Recently I’ve been thinking about the fact that we can’t predict anything.

Yeah, we can predict the weather this afternoon, kind of — though the meteorologists seem to mess up about 50% of the time. Sure, we can be fairly certain that an asteroid from outer space isn’t going to come careening toward Earth, smashing our house to 1,000 pieces while we sleep, I guess. I’m not too worried about that one.

Many babies are born with grey or light blue eyes; it’s only over time that they morph into the color they will be for the rest of their lives.

But the reality is, life is more unpredictable than it is predictable.

Plan check

That’s the truth, and it’s hard for us, I think. We want to know what tomorrow will bring. We want to plan, and we want to make sure we are prepared for whatever is coming. We want to build civilization, and in some pretty key ways, building civilization requires planning.

Civilization itself is a form of predictability, or an attempt to increase predictability. Running water, reliable medical care, stores stocked with meat and eggs, traffic lights that are coordinated in a complex system so as to ensure drivers don’t crash into one another other, and electricity that doesn’t go out every other day. These things are predicable things, and life is better — much better — because of them.

But we can’t predict everything.

Answers and questions

Last week, my wife gave birth to our third child and our second daughter. We didn’t find out the sex ahead of time. We always wait to be surprised, and it was a surprise. Finally we had an answer to the most pressing question on our minds: Is it a boy or a girl? But there are so many more questions, and I have no idea what the answers will be.

Holding her in my arms, looking down into her little eyes, I wonder what color they will be. Many babies (of European descent) are born with grey or light blue eyes; it’s only over time that they morph into the color they will be for the rest of their lives. Our son has brown eyes; our other daughter has blue eyes. What will she have? I have no idea.

I look at her little hands and perfectly soft cheeks, and I wonder who she will be. I have no inkling. Not a single clue. She might be anyone. Her personality could be anything. Is there a seed of it already in her? There must be, but I don’t know it. I don’t know her yet.

There, in my arms, is this little person who might become anyone and anything. I have no idea what she will find funny, how she will be difficult, what she will be interested in, who she will marry, where she will live, how many children she will have, and 100,000 other things that make up a person. I don’t know any of it, and I have no way to predict any of it. All I can do is hold her, care for her, and try to steer her along the way.

A newborn baby is a metaphor for life.

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Predictably unpredictable

When I look back at my life, there is no way I could have predicted any of it. No way I could have told my 28-year-old self where I would be today, what I would do for work, who I would be a father to, where I would live, and how I would feel. I just couldn’t have.

If I go back even further than that, it gets even more obvious. Eighteen-year-old me thought life was going to be one way, and it turned out not at all that way. Some stuff turned out harder, but most turned out better. Nevertheless, however it turned out, I couldn’t have predicted any of it.

The same, of course, goes for all the various social, cultural, and technological developments marching through our society today. I don’t think anyone in 2005 could have accurately predicted AI in 2025. I doubt anyone in 1995 could have predicted the cultural or political debates we are having in 2025. No one could have predicted the years-long ordeal known as COVID.

Serenity now!

Accepting the chaos and unpredictability of life doesn’t mean giving up on any kind of planning or attempt at establishing order. Those things are good; they are a part of civilization after all, remember? Coming face-to-face with the reality of life as something unpredictable means accepting the things we cannot change. It means internalizing Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous Serenity Prayer.

While it may be hard at first for us to accept the unpredictability of it all, it’s more than OK once we make it through the process of reckoning with the uncontrollable. It feels like looking out at the vast horizon and seeing endless possibilities. Like rolling the windows down, setting your arm on the edge of the door, and pressing the gas. Like letting go and letting it all happen. Like looking into the eyes of a newborn baby, knowing that for her, life has only just begun.

Like something beautiful.

Do you really have ADHD — or do they want to medicate you into conformity?

Everybody has a diagnosis these days.

Not just adults — kids too. It doesn’t matter if you're 8 or 38, there's someone somewhere waiting to explain away whatever's different about you.

Perhaps you find your work excruciatingly boring and hard to care about precisely because it is excruciatingly boring and hard to care about.

