I’ve built an office behind our house. Someday my daughter will look at it and think . . . “That’s where my dad worked to provide for us,” and feel a little sentimental. What I never hope she thinks is, “That’s the place my dad loved more than me.”
—Donald Miller
It would be wonderful if these quotes didn’t exist, but they do. They come from the children of great men. From Albert Einstein’s son. From Nelson Mandela’s daughter. From kids whose dads were presidents or kings or rockstars or CEOs. They go something like this: “You were there for so many people as part of your job, but you were never there for me” or “You were the best in the world at everything you did . . . except for fatherhood.”
It’s heartbreaking. Obviously the world needed Nelson Mandela. It needed Eleanor Roosevelt. It needed Steve Jobs. It needed Albert Einstein. What they did was hard, and important. It required sacrifice. It came at the expense of their families—it had to.
But did it have to come at such a high cost? There is no job, no career, no amount of responsibility that justifies being absent from the lives of your children. Being important, having a calling, achieving success, is great. But being important doesn’t change what your most important job is: being a parent. Being there for them. Becoming world class at being Mom or Dad.
Because when your days in the spotlight are over, when your fame and import have receded, you will still be a parent and your kids will still need you for the things kids have always needed their parents for.