The blessing of a smile
While getting my undergraduate degree, I wrote the humor-column for the university paper. For my last article before graduating, I strayed from my normal goal of trying to make people laugh, and chose to instead attempt to make them smile.
As I have been mentally preparing to send my eldest child off to college for his freshmen year, I have thought about that article on several occasions. I am sharing it below, and I hope it makes you smile.
“If you find a man with no smile, give him yours.”
I read those words on a church sign some time ago, and while writing for the University paper the last two years, that is exactly what I have been trying to do. So, for all of you people who cannot find your smile, here’s mine…
Not a single hour goes by that I don’t think about my children. I am constantly wondering what they are going to be like as adults, and what their children will be like. I wonder when all is said and done, if they will think I was a good dad.
For those of you who have not experienced parenting yet, you may not know what I am feeling. I don’t know if I can explain it. All I can say is that parenting may be my most important job. Long after I am pushing up daisies, not much of what I have accomplished in my life will matter, except my children. They are, in the most literal sense, the future. A hundred years from now they may be the only proof that I was ever here.
At night I can close my eyes and see my children being born, a whole new little person, whose entire life is in my hands. They are because I am. I am part of them, and they are part of me.
My children are the reason that I get up and go to work, and why I just spent the last 19 years of my life going to school. I haven’t done all of this for me. Hell, I would have been content as a humor columnist; but I got a degree, took a job I’ve learned to like, and settled into suburbia.
I am not the first person to do this. Millions of parents all over the world get up each morning and make the same sacrifices I do. As children, we just expect there to be food. We just expect there to be new jeans, and money for the mall. We don’t stop to think that someone had to earn that money. Somebody had to get up early, iron their clothes, and yours, make breakfast, and then go to work. The funny thing is, I don’t mind. I don’t mind the sacrifices. In fact, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I want my children to have a great life. That’s one reason why God has put me here. He wants to make sure that my children are raised by a father who loves them, can’t stand being without them, and can’t wait for them to be born. You see, for those of you who have not fully experienced parenting yet, I am one of you. My children are not born yet either, but that doesn’t mean that I am not a father. I have children; I simply have never gotten to see them yet. The thought of getting to see them is what keeps me going. It’s why I get out of bed each morning. And best of all, it is why I smile.
May 1998 *
(*Five years before marrying my wife, and seven years before the birth of our son.)
Picture of the family calendar from 2005 with his due date… not his birthday. :—)