It's not a quirk of your personality or a flaw in your character or a wound in your soul. It's a illness. Never mind that the symptoms are vague or the evidence that it's a discrete medical condition are lacking — a pharmaceutical cure will fix it.

Just pop this pill, and you will be like everyone else. Isn’t that what you want?

All the rage

All the kids these days have ADHD or autism. Which often makes me wonder if any of them do. Or if these conditions exist at all.

Autism certainly seems real in its extreme forms, but I am not at all convinced that it's at the far end of a continuum. I don’t really think being a little “on the spectrum” is a thing. Those people are just a little weird and need stronger guidance on how to get on in life.

I have a friend who was an engineer at Google. He told me half the people he worked with claimed to be “on the spectrum,” and according to him, it was all bull. They didn’t have medical problems; they had personal problems. They were guys who never learned how to interact normally, so they just ended up being kind of weird and rude.

As for ADHD, it's so obscenely overdiagnosed that it's essentially fake at this point. The market has been so oversaturated by ridiculous and erroneous diagnoses that whenever I hear about another kid with ADHD, it tells me more about the doctors and the “system” and less about the kid.

Boys will be boys

Are some kids better at sitting down at a desk for three hours at a time? Sure. Are more girls than boys better at doing it? Yes. Is there a gender factor here when it comes to diagnosis? Absolutely.

Boys don’t learn the same way girls do. But much of modern education ignores this fact. So when boys fidget or get bored, it gets chalked up to ADHD. This is more or less common knowledge by now. So the only thing a boy being diagnosed with ADHD tells me is that he doesn't get enough recess.

Of course, there are extreme cases. There are kids who genuinely don’t seem to be able to focus at all. Something like actual ADHD exists in a small number of boys, but that doesn't negate the broader truth: Instead of seeing people as individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, we decide to overmedicate when someone isn’t exactly like everyone else.

My mom worked with special ed kids. Some of them had mild disabilities, some more extreme. In some cases, it was clear they would need supervised care their entire lives. But in other cases, it wasn't clear just what, if anything, was wrong — besides a certain learned helplessness reinforced by doctors and parents.

Pill and chill

Nowadays ADHD diagnoses aren’t just for kids; adults are getting in on it too. Believe it or not, an increasing amount of men and women, especially women, in their 30s and 40s are discovering that they too have ADHD — a discovery that inevitably “explains everything.” My wife sees reels on Instagram all the time, along with ads selling various solutions.

What's that? You couldn’t focus at your computer, clicking on an excel spreadsheet, sending pointless emails for seven hours at a time? Shocking. No, you don’t need ADHD medication. You need to do something else with your life. Perhaps you find your work excruciatingly boring and hard to care about precisely because it is excruciatingly boring and hard to care about.

Overmedicalization and overdiagnosis is a deep problem in our society. Not just because the result is an increase in prescription drug use, but because the individual human being is lost or suffocated a little bit at a time. Everyone is different. Everyone has skills, and everyone has weaknesses. Everyone learns in a different way, and everyone focuses on different things too.

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Free agency

Some people are just a little awkward, a little weird, a little absent-minded, or a little dry. Sure, they should try to meet society halfway in some reasonable sense — but that happens through early teaching, parental guidance, community expectations, and personal effort, not through a pill you pop every day. For most of the 20th century, we relied far more on those nonmedical supports.

All the pill-popping flattens our individualism and undercuts our own agency as humans. It presupposes that one cannot make oneself better, one cannot work to act right, and that one doesn’t have any control. This is a lie. Yes, of course, there are people who suffer with truly debilitating problems who need medication, and they should get that medication. But it is a small fraction of the population. Most people can make themselves better when they set their minds to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I'm not anti-psychiatry. I'm not into alternative medicine or any of the hippie stuff. I’m not denying that there are people with problems who are helped most effectively with medication. I’m thankful for the blessings of modern medicine and the advancements we continue to see every year.

But we have a problem with overdiagnosis in our country. We have a problem with losing sight of the individual. We have a problem with people who want to give up their agency and turn it all over to a pill, and we are worse off because of it.

