There's No Room for Selfishness in Parenting

If you're seeing this post, I'm either at the hospital with Kim or recovering from the birth process of our son Aidan Robert Haggerty.

Today's guest post is brought to you by Chad Jones of RandomlyChad.com. Check out his blog HERE. Follow him on Twitter HERE.

Enjoy!

------------------

Photo used courtesy of Creative Commons user bottled_void

Parenting isn't easy. It's not for the faint of heart. If I had known all that it entailed I might have reconsidered.

Maybe.

You think I'm kidding.

I'm not.

Because, you see, what parenting required of me was a giving up of my comfortable existence. I mean, my wife and I never had a lot of money, but we had each other.

We had love. According to the Beatles, that's all we need. Right?

God gave us eight years of each other before our son came along. We could vacation when we wanted (we stayed for free with my in-laws at their time share), we could stay up late, sleep in, eat pizza in bed and make love whenever we wanted.

Having kids changed all that.

I mean, that whole "whenever we wanted" thing went right out the proverbial window. There were: night time feedings, diaper changes, diaper bags... every excursion felt like packing for a trip.

Life became a production.

But as hard as raising them is, harder still is how they raise me.

What do I mean?

I mean, very simply, that I didn't know how selfish I was until my wife and I had kids. How I have been confronted with my selfishness everyday since.

And it's not pretty.

Just today, I carped out "Everyone else in this family gets to do what they want, but not me."
That may, or may not, be true, but what did we learn from Spider-Man:

"With great power comes great responsibility." Or biblically speaking: "to whom much is given, much is required."

This means that as a husband, and a dad, I am called by God to sacrifice the most, give up the most, even die the most. And it's not easy.

If you're not willing to die in this way, everyday, don't have kids. In fact, don't get married. Because the notion that "love means never having to say you're sorry" is nothing but a bald-faced lie.

Because they (a wife, kids, family) will grow you (more than you grow them) so very uncomfortably. And there is nothing more humbling than having to get down on one's knees, eye-level with a child, and say: "Sorry. Daddy was wrong. Will you forgive me?"

My friends, consider the cost before taking the plunge--because he who does the "crime" pays the time.

IKYKWIM.

Do you have kids? How have they changed your life?