While we were in the throes of babies and toddlers, pregnancies and postpartums, my husband would often walk through the door after work with groceries, pour me wine, and hold the baby in one arm while he made dinner with the other. I remember on some days being too exhausted to reciprocate with much except an ardent feeling and expression of gratitude to him, for him. That image of him still stands in my mind as the image of heroic manliness.

Another good father and husband we know once said that when he arrives home, he says to himself, “It’s showtime.” It’s his way of reminding himself that the crux of his day belongs to the moment he comes home from work and crosses the threshold into home. Rather than collapse on a sofa with beer and TV and be done for the day, he intended instead to bring his greatest efforts to his home life. What these anecdotes exemplify is a proper ordering of work and home that translates into specific small acts of love that echo throughout the family.

For too long we’ve repeated the cultural lore in movies and media about the domineering and distant man and the oppressed and under-actualized woman.

The good of home

To say that home ought to have primacy over work for men and women is not to say work is unimportant or that we shouldn’t develop professional skills or seek to advance careers. A job doesn’t need to be seen strictly as a means to an end; it can be a good in itself insofar as it is ennobling and sanctifying, and care should be taken to ensure it be done well. But it is a subordinate good to the good of home. Home isn’t a mere launch pad for a man’s success in the world — rather his success in the world is for the sake of home.

If a man sees his work life as a parallel good, divorced from the good of home, the two disparate goods will tend to become rivalrous, for the family wants from the father what is the family's due: to have a significance in his eyes greater than that of his career.

It’s not difficult to see how these two goods become inverted. Twenty-first-century Americans look to career for so much: an identity, the expression of some core passion, a measure of success and worth, a measure of where we stand in relation to others. It’s a compelling part of life, and the cultural stoking of its importance has coincided with the modern attenuation of home life.

These ambient messages grease the slide for us all to descend into an exaggerated view of work at the expense of home. Compounding that is the unavoidable fact that jobs often include deadlines and pressure that can understandably (and sometimes justifiably) claim a more immediate urgency than that of home life. All of this creates a tendency to subvert home for work, even without an explicit intention to do so.

Domino effect

But there are good reasons to be wary of such a tendency. When men fail to privilege home above work, as expressed in how they live each day, it has a domino effect on the family, and therefore society, in several ways.

Firstly, the husband can grow to see his family as a burden getting in the way of his higher purpose, which is his career. He begins to see his principal identity as derived from work and his primary relationships that of employer and employee. Home then starts to adopt similar characteristics; his family may be subconsciously reduced to the equivalent of employees in his charge.

Secondly, the mother’s mission is trivialized. She begins to sense her own work at home is not their common life’s work but merely her burden to endure in service of a higher mission that is his alone and to which she has not acquiesced. If work is a separate and vying good from home, it’s more natural that she begins to want that separate good for herself even at the expense of home life, which now has diminished in value for her as well.

Thirdly, their unity of purpose dissolves. The often tedious work of home is elevating and ennobling when acknowledged by both husband and wife as a taking part in an extolled good, valuable in itself and for the sake of their ultimate end of beatitude. Without this unity of purpose, these duties seem merely menial and heavy — and merely menial and heavy work will quickly feel suffocating and oppressive for whoever shoulders it. Resentment calcifies like a tumor as husband and wife become competitors rather than allies.

Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images

Finally, there are repercussions for society that might be obvious but are worth spelling out. Sons will learn about manhood and daughters about their worth in the eyes of men in large part based upon the axis on which a father orients his life. Both will begin to understand God’s love through their father. Far less than their father’s job promotion, children will remember how he prioritized their mom and them in the small details that make up the composition of their childhood. It’s not the work of one evening or a trip to Disneyland, but it’s the quiet, persevering work of a lifetime. This work, cheerfully and generously done, will reverberate into society and future generations. The neglect of it will as well.

Ordinary love story

The stories we tell as a culture about the dynamics between husband and wife matter. When men and women are united in giving pre-eminence to home, the story can be one of families working in concert, with generosity and gratitude exchanged back and forth in a currency that multiplies with each and every exchange. It’s the story of ordinary people living their quiet shared purpose, a purpose that saturates their hearts and inclines their wills toward God and one another. This love story is transformative and extraordinary precisely because of the seemingly everyday subjects and acts that constitute its operations.

