On the sacred responsibility of showing up

Dedicated to my father and mother, Nelson and Anne — who showed up.

My parents were not perfect.

No parents are.

They carried their own histories, wounds, limitations and sorrows, as we all do. Some things move quietly through families, passing from one generation to the next until someone finally has the courage to look at them in the light.

But when I look back on my childhood, one truth rises above everything else:

My parents were there.

My father knew he was a father. My mother knew she was a mother. They understood that these were not simply names, but sacred responsibilities.

There were boundaries. There was a sense of right and wrong. There was a quiet order beneath the ordinary noise of family life that told a child:

These are my parents.
This is my home.
I belong here.

Perhaps that was one of the deepest gifts of their marriage.

Not perfection.

Presence.

Children Are Not Accessories to Our Lives

I believe children are gifts from God.

Not possessions. Not reflections of our pride. Not interruptions to be fitted around our careers, relationships, travels and ambitions.

They are entrusted to us.

And when something precious is entrusted to us, we are asked to care for it with our whole hearts.

There are men and women who long with all their souls to become parents and never receive that gift. And yet there are others who are given children and slowly teach them, through absence, that everything else matters more.

Work comes first.

Another relationship comes first.

Travel comes first.

Money comes first.

Alcohol, gambling, pornography, shopping and the endless pursuit of pleasure come first.

And somewhere nearby, a child is waiting quietly, hoping to be noticed.

We tell ourselves:

I am busy.

I am providing.

They have everything they need.

There is a maid.

I pay the bills.

But children do not measure love by invoices.

They measure it in moments.

Did you come?

Did you sit beside me?

Did you listen to the story I was trying to tell?

Did you notice when my voice changed?

Did you see that I was hurting?

When I looked into the audience, were you there?

When my world fell apart, could I call you?

These are the questions children carry with them long after childhood has disappeared.

The Deepest Wound Is Often Not Being Seen

Some of the deepest wounds in a human life begin with the feeling that a parent never truly saw us.

A child needs to feel:

I see you.
I hear you.
You matter to me.
I am here.

A father does not have to be perfect to give his child that gift. A mother does not have to be perfect either.

You may lose your temper. You may make mistakes. You may get things terribly wrong.

But you can return.

You can apologise.

You can learn.

You can repair.

What matters is that inconvenience, anger or the collapse of a relationship between adults never becomes an excuse to abandon the child who still needs you.

A marriage may end.

A relationship may end.

Romantic partners may come and go.

Your child remains your child.

The love between adults may change, but the responsibility to a child does not disappear with it.

Whatever happened between a mother and father, a child should never have to carry the emotional bill.

What Our Children Learn From Us

Children learn love long before anyone explains it to them.

They watch.

A boy watches the way his father speaks to his mother. He notices whether women are cherished or humiliated, whether promises are kept, whether strength means protection or domination, and whether a man is brave enough to apologise.

A girl watches too. She learns what love looks like, what respect feels like and what she should believe she deserves.

And all children watch their mothers. They learn dignity, tenderness, boundaries, self-respect and courage from what is lived before them.

One day, the child becomes an adult and carries those lessons into the world.

Sometimes we meet people who are frightened of intimacy, unable to trust, unable to respect love or quick to disappear whenever vulnerability appears, and we wonder what happened.

Sometimes part of the answer began long ago.

A little boy was watching.

A little girl was watching.

A child was learning what love meant.

This is why parenting is so much larger than providing food, education and a roof.

We are teaching another human being how to love.

Happiness Cannot Be Forced — But Love Can Be Given

No parent can promise a child a life without heartbreak.

Life will bring disappointment, illness, rejection, grief and loss. We cannot remove every sorrow from the road ahead.

But we can give a child something that helps them walk through sorrow without losing themselves.

We can give them security.

Belonging.

Affection.

Encouragement.

Boundaries.

Protection.

And the deep, quiet knowledge that somewhere in this enormous world, their existence matters profoundly.

A child who receives that foundation will still suffer. But they do not have to spend their life wondering whether they were ever worth loving.

That is an extraordinary inheritance.

Parenthood Requires the Death of Some Selfishness

When we become mothers and fathers, something in us must change.

We cannot continue living as though only our own desires matter.

This does not mean disappearing as human beings. Children need to see parents who care for their bodies, minds and spirits. They need to learn that love is not martyrdom and that self-respect is not selfishness.

But there is a great difference between self-care and self-absorption.

Parenthood asks us, again and again, to place another human being ahead of our immediate convenience.

Sometimes it is boring.

Sometimes it is exhausting.

Sometimes it is thankless.

Sometimes the child you sacrificed everything for will one day tell you that you ruined their life.

Sometimes you will lie awake wondering whether you have done anything right.

And still, you keep loving.

You keep returning.

You keep showing up.

That is the covenant: to remain faithful through the uncertainty, the fatigue, the confusion and even the ingratitude.

They Only Get One Childhood

This is the part we forget.

Children only get one childhood.

There is no rehearsal.

You cannot return when they are thirty and attend the birthday you missed when they were eight. You cannot go back to sit beside the sixteen-year-old who needed you and was too proud or frightened to say so.

Money cannot purchase yesterday.

Success cannot rebuild a memory.

An apology can heal much — and I believe deeply in reconciliation and repair — but time itself does not turn around.

Those childhood years become the soil from which an adult grows.

One day, the toys disappear.

The bedroom becomes quiet.

The school uniform is folded away for the last time.

The small hand that once reached for yours no longer does.

And strangely, the very things that once exhausted you become the things you would give almost anything to experience once more.

The noise.

The questions.

The interruptions.

The little voice calling from another room:

Come and see.

What Will Matter at the End?

I think increasingly about what remains at the end of a human life.

Not the cars.

Not the houses.

Not the affairs.

Not the lovers.

Not the business deals.

Not the titles.

Not the money sitting in an account.

Eventually, almost everything we spent our lives chasing belongs to somebody else.

What remains is the love we gave.

The people whose lives were changed because we existed.

The hearts that felt safer because we were kind.

And perhaps, if we were fortunate enough to become parents, the human beings God entrusted to us.

Did they know we loved them?

Did they know we were proud of them?

Did we make them feel safe enough to become themselves?

Did we teach them how to love?

And when they needed us —

did we show up?

I dedicate these words to Nelson and Anne, my father and mother.

They were not perfect.

Neither am I.

None of us will ever be.

But they gave me something whose value I understand more deeply with every passing year:

They made me feel that I mattered.

And perhaps this is one of the simplest definitions of love:

Not perfection.

Not money.

Not grand declarations.

But the quiet, faithful decision to say:

I am your mother.
I am your father.
You matter.
I am here.

Because children are gifts.

Because parenthood is sacred.

Because love is remembered in moments.

And because they only get one childhood.