Three weeks to the day my wife and I welcomed our daughter to the world and ascended to parenthood.
When I first laid eyes on her, instantly recognizing my own features in her minutes-old face, I had one feeling course through my veins: a deep, uplifting, and eternal sense of responsibility. A lifelong commitment made automatically without the utterance of a word.
And it was then I understood what so many other parents, in their own way, had tried to communicate to me about parenthood: it’s a higher calling and you’ll understand what that means once you’re in it. In my unspoken promise to her I realized purpose.
I didn’t worry much about the unknowns while she was in the womb since there’s little, if anything, I could do about those. Instead I turned my attention to things I could control: preparing our home, our routines, our finances, and so on. But one nagging thought that straddled the can / can’t control divide tugged at my conscience: “what sort of world will your daughter inherit and how will you prepare her for it?”