For too long we’ve repeated the cultural lore in movies and media about the domineering and distant man and the oppressed and under-actualized woman, both wanting to break from the tedium of middle-class values. The modern response to this story of dissatisfaction has been that we’ve valued home too much and at too great an expense. What this critique fails to see is that when home feels like a prison, it’s not because we’ve given it too much importance but because we’ve given it far too little.

This essay originally appeared in the Family Revival Substack.

America’s future depends on the strength of its fathers

In George Strait’s hit song “The Best Day,” a son sings to his father:

Dad this could be the best day of my life.
Been dreamin’ day and night about the fun we’ll have.
Just me and you doing what I’ve always wanted to.
I’m the luckiest boy alive.
This is the best day of my life.

Last weekend, that song came to life for me. On a flight to Virginia, my 8-year-old son looked at me, grinning ear to ear, and said, “Dad, this is my favorite three days of the year.” Not Christmas. Not his birthday. Not even our family vacations. His favorite three days are spent with me, out in the hills of Virginia, at a small father-son retreat where 25 dads and their school-age sons come together to strengthen a sacred bond.

Being a father isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence. It’s about showing up, time and again.

For the third consecutive year, we packed up and made the trip. It’s become a tradition — canoeing down rivers, building bonfires, swapping stories, touring Civil War battlefields, and wandering through museums that tell the story of America. There’s something about being shoulder to shoulder with your son, not staring at a screen, not rushing from one practice to another, but instead living deliberately in fellowship with other fathers and sons.

These moments don’t just happen. They’re carved out, preserved, and passed down.

Building generational bonds

The retreat is as much for the dads as it is for the boys. While the kids disappear into the woods for laser tag or trampoline wars, the men gather by the fire. We sip whiskey, light cigars, and talk openly — about marriage, business, faith, and the challenges of raising children in a culture that increasingly dismisses the role of good men. Some conversations are heavy. Others are hilarious. But all of them are honest. It is, in every sense of the word, fellowship.

This is what it means to be present. And presence matters.

The statistics back it up. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, children raised without their father in the home are four times more likely to live in poverty, twice as likely to suffer from obesity, and significantly more likely to end up in prison.

Moreover, boys with highly involved fathers are less likely to use drugs, get suspended from school, or commit crimes. And when it comes to faith, the father’s role is critical: If a father practices his faith regularly, his children will have a much higher probability of remaining active in that faith as adults than if only the mother practices.

These facts don’t diminish the role of mothers. Rather, they recognize that fathers have a unique and irreplaceable role in shaping the lives of their sons. In a society that often paints men as disposable, retreats like the one my son and I attend remind us that masculinity, rightly ordered, is indispensable.

Boys will be men

What struck me most this year wasn’t the canoe trips or the campfire stories. It was watching my son interact with other boys — kids he doesn’t see often, but with whom he instantly bonded. They ran free, like boys are supposed to. Sticks became swords, forts were built, dirt was rubbed into grass-stained jeans. It was chaotic, loud, and glorious. And while they played, they also absorbed something deeper: the example of a band of men who were present, engaged, and invested in them.

We live in a culture that is quick to say, “Boys will be boys,” when excusing bad behavior, but slow to recognize that boys will be men one day — and the kind of men they become depends heavily on the kind of men they see. At this retreat, they saw dads who love their wives, work hard, and take their faith seriously. They saw that masculinity is not toxic, but life-giving.

Our founding fathers placed such importance on virtue for a reason. President George Washington himself said, “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” And where do boys learn virtue if not first at the knee of their fathers? Visiting Civil War battlefields with my son, I couldn’t help but think of the boys who became men on those very grounds, some no older than he is now, who sacrificed everything because their fathers taught them what was worth fighting for.

Presence over perfection

Being a father isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence. It’s about showing up, time and again, so that one day your 8-year-old son looks at you and says, “This is my favorite three days of the year.”

