could have ever imagined beforehand. The year 2010 was a horrifically rough one for me, Evelien and our families on far too many levels, but now that our son has arrived on planet Earth, safe and sound, it’s (too) easy to forget about that.

Being a parent is, as I’m sure any parent will testify, an genuinely amazing feeling. A feeling one of my closest friends calls ‘eternal love’. That phrase always sounded kinda corny to me until Jaan was born, but it’s awfully close to what we feel for our little boy, even though at the same time the feeling of being a father for me remains indescribable.

Jaan is an incredibly good boy. He sleeps really well, eats well and defecates well (sorry but that’s important!). We love him to death, in ways people who are not (yet) parents would have a really hard time grasping. I know I sure had difficulties fathoming how deep parental love runs. Let me tell you: unimaginably deep.

I’m sure there will be a lot of challenges along the way – maybe we’ve just been lucky so far and soon we’ll struggle with the dark side of having kids (which everyone keeps telling me is real). We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, all that matters is that our son is happy, healthy, and warming our hearts with every breath, movement or smile.

Anyway, I’m not even sure why I’m writing this blog post – perhaps I just wanted to honor our son’s ‘birthday’ with a blog post for once not written for professional purposes.

To conclude, a number of semi-famous quotations about fatherhood that resonate with me:

> It is much easier to become a father than to be one. ~Kent Nerburn

> Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance. ~Ruth E. Renkel

> A man’s worth is measured by how he parents his children. What he gives them, what he keeps away from them, the lessons he teaches and the lessons he allows them to learn on their own. ~Lisa Rogers

> By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong. ~Charles Wadsworth

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