My kids make me sick!

I never used to get sick.

Every once in a while, sure. But it wasn’t really a regular phenomenon. It also didn’t really matter that much when I did. Yeah, I had work to get done and grocery shopping to do. But when I was a young single guy without any kids, getting sick just didn’t really impact my easy life that much.

I’ve also tried avoiding the illness at all costs. Washing my hands constantly. Staying away from the kids a little. Hugging them gently rather than wrestling like a madman.

Couch bound

Before that, when I was a kid, I loved getting “sick.” Those scare quotes are key. I didn’t actually love getting sick so much as I loved staying home from school because I was sick. That was fun. One day home from school was cool. Two days home was crazy. Going to sleep after the first day home sick, it was glorious knowing that unless a miracle occurred in the middle of the night, there would be yet another day of sitting at home on the couch watching TV.

I remember one year I got mono, and I was home for more than a week. I swear it may have been two weeks. I remember secretly wondering how long I could go with it. “What if I didn’t go back for a month?” A kid can only dream of something so beautiful.

Mono was a serious illness, I guess, but I don’t ever remember really being sad about it. Getting out of school was worth far more than the pain of a sore throat or a feverish head.

Germ magnet

Now I get sick a lot. Well, maybe not a lot, but a lot more than I used to in my 20s, and I certainly don’t like it like I did in my early teens. Now I know without a shadow of a doubt that as soon as I start seeing frost on the grass in the morning, I am going to get sick. And then a month or two after that, I am going to get sick again. And maybe even again after that if I’m really unlucky.

It’s not because I have developed a debilitating disease that results in an unnaturally sickly disposition. It’s because I’m a dad, and my kids are young, and young kids touch stuff in the stores and then stick their hands in their mouths, and then three days later one gets sick, then 24 hours after that another one gets it, and then my wife, and then finally me. Whatever it is runs through the house like a steamroller, and we all get squashed.

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Amor fati

I’ve tried a variety of different tactics over the years. I’ve tried giving up right from the start. Knowing that I’ll get it eventually, I accept my fate and just sort of live life with the sick kids. It feels pretty good psychologically. I’m not worried or stressed out about how I can avoid the illness. I don’t end up over-monitoring my body, trying to discern if I am getting sick or not. I just sort of march toward the cold in a blissful state.

I’ve also tried avoiding the illness at all costs. Washing my hands constantly. Staying away from the kids a little. Hugging them gently rather than wrestling like a madman. Backing my face away as they cough without covering their mouths, then telling them in a frustrated tone, “You need to cover your mouth.” Trying my hardest to prevent the unpreventable. It’s not a great feeling, and I always end up getting sick anyway. But at least I tried. That’s something, right?

Getting sick is just a part of having kids. I know that now. It can be mitigated by hounding them about washing their hands with hot soapy water and not touching their mouths in stores, but it can’t be eliminated entirely. It’s an inescapable fact of family life. If someone gets sick, everyone gets sick.

Family fever

It’s an allegory, of course. When you have a family, you can’t get away. You can’t separate or isolate. You are no longer just yourself. You are everyone at the same time.

We have our separate bedrooms and separate closets, but we share the same space. We have our own plates and silverware, but we share the same dish. We have our own inner thoughts and our own personalities, but we share the same name, the same blood, and the same familial predispositions that are part nature and part nurture, the ones that can’t really be untangled or even really figured out.

We make our kids into the kids they are in ways we can see and in ways we intend, through the prayers we say and the manners we demand. But we make them into who they are in other ways too. Some we don’t see, and some are unintentional: the phrase a kid says that sounds just like mom or the curse word a kid says that makes you realize you really do need to stop swearing.

We make them, and they make us. I’m different now from what I was before, and it’s partly because they made me that way. When you have a family, you are not only taking on the responsibilities of raising kids but also accepting that you aren’t alone anymore. That nothing in life will be tidy (literally or figuratively) like it was before. You are trapped together, you turn yourself over to no longer being yourself and only yourself.

For better or for worse. In sickness and in health.

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How marriage and fatherhood call men to greatness

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.

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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.