I left Virginia with a grateful heart and a renewed conviction. Our culture may tell men to step aside, to silence themselves, to apologize for who they are. But weekends like this one remind me that America doesn’t just need strong fathers — it depends on them. A nation that undermines fatherhood is a nation in decline. A nation that honors fatherhood is a nation with hope.

Photo by O2O Creative via Getty Images

When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through America in the 1830s, he marveled not at our government or our military, but at our families. He saw that the strength of American democracy was tied directly to the strength of American homes. Nearly two centuries later, that remains true.

A lifetime investment

So yes, this retreat was just three days in the hills of Virginia. But in reality, it was much more. It was proof that faith, family, and freedom are not abstract slogans — they are lived out one campfire, one canoe ride, one father-son conversation at a time. And if America is to endure, it will be because fathers step back into the role God gave them, raising sons who know both where they came from and where they are called to go.

When you tally it all up, the weekend’s scorecard looked something like this: one bloody nose, one trip to the hospital for X-rays on an arm, several Coors Lights, and memories no dad could count.

And maybe, just maybe, because an 8-year-old boy knew his dad was right there beside him.

Why write about parenthood?

Sometimes I sit down to write, and I can’t.

More often than not, the only topics that really move my heart (and fingers) to put something down on a digital page are, in some way, related to being a parent.

Parenting is the great leveler. Not everyone becomes one, but everyone who becomes one becomes the same thing.

I sit there, stuck, wondering if I really want to write about parenthood as much as I do. With a blank look on my face, my fingers resting on the thin black keys, the cursor blinking on the white page, my eyes search the sky as I investigate the corners in my brain trying to find anything I really care about.

Stuck, at a loss.

Slipping on Hot Wheels

So I ask myself, “Why wouldn’t I write about parenthood?” People who are single and dating write about finding love. People in war write about death. I’m a dad, so I write about slipping on Hot Wheels cars first thing in the morning, the pictures my kids draw, and how being the bad guy (because if you don’t teach your kids right, no one else will) really is the worst part of it all because I really just want to have a good time with my kids.

I saw a post from Barstool Sports the other day. It read: “Negotiation Masterclass: Hunter Renfrow Missed 10 Calls From The Panthers About Signing A Contract Because His Daughter Declined Them All To Watch 'Bluey' On His Phone.”

I don’t know who Hunter Renfrow is, and I don’t really care about professional football, but it was one of the most human and relatable things I had read that day. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how famous you are, if you are a parent, you are a parent, and if you are a parent, you know what that means.

The great leveler

Parenting is the great leveler. Not everyone becomes one, but everyone who becomes one becomes the same thing. Sometimes, I see videos of kids in Japan or Africa, South America or some other far-flung place, and they are doing the same things my kids do. Sometimes, I see silly “parent humor” Instagram videos from these same places, and I get the jokes. I have no idea what they are saying, but I know what’s happening.

I once saw a video of a baby gorilla poking a big gorilla in the butt and running away whenever the big gorilla turned his head to see who was doing the poking. After the third poke, the big gorilla (who we are supposed to believe is the parent) chases after the little gorilla, disappearing off screen. Someone’s in trouble.

Ever since having kids, I’ve been trying to figure out what really changes in you. I don’t mean the surface level stuff like having another little person to care for or worry about. I don’t mean the obvious logistical stuff of transportation, either. I mean the deeper thing. The feeling inside that you didn’t feel before.

I’m not sure I really understand it and am not sure I can really put it all into words, either. The closest I’ve been able to come to describing it is when you are a parent, you become more of everything: more intense and harsher, yet also, weirdly, more emotional and softer. I think you just become more human, and the knowledge that this becoming more in every way is a universal experience is comforting in some sense.

Photo by Taylor Kopel via Unsplash

On the same page

In our strange era, we have a tendency to see ourselves as something apart from the world. With so much criticism to level at the multitude of problems we see, we end up estranged from more and more of the basic human experience of life on earth in 2025. On a shrinking island floating off beyond the atmosphere and into space, we are alone with a critical stance directed toward everything and everyone else.

