I am enjoying fatherhood more than I initially thought, mostly because I was afraid of the risks and the vulnerability knowing how much I would fear the worst happening to any of them.
You have to be okay with having lack of control sometimes, as you can’t shelter them from every single risk in life. Sometimes horrible accidents happen and I knew these years before I met my wife through a work convention. We have discussions late at night sometimes trying to parse out how we’d respond to a bad situation, but more often than not we just try to enjoy the good times and not fixate on the bad things that could happen. When we took a road trip across the country to see my in-laws for the winter holidays this year, we decided to stay in a desert AirBnb that was complete with an indoor hot tub. However, the furnace inside was old and noisy. Before we told her the source of the noise, our poor daughter thought it was a ghost. She screamed and ran behind us when the furnace turned on and started to cycle about five minutes after we arrived. I had to explain to our daughter that the furnace was old and noisy, and that the AirBnb wasn’t haunted like she feared. I don’t think she believed us no matter how much we tried to reassure her to the contrary. Luckily we were only staying the night and left in the early morning hours to get back on the road. Our daughter finally got to sleep once we loaded back into our SUV and turned on the heat to make the interior warm and toasty.