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YOU ARE NOT THE OWNER’S MANUAL




I tried helping Abbey with homework.

Fifteen minutes later, I was Googling fifth-grade math like I’d missed a decade.

“Dad,” she said, with the patience usually reserved for the elderly,
“that’s not how we do it anymore.”

Not how we do it anymore.

Excellent.

Apparently I spent years becoming educated just in time to become academically useless to a fifth grader.

And there it was…
the quiet undoing of everything I thought parenting was.

I thought this job meant knowing.
Guiding. Shaping.
Handing down the way.

But Sadie and Abbey didn’t come asking for directions.

They came already becoming.

Sadie… full of questions that refuse neat answers.
Abbey… moving through life like rules are mostly suggestions.

And somehow, while I’ve been busy raising them,
they’ve been raising me.

Because they are not here to become me.

Thank God.

One of me has been plenty for everyone involved.

They are not my second chance.
Not my legacy project.
Not my unfinished business.

They are not clay.

They are fire.

And I am not here to shape them.

I’m here to stand close enough to keep them warm…
and wise enough not to control the flame.

Some days I still try.

To fix.
To protect.
To make their lives make sense.

This is adorable, of course, because I barely understand my own.

But I’m learning that keeping them from every fall isn’t the goal.

Becoming is.

And becoming requires something nobody puts in the parenting books:

Loving someone you don’t fully understand.

So I’m trying something different.

Less director.
More witness.

Less “be like me.”
More “show me who you are.”

I still show up.
Still protect.
Still offer advice nobody requested.
Still get ignored halfway through sentences I personally thought were excellent.

But I’m learning to loosen my grip
without loosening my love.

Because our children don’t need our blueprint.

They need our belief.

Not that they’ll become us…

but that they’ll become fully, unapologetically themselves.

And when they do,
maybe our job isn’t to show them the path.

Maybe it’s to stand there…

in awe of the one they made. 

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