We are atomized by the format of the digital world, too. Weirdly connected in some new, shallow ways, but alone and isolated in other deeper ones. There’s no mass media anymore and no grand civilizational stories, either; no one’s on the same page. An empty world observed by lonely people with nothing in common other than the fact that they share nothing in common. That’s how the modern world can feel at the extreme.

But that universal experience of being a parent, that’s real, and it’s comforting, and it’s not going away. It’s not dependent on time or era. Sure, maybe parenting looked a little different in the year 392, but there were parents, and there were kids, and some things never change.

Not alone, not unique

The knowledge that you aren’t alone and that even people who you don’t like and will never like share that same thing; the realization that you even share this with your greatest enemies, and even though you never meet, there is some unspoken thing or secret you are both aware of: There is something strangely comforting about it.

I write about being a parent because that’s who I am right now. It’s what fills my days and what makes my worries. I like writing about it because I have a lot to say about it, even if I sometimes wonder if I should write about it as much as I do. But I think I also write about it, or enjoy writing about it, because of the universalism of it, the leveling, and the historically unremarkable yet totally transformational experience it (being a parent) is.

It's also humanizing knowing I’m not alone and not unique and that all parents and all kids are the same in some way — it’s always been this way and always will be. It’s playing a little part in a big story, the biggest one in the world: the story of life. I think I'll keep writing about being parent.

Take your kids camping

I was on the ferry to Isle Royale National Park, sitting on a long, wooden bench, watching everyone else.

There were singles, couples, groups, and families. Watching a few kids slink along beside their parents, moms and dads making sure they had everything in the right place and everyone was coming along at the proper pace, I remembered the camping trips I used to take with my mom and dad.

None of us had cell phones, much less smartphones. When we were on the trip, we were on the trip and nowhere else. We were all there — wherever we were — together.

We were tent campers. We weren’t as hardcore as the people who do the deep backcountry stuff. You know, the trips where they hike in seven miles and set up their tent in the middle of the dense wilderness. But we were rustic enough for my parents to look down at RVs and any kind of electricity.

Scamps like us

Since then, they have moderated their stance. In their old age, they have acquired a small Scamp trailer — the smallest one you can buy, they assure us — and are constantly apologizing for its very existence, maintaining that they “put in their time.” We tell them that it’s OK, they are almost 70 years old after all. They can stop roughing it.

One summer when I was in middle school, we took a trip out to Maine. We camped the whole way from West Michigan to Acadia National Park. I was watching some old family videos the other day and saw some clips from that trip. We were packing up in the rain in New Hampshire. That’s rough. That video brought back all sorts of other memories from that trip. I remember my brother and I were so into skateboarding and almost killed ourselves every other day.

Dog days

When I was in 9th grade, we took a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We went over to the Apostle Islands off the coast of Wisconsin, too. We brought our dog along. Once, way up north, she jumped out of the car and right into a ditch. We thought her leg was hurt.

My parents were annoyed at the prospect of wasting a day (and money) trying to find a vet way up there. Then, all of a sudden, she miraculously started walking fine again. For the rest of her life (she lived to the ripe old age of 19), we always joked about how she was “faking it” on the U.P. trip.

I was getting really into music around that time and brought my trumpet because I swore I couldn’t take any days off. I would practice with a whisper mute around the campsite and sometimes in the car without a mute. If my parents were ever annoyed, they didn’t show it. They were always supportive, even when we didn’t have any room to spare in the blue Dodge Caravan and I was incessantly running the same passages over and over in the back seat.

In-tents experiences

After my sophomore year of college, we took a big trip, the biggest we ever took. We camped all the way out to California and back. We went to Yosemite, Zion, Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain National Park, and a bunch of other places along the way. I saw a video from that trip the other day, too. We were on the beach south of San Francisco. My dad was filming. My mom and sister were talking with one another near the water, and my brother and I were goofing off down the beach, acting like a couple of idiots.

My parents took us camping because it was cheap. They loved it, of course, they did it before we were born, but I know that a big reason for camping our way across the country in a tent was the affordability.

