The Tradeoffs of Fatherhood

SAN DIEGO, California — I didn’t see my son on Father’s Day.

I spent it 90 miles down the road, coaching a volleyball clinic in San Diego. Such are the tradeoffs of being a provider, husband, and father.

On any given day, that order is scrambled and flipped into whatever it needs to be. Sometimes being a provider must take precedence over the duties of fatherhood, and sometimes it’s the other way around. Every now and again, husband takes the lead role, though that’s often accompanied with being a father, while being the provider must take the back seat for the moment.

It’s a juggling act, always. And it’s hard, a challenge beyond anything I’ve yet experienced.

It’s awesome.

The trade-offs of fatherhood are something I’ve been thinking about a good deal these past 14 months. Long before we had my son, Austin, my wife and I decided that we wanted a parent at home with our kids. We were raised in traditional homes, homes we loved, homes we wanted to replicate as best we could. Dad mostly worked. Mom was largely at home. We designed a similarly traditional setup for our family: husband who provides financially and a wife who makes the home. It works for us.

Like any arrangement, it has its challenges, its upsides and down, its tradeoffs.

To be a sufficient provider, it goes without saying that one must work. Oftentimes, this work takes me out of the home, frequently out of the state, and occasionally out of the country. Which presents tradeoff No. 1: To be a good father, you must spend time with your son. But every minute spent with your son is a minute not spent providing for him.

What’s more important?

On any given day, that changes.

Check that: On any given hour, that changes.

But there’s another ball into the air, too: Every minute spent with either your son or work is also one not spent with your wife.

Three buckets, all in need of filling, and the same 24 hours given to the previous version of you who had neither a kid nor wife.

Since becoming a father, I’ve become especially fond of a saying from Thomas Sowell, an American economist and social philosopher: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

Because while there are no solutions to this juggling act that every father wrestles with, certain tradeoffs you can measure but there are many you cannot. While I can measure the amount of money I provided for my family from the camp this weekend, there is no metric to measure what I missed on Father’s Day, just as there is no barometer to mark the level of pure magic that came when he woke up this morning and recognized that dad was home again and he smiled real big and reached out his arms for me to hold him and take him outside and hot damn is that just incredible beyond words.

There’s no social media score for being, as Luke Combs recently put it in a song, Front Door Famous, walking in the door and seeing your son smile and toddle towards you, knowing it’s officially Dad O’Clock while Mom regains her sanity over the next hour and a half and cooks something delicious. There is no number to accurately assess the giggles you get from providing the nightly raspberries, or reading before bedtime, me speaking English, him speaking…something.

Can’t blame him. Kid still “reads” upside down.

I just wrote a new children’s book, What to do When Someone Makes Fun of Your Shoes and would love it if you checked it out!

There is no fatherhood bank account that tracks the one-of-a-kind feeling of your kid falling asleep in your arms, drooling face resting on your shoulder, knowing he’s safe with Dad. Just as there is no tangible measurement for the sigh and collapse onto the couch or in bed with your wife after a long day of tag-teaming and diaper-changing and tantrum-managing and whatever other storms rolled through, undetected on the parenting weather report that day. There is no measuring the little things — the sweet notes, the surprise bar of chocolate slipped next to your laptop you only notice when you begin to write, the constant acknowledgement that what we’re both doing as Dad The Provider and Mom The Homemaker are exceptionally difficult in their own unique ways.

There’s magic big and small in parenting.

It’s hard. Hardest thing I’ve ever voluntarily done, and will voluntarily do again, and probably again, and, should Delaney get her way, again after that.

Because the trade-offs are worth it.

You don’t get more time in the day as a parent. You just learn to move faster.

Because you know the tradeoff you can’t measure is waiting at the front door.