Ted Williams was a great baseball player, but for a long time, he was a really selfish and ruthless person. He had a horrible, abusive childhood and struggled to find the ability to love or care about anyone.
But Williams’s story has enough hope in it to inspire even the most hard- boiled and reluctant of fathers. Because, over time, Ted Williams started to change. As a friend would say about him: What’s incredible as an observer was to watch him fall in love with his kids. . . . It was everything against his grain to succumb to this outside influence of children. Love had control over him. He felt vulnerable. A vulnerability he had never had in his life.
This softness started to show itself in little hints, in the oddest and yet most personal of places. It was entries in Williams’s fishing journal, where for the first time he began to write about the kids he had long ignored. It was the signed poster his daughter found under piles of memorabilia after her father’s death that just said, “To my beautiful daughter. I love you. Dad.”
You have that kind of vulnerability now. Those same powerful forces are gnawing at you too, hopefully, and making progress on that tough exoskeleton you developed to protect yourself from the world. You can let this parenthood thing change you. You can let this make you better. You can even begin—no matter how far you are down the road, as Williams was—to make up for mistakes you might have made early in your parenting days. It’s never too late.