We almost never stopped for fast food. If we did, it was a crazy treat. Instead, we made sandwiches using soggy cold cuts drawn from the bottom of the blue-and-white cooler in the trunk. It was always half ice, half water in there. We would sit outside a rest stop with our sandwiches, a big bag of half-crushed Lay’s potato chips, and plastic cups filled with water from the drinking fountain near the bathrooms inside.

Some trips, my brother and I shared a small tent while my mom, dad, and sister slept in a bigger one on the other side of the campsite. Other trips, we all shared one big tent together, all five of us. I remember laying there at night, joking with each other, the cold dampness of the sleeping bag on my arms, my mom and dad on one side of the tent, us kids on the other.

IRL or bust

None of us had cell phones, much less smartphones. When we were on the trip, we were on the trip and nowhere else. We were all there — wherever we were — together. Crammed in the car, asleep in the tent, packing up the site in the rain, hotter than hell in Zion National Park in July, sitting around the fire in the morning, freezing after emerging from our sleeping bags in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Some of my most potent childhood memories are from those camping trips. They weren’t fancy or luxurious, we never went to Disney World or any big resorts, and I know I, in my foolish youth, sometimes wondered why my parents were so old-fashioned taking us camping in tents. But they really were special. I know it now, though I didn’t realize it for a long time.

It’s only as a dad that I now understand how much work those trips were and how much they mattered. Taking us three wild kids camping across the country in a tent, seeing all those incredible places. Spending all those days and nights together, just our family, camping. Our parents must have really loved us.

The first disembodied generation

Our lives revolve around technology these days, whether we like it or not. Even if we don’t work in a tech-y field or care much at all about the latest technological developments coming out of Silicon Valley, our lives are shaped by digital advancement.

Take the way we communicate. It’s so different from when I was a kid. Video calling? That was something futuristic. Unheard of. Now my kids talk to their grandparents on FaceTime every day.

If the internet was a one-way street, the Zoomers wouldn’t be much different from us. If it was basically super-TV, their emotional calibration would be recognizable.

Email. I didn’t have one until a couple of years into high school. I remember when we had dial-up. No, I remember when we got dial-up! My parents had one email address, and they checked it every week or so.

Of course, we can’t forget texting. We carry on conversations with 10 different people all over the country. Or maybe all over the world! We also have social media. What is that? Imagine telling yourself about X and Instagram in 1992. What a world this is.

Zooming ahead

The profound impacts of technology are so great, and we are constantly in the midst of it. I’m not sure there’s enough time to stop and really realize how it’s changed both our world and us. It’s changed us all, not exactly for the better. But I think it’s changed some more than others, and I think it’s changed Generation Z (the Zoomers) the most.

It’s hard to get my head around the Zoomers. I know them, I see them, I hear them, but I can’t quite understand them. There's something profoundly different about them, beyond the usual generational gaps: the music, the language, the clothing, the general aesthetic sensibilities. It’s something deeper in the way they think and, most importantly, feel.

All generations have a spirit that isn’t so easily understood from the outside. It’s the logic of the time in which they were brought up, the essence of the world at that moment in history. Sometimes it’s easy to pinpoint direct connections between economic realities, global conflicts, collective anxieties, broad societal changes, and how a generation is, for lack of a better word.

The Zoomers have that too, of course. It explains some of who they are, but not all. At a deeper level, the real difference between the Zoomers and the rest of us is technology — and how they and their feelings were shaped by technology.

Emotional calibration

The emotional calibration of the Zoomers is different from ours. All of us — Boomers, Millennials, Gen X’ers, and any of the Greatest Generation that are still alive — were emotionally calibrated offline. Even if we have since embraced the technological world with open arms, even if we are just as plugged in as the Zoomers are today, the way we emotionally relate to others and the world as a whole was shaped offline.

If the internet was a one-way street, the Zoomers wouldn’t be much different from us. If it was basically super-TV, their emotional calibration would be recognizable. They might have 50,000 channels to watch instead of 35; they might have digital access to every book in the world rather than going down to the library just to brow a few thousand old titles; but our difference would be merely a matter of degree.

8 billion ways to cry

But the internet is not super-TV. It isn’t a one-way street. It’s not even a two-way street; it’s an 8-billion-way street. It’s another world, and it’s the world they grew up in. The real thing that altered the emotional calibration of the Zoomers was extremely early exposure to social media, comment sections, algorithms, and pervasive anonymous interaction.

It’s profound, fascinating, and sad. I don’t think I can begin to accurately explore what all the implications are. I don’t think I can actually explain it, really. I don’t think any of us can. Only Zoomers can do it, but they would also need to be self-aware of all these facts, historically literate, emotionally robust, psychologically fearless, and with a real, strong sense of the worlds before them and what they actually were. That’s a tall order for any generation.

RELATED: Cut the Zoomers some slack

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Different cement

I don’t know how to explain all the ways the Zoomer’s emotional calibration is different. But I can feel it, and you can too. And I know the reason. It’s the technology. The social aspect of the internet shaped a different of kind of emotional base for them.

Can it be reversed? I don’t think so. I think they will forever be different from us. Even when they get older and enter more mature seasons of life, they will remain different. The foundation was poured with different cement.

This is why they are, somewhere deep down, something of an enigma to the rest of us. We were raised in an embodied world. The Zoomers were raised in a disembodied one.

Why Hollywood’s ‘Nobody’ is every father today

If you’re old enough, you remember Clark Griswold — Chevy Chase’s bumbling but optimistic dad in “National Lampoon’s Vacation” — dragging his family across the country to reach Wally World. After a trail of disasters, Clark got his family to the gates, only to find the theme park closed. Undeterred, he improvised, fought back (in his slapstick way), and refused to give up on his promise to deliver joy.

Fast-forward to today. Warning: This article includes spoilers.

'Nobody 2' isn’t really about bullets and bloodshed. It’s about fathers who refuse to quit.

In “Nobody 2,” we meet Hutch (Bob Odenkirk), a far cry from Clark Griswold. Think “Vacation” meets “John Wick.” Hutch is a quiet father under siege by a world that won’t leave him alone. He struggles to shield his family not only from criminals but also from the toll the fight takes on his time and soul.

So Hutch does what Clark did: He plans a family trip, hoping to reclaim some peace. Instead, everything explodes — literally. A sadistic crime boss, a brutal syndicate, and one gut-wrenching moment when a security guard strikes his daughter. Hutch erupts, not for revenge, but to protect the people he loves most.

Fathers against a hostile culture

That arc — from Clark’s comedy of errors to Hutch’s bloody brawls — tells us something about our culture. In 1983, dads were goofs trying to make memories. In 2025, they’re embattled guardians. The father who simply wants to provide and protect finds himself waging war against a culture that derides family, treats children as disposable or designable, and mocks traditional marriage as oppressive.

The threats aren’t just cinematic. Fathers fight mountains of bills, debt, and cultural poison pumped daily into their children’s minds — DEI’s racial grievance, the LGBTQ+ lobby’s sex radicalism, and a constant drumbeat that undermines fatherhood itself.

Men are told they’re helpless. But they’re not. A father’s job is to lead his family toward the good life, armed with truth and love.

The 'nobody' every man

Hutch is called a “nobody” because that’s how the world sees him — the quiet everyman doing his duty, not chasing glory. But that’s exactly what makes him extraordinary. He embodies what fathers have always wanted: the best for their children and the enduring love of their wives.

The emotional heart of the film comes when Hutch tells his father, “I just want my son to be a better man than I am.” That is fatherhood distilled. We know our limits, we know our failures, and we want our sons to rise higher.

Photo by Joe Maher/Getty Images

And here’s the twist feminists won’t like. The final villain — a shriveled old woman who embodies bitter family-hatred — isn’t defeated by Hutch. She’s finished off by his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen). Far from sidelined, she stands as his partner, the helper he needs to secure a future for their children.

Better men

It’s all metaphor, maybe allegory. “Nobody 2” isn’t really about bullets and bloodshed. It’s about fathers who refuse to quit. Men who insist that their families are worth everything. Husbands who know their sons can and must be better men.

The Griswolds made us laugh four decades ago. Hutch forces us to face what’s at stake today for fathers.

I Lost My Freedom, Money, And Guns Based On No Evidence And With No Chance To Defend Myself

When accusation becomes law, fatherhood becomes a crime.

The world changed, and now we homeschool

I grew up going to school, normal school. Public school mostly, but private school for a few years too.

My mom would drop me off first thing in the morning, sometimes before the sun came up. I would spend the next few hours sitting at a desk, bored. At lunch I would guzzle down a few cartons of milk and whatever it was that my mom packed in the crumpled-up brown paper bag that had been sitting in my locker for the past four hours.

Yes, our lives would be much easier if our kids went to school. But we wouldn’t be doing what’s right. We wouldn’t be rising to the challenge the world has presented us.

After that I would enjoy 30 minutes outside for recess and then spend the rest of the day wishing away the afternoon, dreaming of what I could be doing instead. Skateboarding, riding my bike, playing baseball, basketball, or anything else other than what I was doing.

Finally, around 3:30, my mom would come back and pick me up in front of the school. We would drive home, eat dinner together as a family, go to sleep, wake up, and do it all over again. My childhood schooling was just like my wife’s and basically everyone else’s.

Cutting class

But my kids aren’t going to have that same experience or those same memories, because I’m not sending my kids to school.

We are homeschooling our kids, or rather we are just at the beginning of homeschooling our kids. They are finally old enough that people ask where they go to school. Or, if we are out and about at 10 on a Tuesday morning in October, people might ask if they have a dentist’s appointment, or if they are sick, or if school was canceled today.

“No, we homeschool.”

My wife and I always thought we would send our kids to school, because why wouldn’t we? We went to school, and we turned out fine, sort of. Back when we were in school, homeschooled kids were weird. Or at least that’s what we thought about them. Whether they actually were weird or not is another question. Maybe we were just over-socialized and too brainwashed by the system.

Maybe we were the weird ones. These days, I’m starting to think that’s it.

Hindsight is 2020

We didn’t even think about homeschooling our kids until the summer of 2020. Our kids weren’t in school yet; we didn’t even have multiple kids yet! But that was when we first started thinking about becoming those weirdos known as homeschoolers.

Why was that the moment we decidde to diverge from the “normal” school track? What was the grand impetus to think outside the box and decide to forgo the prison sentence known as public school?

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? 2020, we remember. But it wasn’t just the COVID stuff or the summer rioting and general insanity of that time.

It was everything else that had been rotting for years in the public school system. The LGBTQ alphabet soup indoctrination, the brain-numbing iPad classes that kids endure, the generally weak curriculum, and the low quality of the average gen-pop student. It’s not only the teachers or the classes that are the problem. It’s also the kids. One bad kid with an unlocked iPhone and open internet access is all it takes to screw your kid up.

A numbers game

We realized that if we send our kids to some school that doesn’t reflect our values for seven hours a day, every single day, and we somehow expect to teach our kids the values we believe over the course of the mere three hours we have together every night, we are fooling ourselves. It’s a numbers game, and we won’t be able to compete. We will lose the battle to the values they receive at school.

That was the big kicker for us. We decided to homeschool for the sake of our kids’ souls, to keep them away from the meat grinder of degenerating modern America.

Our decision to homeschool is a pragmatic one. The world is not the same as it was when we were kids. For children, it’s a worse one. We might wish it were 1994, but it’s not. We might wish that we could turn our kids over to the school system and trust that everything will be relatively fine while we go about our day at work, but we can’t.

The hard way

Our lives would be easier if we sent our kids to school. We would have more time to ourselves. The house would be so quiet most of the day. We would be able to work in peace. We would probably sit and have lunch together without being interrupted, much like we did before we had kids. We would be able to offshore our care and responsibility to someone else — the public school system.

Yes, our lives would be much easier if our kids went to school. But we wouldn’t be doing what’s right. We wouldn’t be rising to the challenge the world has presented us. We would be living in some other fantasy, thinking things are all okay, thinking it’s 1994. They’re not, and it’s not. We would be delusional, and our kids would be worse off because of it.

We can’t deny the world as it is. We have to look it square in the face. Sometimes it demands things we didn’t plan on. Sometimes it’s not the way we wish it was. “That’s how it goes when it goes that way," as my dad used to say.

In the face of a changing world, all we can do is adapt and make the best choices we can with the information we have at the time. There’s no point in hopelessly wishing things were different from what they are. The world changed, so did our plans, and now we are homeschoolers.

Birth is the only ‘gender reveal’ you need

There are no surprises anymore.

In our day and age, we seem focused on making our lives as predictable as possible.

Every single day for nine months, I wondered who it was.

We can flatten the roller coaster otherwise known as life. We can know the weather tomorrow or the day after. We can know what’s going to kill us with blood tests, scans involving complex probabilities, and a catalog of family history. Someday soon we might even be able to know just exactly how many years we have left with 99.9% accuracy.

Of course, it’s easier to plan that way. And I’m sure we’d all agree one of the major benefits of technology is that it often lets us eliminate unpleasant surprises: Nobody ever wished for a more “interesting” medical checkup or airplane flight.

Suprised by joy

The danger is that in our eagerness for certainty and control, we end up eliminating the good surprises as well. Surprises that make you smile, rather than shudder: opening a thoughtfully wrapped gift, finding out you got the promotion, learning that a girl you’ve been thinking about has been thinking about you too.

Remember that youthful feeling? It’s youthful because it takes a certain optimism and playfulness to embrace surprise — especially when it would be easier to just cut to the chase.

The greatest, most meaningful surprise I’ve experienced has been as a new father.

The waiting game

You wait nine long months, planning for the future as best you can. Then one day you rush to the hospital. More waiting as your wife goes through labor, as you do whatever you can — if anything — to help her through it.

Then, in one incredible moment, you find out if you have a son or a daughter. There’s nothing like that surprise.

Today, not many “wait to find out,” as we say. Most parents are anxious to know if it’s a boy or a girl, so as soon as they are able to do the test and find out, they do the test and find out.

I get it. I really do. It’s the most exciting thing in the world knowing that you are going to be a parent, and you just want to know if it’s a boy or a girl. Who is that little person growing inside?

It’s hard to wait all that time, refusing to know when you could so very easily know. All you have to do is call your doctor, and in a few seconds he can tell you.

That way you can buy the right clothes and paint the nursery the right color. And honestly, that little moment on the phone is its own little surprise.

Photos by Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images, Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Mystery meet

But waiting is better. It really is. We always wait with our kids, and I have to say that nothing in life compares to that one incredible moment. It’s when they arrive. When they leave the protected world of their mother’s womb and join us in ours.

We see them for the first time, in flesh and blood, and we know who they are, or at least one thing about who they are. “It’s a girl!” Or, “It’s a boy!”

Waiting was hardest with our first. There was already so much we were excited about, anxious about, confused about, and generally worried about, that holding off and not learning whether or not we were having a boy or a girl was pretty tough.

Every single day for nine months, I wondered who it was. But I waited and only found out I had a son, in one heart-shaking breath, two seconds before I held him.

God knows

With our second, it was easier. We thought it was going to be a boy. Our first was a boy, it was all we knew, and for some reason we just swore it was going to be the same. We had a feeling.

We felt wrong; it wasn’t a boy, and learning that it wasn’t early one November morning after our car broke down on the way to the hospital was a shock no smaller than that of a few years prior when we found out we had a son.

It’s the waiting and knowing that the answer is known, but not by you. Knowing that someone is in there — and we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but we are going to know soon — is a nine-month tease unlike anything else we experience.

It’s a tension that builds, a question that keeps being asked. And then, finally, it’s answered in one euphoric moment and no matter the answer, it’s a good one, and you just can’t believe it.

The greatest surprise in life is the surprise of life. Babies — they are life. New, beautiful, fresh, pure, innocent life. They are our future. In reality and symbol. And so we wait all those months, and when finally we have an answer to our question, we hold them and look at their little watery eyes and ask them quietly, knowing that they can’t possibly respond, “Who are you going to be?”

There are still surprises left in life.